Roxy Music were one of the leading lights of the Glam movement and yet to a large extent their music passed me by and I didn’t pick up on it until 20 years later. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of them, I knew them by sight, I liked their weird (to me) image and I loved ‘Virginia Plain’ but other than that they didn’t seem to make it into our household.
In fact, I’m embarrassed to say, that my main memory of them was their artwork rather than their music. I remember standing at the front of Woolworths going through the LPs and, after studying a topless woman on the front of a Pink Floyd LP (‘A Nice Pair’), I discovered ‘Country Life’. For a growing lad this was definitely an interesting album cover and I studied the album intently as I pretended I was going to buy it. Unfortunately I was shopping with my mum who walked up behind me and asked what I was looking at. For some reason my brain never worked well when lying to my parents and I always came up with the weirdest of statements. This time the lie based itself around the fact that I was studying the lingerie the women were wearing. There were two major problems with this lie, the first was that the lingerie was see-through; the second was that I didn’t know how to pronounce lingerie, I’d only ever seen it written down and I presumed that it rhymed with finger. So turning to my mum I found myself saying “It’s alright mum I wasn’t looking at the girls I was looking at their linger-ey”.
Maybe I now understand why none of their LPs made it into our house!
Despite Bryan Ferry’s present day appearance and personae he was born into a traditional working class family. The son of a coal miner, he developed a taste in art that he studied at Newcastle University. This move also enabled him to indulge his passion for music and he joined the band ‘The Gas Board’.
While many people remember Roxy Music as ‘the group with Bryan Ferry’ they were in fact a complete group with each member possessing skills to compliment, and contrast with, the others. Leading from the front however made Ferry the most visible and it was Ferry that started the ball rolling in 1971 as he placed the advert that would result in the group’s formation. Advertising for a keyboard player to join him and Graham Simpson (bassist with ‘The Gas Board’) they received a reply from Andy MacKay. He was brought on board despite the fact that he couldn’t play keyboards (but he did own a synthesiser); he could however play sax and oboe. Fortuitously he also knew a guy from university called Brian Eno who could play synthesiser and was interested in electronic music.
Eno was recruited into Roxy Music as a ‘non musician’ (his words) and initially supported the group with technical advice and from behind the mixing desk (supported by his synths and tape recorders) when the group played live. However this initial reluctance to be a ‘musician’ within the group soon changed and Eno joined the group on stage where his OTT outfits helped to define the group’s image and give impetus to the burgeoning Glam movement.