Roxy Music’s first record, shimmering with campy decadence and art-school ambition, is the sum of the chemistry between two of its principal creators – Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno. Ferry, Roxy Music’s chief songwriter and lead vocalist was a Humphrey Bogart obsessive who’s love of fine tailoring and supermodels had seen him dubbed “Byron Ferrari” by the rock press. Eno was to be an electronic music pioneer whose avant garde production style and synthetic electronic “treatments” for songs (which would notably become a centrepiece of David Bowie’s Heroes a few years later) would revolutionise pop music in the years to come. On Roxy Music, both men’s debut album, the wilful dissonance between Ferry’s pouting romanticism and Eno’s proto-ambient techniques really set the band apart from the rest of the early seventies glam rock pack. While the two are still discovering their chemistry, the moments where they connect are alchemical – the stutter of album opener Re-make/Re-model and the liquid velvet of Ladytron are “eureka” moments for the band. Unchecked, their ambitions carry them in different directions -the 7 minute, Eno driven synth jam “Sea Breezes” is an example. Eno would only stay with the band for one more record (the excellent For Your Pleasure) but this, Roxy Music’s debut, was the birth of a new kind of rock n’ roll: highly stylised and decadent but also world-weary and intelligent with tongue firmly planted in cheek.
Pete Whelan 