With David Bowie blazing a trail of mutant androgyny across teen Britain Roxy followed close behind with their swaggering rockers
Posted in General on 27. Aug, 2010
With David Bowie blazing a trail of mutant androgyny across teen Britain, Roxy followed close behind with their swaggering rockers (“Do the Strand”) and eerie space-age ballads (“In Every Dream Home a Heartache”), fashioning the definitive statement that was 1973’s majestic For Your Pleasure “I saw Bryan’s songs in the context of pop art,” says Eno. “That was the period when pop music became self-conscious, in the sense that it started to look at its own history as material that could be used. We wanted to say, ‘We know we’re working in pop music, we know there’s a history to it and we know it’s a showbiz game.’ And knowing all that, we’re still going to try to do something new.” “We had so many ideas that it was like, ‘Christ! Let’s get them all down before they go away’,” Ferry said in 1997. “Later you start to compromise, for fear of your music going over people’s heads. On Roxy Music it was like, ‘Let’s do this thing right next to that, edit straight in from this to that,’ and so you never got bored with it. I mean, there are many flaws on that first album the singing is terrible, and the recording isn’t very good but it’s also incredibly exciting. I think we enjoyed making For Your Pleasure more, because we felt a little more in control.
We still had a producer, but I think Brian had a lot more to do with the sound. And I think I underestimated what a help Brian was to me when we split up.” Ferry was a control freak long before Eno departed Roxy in the summer of 1973; certainly the band wasn’t big enough for both Br(y/i)ans. Bryan 1 even commenced a highly successful solo career with These Foolish Things, the first of 10 solo albums that feature some of the most emotionally arid recordings in the history of pop. On these he’s called all the shots, unencumbered by the pretence of democracy.”The reason it fell apart, I think, is that Bryan was doing all the work and Eno getting all the glory,” laughs David Enthoven. “It was Eno who got to shag all the girls, and I think that drove Bryan completely bonkers.
I mean, Eno was literally shagging non-stop; he was on for it all the time, like a fucking rabbit.” Roxy pushed on without Eno, making the superb Stranded (1973) and the slightly less superb Country Life (1974). Attired in singularly daft GI and Zorro outfits, Ferry became the “Byron Ferrari” of music-press jibes and began squiring leggy Texan Jerry Hall around town. “I suppose that’s where the tuxedo came in, and the different kinds of suit and stuff,” he has said. “By that time, people knew who we were, so I guess we’d pushed ourselves as much in that direction as we could and we then felt we didn’t have to anymore.” But hang on a tick, wasn’t that leggy Jerry on the arm of notorious rock Lothario Mick Jagger? Why yes, La Hall did indeed break our Byron’s heart, switching seamlessly from one social (rock) climber to another, and later becoming the subject of doleful Ferry reflections such as “Kiss and Tell”.And herein we hit on a fundamental strand in the Ferry psyche: self-advancement.