‘Re-Make Re-Model’: the Roxy Music song about the beautiful girl Bryan Ferry never met
It was imperative for Roxy Music to stand out among the crowd in the early 1970s. The easiest way to do that was through image: the band members took on radical personas and donned wild costumes during their photo shoots and promotional appearances. Just before the glam rock genre was set to take off in Britain, Roxy Music was at the forefront of glitz and glamour, with singer Bryan Ferry and keyboardist Brian Eno competing to see who could hold the spotlight for the longest amount of time.
But if Roxy Music just looked good in pictures, they wouldn’t have lasted the test of time. Instead, the group stood out through their dedication to another genre: art rock. With Eno’s post-production effects, Phil Manzanera’s razor-sharp guitar lines, and Ferry’s dedication to old-school love songs, Roxy Music sounded like no other group of the time. From the band’s self-titled debut onward, Roxy Music were intent on blasting out futuristic jams to scores of hip romantics around the world.
As a former art school student himself, Ferry would occasionally turn to his former medium to gain inspiration. For the first track on the band’s 1972 self-titled debut, Ferry channelled the work of Derek Boshier, specifically his early 1960s painting, Re-Think/Re-Entry. ‘Re-Make/Re-Model’ would get its title from the painting, but when it came to the song’s lyrics, Ferry would be inspired by a real-life incident.
“I went with a friend, and I was very attracted to this girl backstage who was wearing a fluffy jacket,” Ferry claimed to Uncut in 2013. “I then saw her when we were driving home in the terrible slow queue to get out of the site, and she was in the car in front. And I memorised the number of the car. So it was a kind of cry in the wild… I never met her.”
Manzanera felt that Roxy Music had accurately made their identity known on the track. “That sort of sums us up in a witty way with that ending, three chords, a lot of attack, a lot of enthusiasm,” he would later tell The Sun. For the song’s introductory cocktail party, Ferry and the band members sliced up tape to make the fun seem real.
“It seemed like a good idea to start our first album with a party scene, a kind of celebration,” Ferry told The Guardian. “We used sound effects tapes and added our own voices to the party to make it more real.”
Check out ‘Re-Make/Re-Model’ down below.
