“We just hadn’t a clue”: The glorious fluke of Roxy Music’s debut opus
There is a cruel irony in the pop charts.
A song could be poured over for months, worked on by expansive teams of gifted producers, all adhering to a strict formula concocted for success, and the final product would still pale in comparison to the spontaneous and entirely unexpected success of a masterpiece like Roxy Music’s ‘Virginia Plain’.
An oddity, even by the standards of Bryan Ferry’s art-rock revolution, ‘Virginia Plain’ didn’t seem to take any notice of the accepted pop music formula that had served artists so valiantly up to that point in time. With the song’s title not appearing until the very last line, an improvised guitar solo, and without even a chorus, the song defied all pop conventions, yet it managed to rise to number four in the UK singles charts – to the presumed chagrin of rival record labels and hopeful posters of the day.
In the light of Roxy Music’s subsequent discography, denoted by its experimental innovations and repeated rejection of pop conventions, you would be forgiven for assuming that ‘Virginia Plain’ and its subversive structure were entirely deliberate; an artistic comment by Ferry, or a blow struck for musical experimenters like Brian Eno.
It is a noble image of one of the most stunningly original groups of the 1970s, but it is also rather far from the reality of the song.
For starters, the song was only recorded as a kind of afterthought. Following on from the relative success of the band’s self-titled debut album, Island Records convinced the band to record a single in an attempt to capitalise on their newfound relevance. So, taking inspiration from one of his own paintings, Ferry went away and produced ‘Virginia Plain’, not knowing that the song would change the course of his life forevermore.
“This day and age, when you think of singles, they have the formula perfected,” guitarist Phil Manzanera once told Classic Rock, recalling the origins of the track. “Straight into the chorus for the beginning, play the hook, quick verse, back to chorus, repeat until fade. There was none of that with ‘Virginia Plain’.” That individualistic quality came more from ignorance than ambition, though.
“We just hadn’t a clue how to make a single,” he admitted. “We’d never done one before.” Hence why ‘Virginia Plain’ sounded totally unlike any other charting single of 1972, both in sound and structure.
In the wake of the single’s unlikely success story, ‘Virginia Plain’ became an incredibly influential track in Roxy Music’s repertoire, introducing mass audiences to the revolutionary sounds of art rock for the very first time. It is no surprise, then, that groups like Squeeze used the song as the basis of inspiration for their own beloved masterpieces, ‘Up the Junction’ borrowing the subversive song structure of Ferry’s opus.
Although that inaugural hit single didn’t dictate the sound of Roxy Music going forwards, it did at least legitimise their innovative, art-rock output on the mainstream airwaves. It is easy to imagine Roxy Music having joined the legions of woefully underappreciated art-rock outfits around in the 1970s, but they were one of the very few to break into the mainstream, albeit entirely by accident.
