“I was probably drunk”: the moment Bryan Ferry knew that ‘Roxy Music’ mattered
Good bands come and go with the changing of the tides, but once in a generation, a group arises that changes the entire landscape. Back in the 1970s, as psychedelic experimentation turned into self-aggrandising prog, Roxy Music were that group, blazing a trail of art rock innovation which remains unparalleled to this day.
It is difficult to succinctly capture just how much the music industry changed during the late 1960s, what with the emergence of LSD-fueled experimentation and countercultural revolution defining the entire fucking rock scene. Even with that colossal cultural shift, though, nobody could have properly predicted the rise of Roxy Music; the Bryan Ferry-fronted outfit were totally unlike anything that had come before, and they made no attempt to disguise that fact during their rapid rise to commercial success and, crucially, cult status.
A core part of that individuality within the band came from Ferry’s art-school background, where his interest in painting arguably outweighed his early efforts within the musical realm. It was at art school that Ferry first formed Roxy Music in 1970, recruiting a crack team of similarly artistic, individualistic, and experimental musicians, including the archetypal innovator Brian Eno, who formed an irrefutably essential part of the group’s sound during those early years.
Inevitably, with Ferry’s painting sensibilities, the visual aspects of Roxy Music were placed on an equal level of importance to the music itself. Hence, a lot of audiences became aware of the revolutionary nature of the group solely through their appearance and album covers, before even listening to any of their LPs. That was, unsurprisingly, done by design, and, in fact, the provocative (or, at least, provocative for 1972) album cover for the band’s eponymous debut album was the first thing that tipped Ferry off to the fact that he was on to a winner with Roxy Music.
After all, nobody sounded like Roxy Music back in the early 1970s, but nobody looked like them either. “It was kind of underground, which I think is rather cool,” Ferry told Another Man in 2020, reflecting upon that beloved debut. “I remember when I saw the first Roxy Music album cover in the window of a local record store on King’s Road. It was the night before the record’s release, I was probably drunk. It was just a fabulous thing.”
“You felt you’d done something really good, really interesting that the man in the street would see,” he continued. “Stop them in their tracks, there in the street, not in an art gallery. To me, that was really important.” Whether or not that emotional revelation came as a result of a night on the drink, it is difficult to disagree with Ferry’s account of the album’s importance.
Maybe more so than any other band, Roxy Music recognised the power of those provocative album covers, and they turned an entire generation of similarly inclined audiences onto some of the most important, innovative music of that decade. Roxy Music, as an album, is a postmodern masterpiece, and you could hang both the album cover and the soundwaves on any gallery wall without it looking out of place.
Even if the album cover didn’t stop people in their tracks, the music encased within certainly did. It wasn’t quite glam, it certainly wasn’t prog; it was something entirely different, as though Ferry and co had been elevated to a higher plane of musical understanding, or that they had been sent from the future to show the musicians of 1972 the way forward. It was, and still is, an avant-pop masterpiece, which challenged all who heard it to approach music in an entirely different fashion.
