Remembering Roxy Music and their unstoppable performance on Musikladen in 1973
Bryan Ferry’s Roxy Music is one of those bands that is simply impossible to pin down. Their brand of space-tinged, twisted and glamorous rock and roll set tongues a-wagging when they first landed on our screens and stereos in the early seventies.
In a world where hippies were only just beginning to find themselves jobs, Ferry’s band offered something completely original and would’ve looked like proverbial aliens when landing on the German show Musikladen in 1973.
Arriving with their debut track ‘Virginia Plain’ (a song about a painting of a packet of cigarettes) they tore open the idea of ‘rock and roll’ and added a heavy dose of glitter atop some antennae, placed them on their heads and made it a style of their own. They shocked everyone.
The band
The group was originally comprised of Bryan Ferry (vocals, keys, and chief songwriter), Graham Simpson (bass), Phil Manzanera (guitar), Andy Mackay (saxophone and oboe), Paul Thompson (drums and percussion), and last but not least, Brian Eno (VCS3 synthesizer, tape effects, backing vocals) one of the most mercurial musicians around.
Despite coming from a working-class background, Ferry appreciated the more audacious parts of life. Not content with rock and roll, his mother took him to a Bill Haley gig in the 50s. Ferry preferred jazz and soul, with his ambition rooted more firmly in art than anything else. That was until the singer made his way to London to catch the great Otis Redding. It was an experience which would change his life and the point at which his head turned towards being a singer.
Ferry still felt like an oddity, though. Never quite fitting in with his contemporaries, he only really found his confidence when studying fine art at Newcastle University under the tutelage of Pop artist Richard Hamilton. This emboldening of spirit, along with Redding’s gig, pushed Ferry to move to London after he graduated and start singing and writing his own songs.
After arriving in the capital Ferry began to put together the band he needed. Some members wouldn’t work out but in 1970 Ferry formed Roxy Music with Simpson in 1970. Andy MacKay and Eno soon joined, then Thompson and finally Phil Manzanera.
As Manzanera later recalled, the rich diversity of those early sessions together created Roxy sound: “We’d start off with ‘Memphis Soul’ Stew, and then we’d go into ‘The Bob (Medley)’, this heavy bizarre thing about the Battle Of Britain with synths and sirens. We had everything in there from King Curtis to The Velvet Underground to systems music to ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll. At the time we said this was ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s rock ’n’ roll.”
“Eno would respond to something that sounded like it came off the first Velvets album, then Ferry would play something ‘50s, and I’d play my version of ‘50s. I was always a terrible session player. I could never learn a solo, and I stuck that ‘not quite right’ approach onto Roxy. Six people in a band created this hybrid.”
By 1972, they had written and recorded their first single, ‘Virginia Plain,’ to wide acclaim and open-mouthed appreciation. Fast-forward one year, and we see a somewhat shocked, mostly adoring, but still open-mouthed audience watching on as Ferry and Co made their way through their 4-track set on Musikladen.
Their commanding performance would go on to define their lifespan as a band and become one of the many reasons Roxy Music are considered one of the founding fathers of modern rock and roll. They were the future, and probably still are.
