Roxy Music’s most successful song, according to Brian Eno: “It’s got a lot of discipline”
At the beginning of UK glam’s peak in 1972, only one of the ‘Big Three’ had immediately found fame during the pop charts’ glitter frenzy. David Bowie had been slogging it around London trying his hand at a myriad of musical incarnations before striking stardom with his mulleted Martian alter-ego, and Marc Bolan was a starry-eyed hippy offering psychedelic folk playing 1970’s Glastonbury Festival debut and sporting far-out album titles such as My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair… But Now They’re Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows before unleashing ‘T Rextasy’ onto a generation of pop pickers.
Roxy Music, however, seemed to land on Top of the Pops with their retro-futurist sheen and art rock flamboyance fully realised off the back of their debut single. Dropped a month after their eponymous first album, ‘Virginia Plain’s dazzling postmodern carnival ride heralded the arrival of a group who looked beamed onto bedroom wall posters or The Old Grey Whistle Test TV show from some exotic, comic book universe that aesthetically and sonically straddled a nostalgic affection for the 1950s’ pop-cultural ripples while earnestly grabbing for a sound that looked way ahead from Woodstock’s double-denimed seriousness still clogging the charts. Before even their second single ‘Pyjamarama’ was out, Roxy Music were stars of the glam era.
The tussle between frontman and principal songwriter Bryan Ferry’s pop focus and synthesist Brian Eno’s penchant for looser experimentalism first flashed during the sessions for their sophomore record. Reining in the expanded arrangements and song structures that characterised their debut, 1973’s For Your Pleasure pursued a sharper and more cohesive shimmering pop statement on romance, glamour, and the arts.
Yet, opening the record’s second side was the nine-minute ‘The Bogus Man’, an eerie skulker indebted to the progressive and open-ended jams from German krautrockers Can that ostensibly had Eno’s dynamic fingerprints all over it.
Lyrically alluding to a deviant force, or even possibly a sexually-motivated stalker, ‘The Bogus Man’ creeps along its slithering motorik beat with atonal menace. Cast in voyeuristic shadow, Andy Mackay blasts his saxophone with panicked urgency forever slightly off-key, drummer Paul Thompson holds a cod-reggae percussion pattern, Phil Manzanera stirs the eerie affair with subtle guitar echo, and Eno manipulates his EMS VCS 3 synth to emit resonant pangs of cold steel.
Fronting the elastic mesh are Ferry’s cooing vocals, whispering and murmuring the lyrical disquiet—“He’s tired but he’ll get to you / And show you lots of fun”—while coating the seedy jam in the Mellotron’s rich and weathered textures.
Following the domestic nightmare of ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’, ‘The Bogus Man’ sits at For Your Pleasure’s centre with evocative, alien energy. It’s a cut the band were proud of, no less than Eno, who had eagerly tried to steer the album toward such a creative realm of free-form traverse.
“All the elements are very strange, but they do work together to give this feeling of something very uneasy proceeding in a direction it’s not quite sure of,” Eno revealed to Sounds that year. “For me, it’s probably the most successful track because it’s the one on which the band is most obviously working together, and it’s also got a lot of discipline”.
Eno would leave Roxy Music four months after For Your Pleasure’s release, pursuing a much-celebrated ambient and production career while Ferry’s captaining of the band would continue to flourish as one of the decade’s most inventive pop groups. While future albums would yield essential Roxy standards, ‘The Bogus Man’ dwells in their songbook as their most curious branch point, a fraught and knotted sting of haunting grooves that briefly misdirects the band’s creative trajectory toward an infinitely more dark and leftfield path.
