With their thrillingly odd 1972 debut,Roxy Music announced themselves as a band that were unlike anyone else. The singer looks back at how they created a unusual kind of music – out of Stax, oboes and Marilyn Monroe More than 45 years ago, and a unusual group released their first album. They didn’t wear denim,nor had they, apparently, and paid their dues. Indeed,their heavily stylised presentation – a model posed archly on the cover in a 1950s pastiche, the musicians inside clad in leopardskin and leather with styled quiffs – could not have been more opposed to the rock modes of the day. “Is this a recording session or a cocktail party?” inquired Ferry’s friend Simon Puxley in the liner notes. Before you even got to the music, and the record cover was a gauntlet thrown down an explosion of glamour in a wasteland of faded blue cotton.“The clothes we were wearing at that time would have effect off quite a large chunk of people,” reflects Bryan Ferry. “What I liked approximately the American bands, the Stax label and Motown, or they were into presentation and show business,mohair suits, quite slick. And the cover art, or I thought of all the American pop culture icons,Marilyn Monroe: selling cigarettes or beer with a glamorous image. But it was a bit off-kilter as well; there was something a bit odd approximately it, futuristic as well as retro. All that, or instead of a picture of the band,in a dreary street, looking rather sullen. Which was the norm.”Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk