Chicago:Roxy redux - Mon 30th Jul
Chicago:Roxy redux
30 July 2001
From The Chicago Tribune.
Roxy Music's world-weary art-rock remains in style:By Greg Kot
Reunion tours are the refuge of faded rock stars looking for one more payday. From the Who to the Sex Pistols, these events turn once-revolutionary sounds into the soothing hum of nostalgia, as both performers and audience seek to relive their youth.
But Roxy Music's youth always seemed short-lived; their graceful aging was built into a sound and a style that was cool, distanced and refined, with a profoundly adult undercurrent of dark wit, spiritual uneasiness, and brooding loneliness. Theirs was a new rock 'n' roll that was ahead of its time even as it drew on the distant, pre-rock past for inspiration.
It is a stance that should serve the band well on its current tour, which reunites singer Bryan Ferry with guitarist Phil Manzanera and saxophonist Andy Mackay for the first time in 17 years. They arrive Monday, July 29, at the Allstate Arena with a band that includes longtime Roxy drummer Paul Thompson, though not cofounding co-founding member Brian Eno, the famed producer (U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie), who prefers not to tour.
At 55, Ferry remains a dashing presence, seemingly as timeless and unworn as the matinee idols he idolized as a youth. His hair, as Warren Zevon might say, is perfect, always looking freshly windswept, in a rakish, devil-may-care manner, even when indoors. Phoning from his home outside London recently, he spoke like a country squire; for him, reuniting with Mackay and Manzanera sounds as effortless as slipping on a favored smoking jacket.
"It's always been a big maybe," Ferry says, "but I was very open to the tour when it manifested itself this year," in the form of an undisclosed guarantee from concert promoter Clear Channel Entertainment (formerly SFX) to do 50 dates in North America and Europe. "I enjoyed my solo tour last year very much, when I was adding more Roxy material as it went along, and the audience reaction was very strong. I enjoyed singing those songs, and I was pleased how well they stood up after all these years."
Many of those songs remain criminally obscure in North America. A band with a number of top-10 hits and albums in Europe, Roxy Music was never particularly well understood in the U.S. during its early prime, 1971 to '76, and only in its becalmed final phase, which produced the album "Avalon" and the hits "Dance Away" and "Jealous Guy" (a cover of the John Lennon song) did it begin to make an impression. At its commercial peak, in 1983, Roxy called it a day.
"A band," Manzanera says by way of explanation, "is a very unnatural state. We had been together for 12 years, and it was time to get a life. Now it's more like we're jazz musicians who get together for a project."
The project at hand is to demonstrate that Roxy Music is more than the sum of "Dance Away" "Jealous Guy" and "Love Is the Drug," which remain the only Roxy songs to enjoy much airplay anymore, a serious disservice to the band's legacy and impact. Roxy influenced the sound and the look of rock for the next two decades, and many of the bands who took cues from it —- Duran Duran, ABC, the Cars —- had far greater commercial success.
"When someone offered to put together a reunion tour for us, we were immediately enthusiastic because we felt it was a good idea to play these songs," says Manzanera, 50. "They are good songs, but if we don't play them, who will? Otherwise, they'd be lost. And who better to do them than us?"
For a younger generation of artists inspired by Roxy Music, the tour represents an opportunity to hear music that has not only aged well, but has actually grown in stature over the decades.
"Sometimes reunion tours depress the hell out of me," says electronic-music gadfly Moby. "But the way Roxy Music evolved, they were such an elegant band by the time of 'Avalon.' Bryan Ferry is one of the few musicians whose records don't depress me as he ages. What depresses me is seeing people trying to hold on to their youth, re-creating their glory days. But in Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry was a dignified gentleman when he was 19 years old."
Glam meets art-rock
Ferry was already in his twenties by the time Roxy Music formed in 1971, but the point is valid: there was always an adult sensibility at work in the band's music, a new way of looking at the world through the prism of rock music.
Roxy emerged alongside the glam and art-rock movements in early '70s Britain. Glam celebrated simple, stomping three-minute songs performed with an attitude coated in glitter and lipstick. Most of the high-minded art-rockers forged a loftily complex sound that echoed classical music. While Roxy had a sartorial elegance (it was the first rock band to list art directors and hair stylists in the liner notes of its albums) that appealed to the glam audience and the musical chops to stay with the art-rockers, the original quintet didn’t fit comfortably in either camp. The difficulty in pigeonholing them led to some strange tours: Manzanera recalls a 1972 New Year's Eve show in Chicago in which the band was fifth on a bill opening for Steve Miller; Roxy also opened an arena tour for Jethro Tull.
But the band was always sure of itself, and created a look and a sound that was immediately striking on the groundbreaking albums "Roxy Music" and "For Your Pleasure" in 1972-73. During the '60s, Ferry was an art student at Newcastle University in England, where he studied under Pop Art conceptualist Richard Hamilton, whose work borrowed symbols of mass media, advertising and pop culture and put them in fresh, provocative contexts.
In the same way, Ferry combined and juxtaposed elements that seemingly didn't belong together to create a bold new style of rock music. His foil was Eno, another art-school student whose experimental playfulness on synthesizers, keyboards and tape machines introduced an element of chaos to Ferry's more orderly universe. With Mackay and Manzanera's instrumental dexterity, Roxy played rampaging rock songs ("Do the Strand," "Virginia Plain") and melancholy ballads ("Mother of Pearl," "Chance Meeting") that subverted traditional verse-chorus-verse structure, and infused melody with noise, harmony with dissonance, the love song with anxiety and dark humor. Ferry didn't so much sing as croon, in a tremulous vibrato that conveyed both irony and wounded sincerity, sometimes within the space of a few notes.
In the early '70s, Ferry would show up on stage wearing the uniform of the enemy: a white tuxedo. Back then, rock 'n' rollers clung to the notion that they were the counterculture, and yet here was Ferry modeling an outfit befitting a lounge crooner from his parents' generation. Even as a young man, Ferry acted as if he'd been everywhere and indulged everything, and Roxy Music brought a knowing sophistication to an art form notoriously cynical about all things refined.
Artistic exercises
Though Roxy borrowed from Romantic ideas about decadence, fashion and the nobility of art for art's sake that had existed since Oscar Wilde's heyday in the late 19th Century, the band could hardly be described as retro. Roxy may not have invented postmodern ideas such as irony, but it certainly helped introduce them to the rock lexicon. One of Ferry's finest compositions, "In Every Dream Home a Heartache," would be comical if it weren't so disquieting; it's an homage to a blow-up sex doll sung from the vantage point of a bored, lonely Gatsby-like figure. The song, from "For Your Pleasure," was inspired by a Hamilton collage from the '50s entitled, "Just What is it that Makes Today’s Home So Different, So Appealing?'"
"It was a very exciting time, because I felt I was onto something as far as self-expression," Ferry says of the song, which became the centerpiece of "For Your Pleasure." "Hamilton's collage portrayed all these consumer products, and how all these things had become essential to life. I wanted to do something on the very edge of that idea. The blow-up doll...that seemed to do the trick."
Ferry now speaks of singing these songs as though they were an exercise in acting: "I do these songs now and sometimes I feel as though someone else has written them. You get lost and completely absorbed in one, and then you go to another and then another, like you're traveling from one place to another in some sort of H.G. Wells time machine."
Where does the actor end and Ferry begin? Was he self-absorbed, vain and corrupt, as the surface of his image and music telegraphed, or insecure, lonely and world-weary, as deeper investigation suggested? Or, more likely, some complex combination of all those elements? In that ambiguity, Roxy Music finds its lasting relevance.