The comical cover-up of Roxy Music’s erotic 1974 album sleeve
For their fourth album, Roxy Music decided to dial up their penchant for sexually beckoning album covers several raunchy notches.
Amorous glamour was a key feature of the art-rockers’ retro-futurist glow. Just as they married the sonics of avant-garde electronics with a playful nostalgia for the old cabaret, jazz standards, and rock and roll numbers of yesteryear, Roxy Music’s pop-art escapism was afforded a signature emblem via the curated models enticing any young glam fan into their glittering soirée.
Roxy Music flashed an old-fashioned US pin-up girl, a leather-clad femme fatale walks her pet panther against a dreamy skyline on For Your Pleasure, and Stranded aptly captures a shipwrecked model in a steamy Hollywood set jungle.
All in good fun, and flexing a smart play on commercial advertising and countering Woodstock’s double-denim earnestness and stultifying clamour for authenticity. But 1974’s Country Life took the postmodern playing to a realm far closer to purer eroticism.
Standing in front of a fairly unremarkable leafy foliage, two models glistening and shimmering in the harsh light pose with a lot less manicured finesse than had artfully adorned previous covers, the girl on the right holding her naked breasts, while her companion on the left sports transparent lingerie and holds her hand suggestively over her groin.
Everything about Country Life teemed with sharper urgency. The modern chic of the photography, the flesh on display, and the masturbatory signal—supposedly an unwitting happenstance—all draped Roxy Music’s pastiche of its namesake rural magazine for aristocrats with greater provocation.
Then there were the girls themselves. While previous subjects had been professional models, German friends Eveline Grunwald and Constanze Karoli were randomly spotted by frontman Bryan Ferry, stylist Anthony Price, and photographer Eric Boman while in a Portuguese bar and immediately propositioned for the cover shoot. They didn’t need much convincing. Already fans, and curiously enough, Grunwald was dating Can guitarist Michael Karoli while Constanze was his sister, the two signed up for their immortalising as a defining piece of 1970s art-rock.
Country Life was another Roxy winner, climbing to number three on the UK Albums Chart without much fanfare of its racy artwork. The same couldn’t be said for the States, however. Early copies were ensconced in an opaque shrink wrap, which probably added an extra degree of tantalise, but later issues simply swapped Karoli and Grunwald for a bland shot of the trees they were standing in front of, originally intended for the back cover. It was a hilariously absurd decision on Atco’s part, Roxy Music’s US distributor, scraping out all of the exotic charge so essential to the band’s stylistic flourish, and likely met with bafflement from longtime fans across the Atlantic.
Did such censorship affect its sales? Probably not, Country Life was their highest peaking album at that point by a long stretch, reaching number 37 on the Billboard 200 and forging their North American conquering. Future covers would retreat to a more polished, glossy artifice of composed high fashion, but Country Life simmers with raw energy over 50 years later, a fitting portrait reflecting Roxy Music’s faint tether to the glam world before embarking on their smoother pop sheen that would define their later years.
