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From their earliest moments of public recognition, Roxy Music stood for an assertion of exclusivity – a conjuring of la vie deluxe, inculcated by a bravura use of style. Achieving fame within the pop mainstream almost immediately, Roxy Music became, as the band’s creator Bryan Ferry would observe in 1975, “above all… a state of mind”.

This was a dream which had begun for Ferry during his earliest adolescence, and which would possess him throughout his career as a student of fine art at Newcastle University. On moving to London in 1969, Ferry would spend his first night in the capital sleeping on the floor of David Hockney’s studio in Notting Hill – a temporary abode which neatly summarised his determination to combine his passion for art with his equal obsession with pop music.

For the son of a former colliery worker from the small mining town of Washington, County Durham, the creation of Roxy Music – that most glamorous of groups – would be an astonishing achievement. But the attainment of Ferry’s dream would also describe, as fable almost, the epic subcultural journey from England’s austerity years of the Fifties (in all their rationed, damp, colourless depression) to the extravagant nostalgia for the elegance of the Twenties that would become a high-fashion cult during the early Seventies.

Bryan Ferry: “When my parents were first married they lived in a farmhouse; and there was a hill nearby called Penshaw Hill. On top of the hill was a local landmark – a Greek monument built for the first Earl of Durham. This was where my father was brought up; and his family had farmed on the sides of the hill. Years later, when I showed this place to Antony Price [the legendary fashion designer who would style much of Roxy Music’s glamorous image], he said, ‘Now I know why you’re so interested in visual things: it’s because of that monument.’

“And it seemed to me like a symbol, that monument – representing art, and another life, away from the coal fields and the hard Northeastern environment; it seemed to represent something from another civilization, that was much finer...

“My childhood took place in Washington, which at the time was a small pit village in County Durham. It stands about five miles from Sunderland, and five miles from Newcastle, and a few miles from Durham as well – so it’s in the triangle between those three cities. It was a typical pit village, in as much as there was a small pocket of quite heavy industry surrounded by very rich farmland; and then there’d be another village which had its own pit, and maybe a factory – and then more farmland. So it was quite strange, with the combination of being close to the countryside, yet in this very tough working environment as well.

“When I was a boy, I had a paper round, and so I used to read The Melody Maker before I put it through someone’s letterbox. I dragged my uncle Bryan off to see the Chris Barber Band at Newcastle City Hall; and then, when I got a little braver, I started to go into town to see concerts on my own. I would be dressed in a white trenchcoat – at the age of 12. I would probably have seen the adverts for Strand cigarettes; I was very interested in style...

“My sisters and I would sit in the cinema and watch any old rubbish. I started going to the pictures early on – even when I was at junior school. My dad had an allotment where he grew his vegetables, and that was right next door to the cinema – the Carlton. It was a local flea-pit really, but it was my Cinema Paradiso from a very early age, because my mother used to make tea for the projectionist – cakes and scones and sandwiches. So he got these free teas, and we got free tickets. There were wooden benches that you sat on...

“Of course, when you got old enough to have a girlfriend, or to go on a date, the only thing you did was take her to the pictures. But that was in the high street of Washington, where there were two cinemas – which were bigger, and had proper velveteen seats rather than benches. One was called the Regal, and the other the Ritz. None of them are there now. When I went to university I would go to the cinema club, which is where I became aware of cinema classics and film-as-art – all that kind of thing. Up until then it was film-as-entertainment. That was all you did – you didn’t have television. We got one in 1955 when Newcastle were in the Cup, but so did everyone in Newcastle. We were very poor, you see... So I think it’s fair to say that Roxy Music, from my point of view, would be the reverse of this background.”

In 1953, the artist Richard Hamilton – now widely credited with conceiving Pop Art – was appointed to the post of “teacher of basic design”, at what was then known, confusingly, as the King Edward VII School of Art, within King’s College, University of Durham at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. His arrival would mark the beginning of an era, inaugurating a chain of events and a gathering of participants that would include, 20 years and many fortuitous encounters later, the creation by Bryan Ferry – who would study fine art at Newcastle between 1964 and 1968 – of Roxy Music.

The line connecting Richard Hamilton’s appointment to Newcastle and Ferry’s realisation of his own pop vision is drawn between a complex but distinct configuration of points. What emerges from its tracery are various semi-casual cenacles, comprising networks of art-student friendships forged across the Sixties. The tenets of these would splice artistic enquiry with bedsit Bohemianism, and a devotion to the shrines of pop music and personal style. And one defining consequence of such a lifestyle – however buoyed up by more traditional undergraduate pursuits – would be an inclination to balance the creative possibilities opened up by an education in fine art, against the conscious honing of a pose.

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