‘Trash’: the Roxy Music track that parodied the Sex Pistols
Conservative art-pop grammar school boys like Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music are usually the kinds of thing you’d expect punk rock rebels such as the Sex Pistols to turn their nose up at, but the anarchic London four-piece were actually fans of their avant-garde glam rock predecessors.
In a 2009 interview, John Lydon explained that his favourite Roxy Music track is ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache’, from their second album, 1973’s For Your Pleasure.
Lydon added, “I get what Bryan Ferry is trying to do – experimenting in a bizarre world and then couching what he finds in the style and language of the hunting set. It’s an exotic, intriguing concept and he’s the only one doing it. This song reveals a corner of your psyche that not many people would like to admit exists; that the mind wanders into dark places, and the body follows. It’s a romantic delusion, and it’s fascinating material for a song.”
‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache’ is a scraping, drifting expanse of darkness and delusion which at times sounds like a cross between The Velvet Underground and Pink Floyd – and on which Bryan Ferry sounds an awful lot like an early Nick Cave – the song only explodes into uncomfortable life towards the end. It doesn’t sound like anything that the Sex Pistols ever did, but the idea of writing subversive lyrics which reach for places other artists were too afraid of or too uncomfortable to go to must have connected with the young punks. And while the Sex Pistols never attempted to make any songs that sounded like Roxy Music, Roxy Music did, in fact, attempt to make one that sounded like the Sex Pistols to cash in on the popularity of the new kids on the block.
Bryan Ferry put Roxy Music on the back-burner in 1975, following the release of their album Siren, in order to pursue solo stardom. A year later, he released the classic Let’s Stick Together, but after diminishing returns with the follow-up In Your Mind and then The Bride Stripped Bare, he got his band back together to record new music again.
In 1979, the new Roxy Music single ‘Trash’ arrived in anticipation of their new album Manifesto and as a response to the explosion of the UK’s punk scene. “We always said that we inspired amateurs,” Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera told the BBC in 2011. “It’s exactly what the punks were doing, and if you come up with something like that at a time when everything else is just a bit vague in the music business, you can be successful. One of the tracks that I co-wrote, ‘Trash’, I had a riff, and I thought, ‘Well, this could be a sort of punky type track.'”
They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but that might not always hold. It could be argued that it’s not the most flattering idea to emulate another group’s sound in order to capitalise on their popularity and then later refer to the band as “amateurs” when it didn’t work out.
In any case, the guitar riff at the start of the song sounds like it owes more to Blue Öyster Cult’s ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper’ than it does to anything by the Sex Pistols, but before long, the song picks up pace and seems to inform the direction that David Bowie would be taking a few months later with Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps).
‘Trash’ only just broke into the UK’s Top 40, but follow-up singles ‘Dance Away’ and ‘Angel Eyes’ fared a lot better, reaching number two and number four, respectively, while the album Manifesto also went into the top ten.
