The Roxy Music song made out of a joke: “One of the most bizarre events”
If there was ever a band that personified the very idea of a ‘knowing wink’ it was Roxy Music. The Last Dinner Party’s dads hurtled into the 1970s as progenitors of new wave – more closely akin to proto-post-punk if you want to be pretentious about it, and considering it’s Roxy Music we’re talking about, we should. They were louche and sexy, and the form of frontman, Brian Ferry, had a legitimate wordsmith in charge of the lyrics. Even an extremely close shave with death in a crashing plane in 2000 had him thinking, “Oh no, I’ve got an album to finish. Could we reschedule?”‘
So, it should come as no surprise that Roxy Music have a few songs that began life as jokes. Most notably, ‘A Song For Europe’ is a lesser spotted number from their 1973 album Stranded. A few of you of a certain vintage may have spotted the gag right from the off, but for those of you who were born after the 1990s, let me explain. Prior to making Stranded, Ferry had very much been the creative hub of the band. Writing the songs, then bringing them to the rest of the group to flesh them out.
After a few albums getting to know each other, though, the band decided to branch out and begin writing collaboratively. In an interview with Rock’s Backpages in 2001, he spoke particularly of his work with the band’s saxophonist Andy Mackay. “He had more musical training than anybody, including me. (He) had this European music background, where my background was much more American… It actually made for a good combination.”
Pay attention to that “European music background” part, because that will be important. One of Mackay’s piano compositions came across as particularly European to Ferry, who started writing lyrics for it and finding himself picturing a lovelorn young man wandering the streets of Paris pining for his lost love. “And here by the Seine / Notre-Dame casts a long lonely shadow / Now – only sorrow / No tomorrow / There’s no today for us / Nothing is there for us to share but yesterday.”
Fearing that it was all getting a bit dour, Ferry turned the European factor up to an almost comical level by singing the penultimate chorus in Latin, and then the final chorus in French. Giving what would otherwise be a straightforward song of love and loss a self-mocking twist that could only come from Roxy Music. He wasn’t finished there, though, as the track didn’t have a title for a while until it came from an unlikely yet very fitting source. The Eurovision Song Contest.
That’s right; we have to thank the ludicrous camp singing competition for so much more than ABBA and Conchita Wurst. You see, there’s a whole other rigmarole, directly before the main Eurovision broadcast that we all know and try to watch until we realise how interminably long it is. Our contestants don’t just come out of nowhere; there’s a whole TV legacy of deciding which poor soul gets to step up for the pride of a nation and be slapped down with a humiliating nil point.
From 1961 until 2001, that program was called ‘A Song For Europe”. Once Ferry saw what he called in Melody Maker “one of the more bizarre events in the calendar”, he knew he had a title, and one of the most underrated gems in their back catalogue was complete.
