The enduring influence of the best British art-rock band since the Beatles
MUCH IN life depends on timing. Imagine, for example, how many more Grand Slam titles a tennis player of Andy Murray’s excellence might have accumulated in his prime, had he not had the misfortune to share it with Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, three of the finest players the men’s game has known.
The story of Roxy Music is a similar one. The principal reason they as a band, and particularly Bryan Ferry, their frontman and chief songwriter, do not occupy the exalted position in popular culture that David Bowie does is because, well, David Bowie does. Their heyday coincides almost exactly with his. Their sensibility—blending fine art, glamour, sensationalism, eccentricity and sex—runs parallel to his.
Yet Roxy Music had qualities of their own that Bowie could not emulate. This art-school band was a miscellany: its members ranged across social classes , origins and, above all, talents . These disparate elements did not so much unite as collide in pursuit of a strange, exotic beauty. They filled the interregnum between psychedelia and glam rock with outrageous colour and style; there was a wonderful unwieldiness to them.
Mr Eno famously remarked that every one of the relatively few people who bought a copy of the Velvet Underground’s first album started a band . Roxy Music were always more popular than the Velvet Underground, but their strike rate in that regard cannot have been much lower, and their heirs are far more diverse. Without Roxy Music there would surely have been no ABC, no New Romantic movement, no Goldfrapp, no Pulp, no Human League, no Siouxsie and the Banshees—at least not as they are known now.
Roxy Music’s recording career lasted only 11 years, and if you listen to their first two albums, “Roxy Music” and “For Your Pleasure”, and the last two , “Flesh And Blood” and “Avalon”, you might take them for different bands. Many partisans of the early iteration certainly think so, and feel that when Mr Eno departed in 1973, leaving Mr Ferry effectively in sole charge, the group lost their way, drifting into middle-of-the-road pop.
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