Was wondering what everyone's favourite Roxy lyric was ?

I learned so much from the first 5 Roxy albums. Wondering what a particluar reference meant and doing some research, or simply thinking, 'that's damn clever'.

My own favourite is 'The sidewalk papers gutter-press me down'.
Works on so many levels in the context of the song.

Len

Oh my word - that had never occurred to me. I wonder how many other Geordies refer to it as a Gondala!

Just Like You - Brilliant Helen.

"Diamonds May Be Your Best Friend
But, Like Laughter After Tears
I'll Follow You To The End"

The new version of Viva will have an exclusive piece of work taken from the notes of the late Dr Simon Puxley about Ferry's lyrics. This was for a project that sadly we will never see the finished article. Here is a taster of 3 songs from the first album.

Re-make/Re-model.

The first recorded Bryan Ferry composition, opening the ‘Roxy Music’ album by trashing into, cocktail-party chatter – like the song-title itself an obliquely-expressed declaration of intent. Appropriately its immediate popularity made it in effect the band’s signature tune.


Re-make/ Re-model

Remaking a situation – or a life after loosing, viz. ‘The next time’; and indirectly, as suggested above, remaking music. Also ‘with reference to’ make and model of car (see next note); possibly also hints at ‘model-girl’.

CPL593H

A private reference: the registration number of a car, the only clue to the identity of the girl who inspired the song. (In effect the make and model specified).

Ladytron

Auto-girl, machine-woman. ‘Tron’ is a suffix meaning ‘instrument’ or ‘machine’ and tends to have a scientific, sci-fi or futuristic connotations, and sometimes, therefore, sinister overtones. Here it is used as a play on ‘mellotron’, a modern electronic instrument (literally ‘a melody-machine’) which creates the organ-like backing at the start of the song. The title actually conflates the ‘lady’ of the lyric with sound of the music,

The automatism of modern life is alluded to in several subsequent songs: see ‘In Every Dreamhome A Heartache’ (inflatable doll), ‘Serenade’ (“G-Plan gymnastics”), ‘Street Life’ (“brave new world”), ‘Just like You’ (“this auto-style age”), and ‘She Sells’ (“auto-erotic please”).

2HB

i.e. ‘To Humphrey Bogart’, eminent Hollywood star of the ‘40’s and early 50’s. But also a pencil; lead pencils are categorised according to the lead they contain with the symbols H, 2H, B, 2B, HB – there isn’t actually a type 2HB. The song sketches, in broad strokes, the world and atmosphere epitomised in some of Bogart’s most famous films: the seedy romantic underside of American life in the ‘30’s and 40’s’ – cool, stylish, witty, hard, and heroic.

(Your) death … our love

Bogart died in 1957, but since his fame has, if anything, increased to give him a legendary status.

Here’s looking at you kid

Bogart’s famous toast to Ingrid Bergman in ‘Casablanca’. ‘Casablanca’, made in 1943 by Michael Curtiz, is a rare, brilliant film which both typifies the Bogart style and raises it to a uniquely exotic level. A good deal of the song’s lyrics alludes directly to the film’s story.

Long time since we’re together

In ‘Casablanca’ Bogart’s long-lost love – played by Ingrid Bergman – reappears.

Ideal love… hero

The Heroine had disappeared without warning one night in Paris. Bogart’s plays a nightclub boss who generally wears a white jacket and black tie; ‘wings’ describes the extended edges of his jacket shoulders (very in vogue at the time), and is also a play on ‘flies’ in the preceding line. At the end of the film Bogart lets Bergman go with her husband, who is the only hero in a very literal sense (he ‘wins’ the girl) - Bogart is the truly heroic anti-hero.

Finding not keeping’s the lesson

Bogart rediscovers his love but – in doing so – doesn’t need to keep her; he realises that she didn’t leave him after all, and that she still loves him. That is enough; to keep her would only lead to pain, and something not worthy of what they will always share witch each other. It is, indeed, the ‘lesson’ Bogart learns in the film. Here it’s cleverly expressed as a reversal of the saying ‘Finders Keepers’.

Take two people… etc

Almost all of the action in ‘Casablanca’ takes place in the nightclub, and includes numerous intense exchanges between the former lovers. Bogart smokes constantly.

Ladder

Ladder of stocking; stairway to heaven.

I can't choose a favourite lyric - I have been trying!
I've always liked "boogaloo a rhapsody divine" - whether it's the few odd words "serpentine sleekness was always my weakness" or a whole song - If There Is Something/Grey Lagoons (and all the others) for example I don't think there's anyone to touch Roxy. It was the lyrics which first drew me to Roxy all those years ago, then the music, then the personalities.

There seems to be a song to cover every event in one's life and Roxy have gotten me through most difficult situations. I've a friend, a huge Roxy fan who was suffering a broken love affair. He told me once he could make it through the whole of Siren without being too upset he knew he'd be fine.

Don't know about the 'gondola' lyrics. I've always thought it was a lovely play on words being Venice and the Bridge of Sighs and all that.

For me, Roxy lyrics work whether they're complicated or simple. Spin Me Round is so simple yet so evocative.