The fact that I found many of Roxy Music’s album covers curiously satisfying when coming into my teens, now seems little more than a wet sheet in a universe of used tissues. And however mildly misogynistic they now appear – woman on bed in lingerie grimacing at camera (1972’s Roxy Music), woman in heels with Jaguar on a leash (1973’s For Your Pleasure), woman marooned and looking submissive on beach with tits hanging out (Stranded), women with barely concealed beavers and see through bras pinned up against country ferns (1974’s Country Life) they could arguably be saluted for celebrating their assertive sexualities for the very first time also. And it’s the latter that I’d like to believe. Regardless of whether it’s true.
Much like this Super Audio CD attests, Roxy Music can be split into two definable periods: the suave, early eighties sophisticated pop romance (popularised by the slinky and percussive ‘Avalon’, the louche and foppish ‘Oh Yeah’, the tender and the beautiful ‘Dance Away’) and the kitsch and experimental early ‘Eno’ period. And it’s here that I’d like to linger a mo’, for from the outset of the squiggly discordant synth and sax intro of ‘Both Ends Burning’ to the faux-alien stax of ‘Re-Make/Re-Model’ it’s clear that Roxy with Eno are one brave and formidable beast. Tracks like ‘Out Of The Blue’ and ‘Mother Of Pearl’, ‘Do The Strand’ bear all the same cultivated and barouque tendencies of Bowie and Cockney Rebel, the same lisping and confounding theatricality, whilst ‘Pyjamarama’ and ‘Virginia Plain’ craft an air of wildly screw-ball and eccentric space-pop. In fact, if you thought Bowie and Sparks were subversive and deconstructional, just get a load of this: mad as a hat keyboards, squealing, untuned fuzz guitars, bonkers oboes, crazy synths, psychomodo vocals and strange and unruly saxophones.
Not everything that glittered in the 1970s was gold. This band on the otherhand was.