As the young Bryan Ferry was beginning to envisage a marriage between rhythm
and blues and Warholian Pop Art, the two other founding members of Roxy
Music – Andy Mackay, at Reading University, and Brian Eno, over at
Winchester School of Art – were actively exploring the relationship to music
of ideas within the visual arts, electronics, the musical avant garde,
science, and performance art. At the same time, at the Royal College of Art
in London, within the generation of fashion students directly succeeding
Ossie Clark, Roxy Music’s future stylist, Antony Price, was creating an
extravagantly theatrical construction of image that fused fetishistic
sexuality with the attention to technical detail that a Hollywood set
designer of the Thirties would devote to the creation of a big musical
number.
“The world we are talking about was a world obsessed with things clever,”
Price would later tell me, “and with spotting things clever.” And in such a
heady constellation of personalities, there were few cleverer than the young
Brian Eno.
Brian Eno: “I liked very much the idea of synthesis – of artificiality. A lot
of what Roxy was about was a rebellion against the rather maudlin sincerity
of the blues movement – which, by the way, I have come to appreciate far
more. When you are just starting something, it’s much easier to know what
you don’t want to be than to know where you’re actually trying to go. We
thought about ourselves in the negative quite a lot, I think. This was most
articulated by Bryan, Andy and myself – we were very opinionated, very
snobbish even, about what we were doing. In fact, we treated Roxy Music as
an art movement that had set itself up in contradiction to what was going on
at the time.”
In one crucial sense, Roxy Music would be a modern triumph of the applied arts
– a bringing together of art, music and design; and with the release of the
group’s debut album in June 1972, titled simply Roxy Music,
Bryan Ferry would present his carte de visite to the world. The record was
arch, thrilling, elegant, unique, clever and richly romantic. A style
manifesto written in the language of heavily stylised pop and rock music
(the songs made use of both genres, in their broadest sense, and at times
simultaneously), the album was made all the more alluring by its
presentation. The principal musicians, cosmetically beautified, looked
sinister, louche, imperial, remote, maniacal and leeringly self-preening. By
contrast, the auburn-haired beauty queen whose image lay across the record’s
ice-blue gatefold sleeve (a model called Kari Ann who had also modelled for
Ossie Clark and Antony Price) appeared beseeching, yielding, yearning – at
once seductive and seduced. She seemed to have been ravished – or to be
achingly desirous of being ravished – by the very music that her glamour was
being asked to represent.
In addition to the iconic cover star on their debut album, three other women
would be vital to the configuration of individuals and art-student factions
out of which Roxy Music would emerge. As observed by Rita Donagh, the
artist, teacher and second wife of Richard Hamilton, who would subsequently
know Andy Mackay during his student years at Reading University, “Roxy Music
was like a coming together of Newcastle and Reading.” This meeting was
ultimately enabled by Mackay’s former girlfriend, another Reading art
student called Viv Kemp – who had become friends with the Newcastle fine art
graduates in London, including the artist Tim Head (whom she would later
marry) and Head’s friend Bryan Ferry. Without Viv, arguably, Roxy Music
would not have happened.
Likewise, Bryan Ferry’s one-time girlfriend Susie Cussins – the daughter of a
wealthy Newcastle family, with whom Ferry would share a flat in Kensington
in the very early Seventies – would provide some vital financial assistance
to the fledgling group; while Juliet Mann, a designer and Rita Hayworthesque
muse to Antony Price, would be a pivotal figure within the essentially gay,
Notting Hill Bohemia in which Ferry would meet Price and the iconic hair
stylist “Keith from Smile” – whose names would later reach millions by way
of their credits on the sleeve of Roxy Music’s debut album.
Roxy Music, as such, proposed a masterclass in charisma. To those responsive
to its infectious charms, the album suggested a hitherto hidden and
instantly desirable demi-monde – a place of declamatory style and
sophistication, part cabaret, part carnival, simultaneously futuristic and
archaic, but swaggeringly self-assured in its balancing of contradictions.
The greater formula of this effect, nearly 25 years later, would be
summarised by Brian Eno in perhaps one of the most coherent definitions of
pop music ever uttered: “I thought, and still think, that pop music isn’t
primarily about making music in any traditional sense of the word. It’s
about creating new, imaginary worlds and inviting people to try them out.”
Brian Eno: “I always felt like a pop star. That’s funny… Even when I was at
art school I used to dress as though I was something fairly special; I
dressed very strangely, and used to have my clothes made and so on. I had
the attitude, if not of a pop star, then of someone who could do whatever
they wanted. In Roxy, our look was proud and future-looking – not introvert.
One of the things about the blues movement that we especially didn’t like
was that it was all backward-looking – to do with roots and realism and
sincerity. And we didn’t want anything to do with that – roots just didn’t
interest us.
“We were Postmodernists in that sense: we thought that anything was there for
the taking – it’s just a palette. The whole history of music – you don’t
have to have any reverence for it; you can take what you want, stick it with
whatever else you like, and see what you get. That’s why those records were
so quixotic in their changes...”
Bryan Ferry: “I was the author of Roxy Music, if you like, and it was my
vision; but having said that, the various parts of it were very important to
the overall make-up. Therefore the fact that Eno was there was supremely
important, and also Andy and Phil [Manzanera], and not forgetting our great
drummer, Paul Thompson. However, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, at
all. It was more a case of having a vague vision… I think that the thing
about Roxy Music is that there was quite a vast – or bigger than usual –
musical range in the group. We might not have been the best players in the
world, but the palette there was quite extensive. And I think that that’s
what made some of the early Roxy stuff so satisfying: there was a richness
to it...”
Of the inner circle of young artists, designers, musicians and stylists who
witnessed the creation of Roxy, nearly all would recognise the exuberant pop
demi-monde, fixated on glamour and newness, that Roxy Music so invitingly
proposed. Making their operational headquarters, as the Sixties gave way to
the Seventies, amid the red-brick mansion blocks, black-railinged squares,
stucco-fronted houses and broad, grey streets around Chelsea, Kensington,
Notting Hill and Olympia, a further characteristic of this particular milieu
would be their consciously heightened engagement with the concept of modern
style.
Individually and collectively, therefore, many of the Roxy circle were more
than semi-seriously concerned with the dimensions of their own exclusivity;
and as connoisseurs of an intoxicating sense of pose – in one sense aloof,
separatist – played games with not only the re-invention of themselves, but
the entire notion of class. In this, these artist Bohemians of the late
Sixties would emerge in the earliest years of the Seventies as both their
own art movement and their own high society – fulfilling to the letter the
edict of Charles Baudelaire, a century before, that in periods of social
transition, the cult of dandyism, “may conceive the idea of establishing a
new kind of aristocracy...”
From such a heady fusion of mutated Mod cool, the influence of fine art and
the avant garde, Roxy Music would establish themselves in the pop mainstream
as the ultimate pop agents of heightened romanticism. Their debut album was
claimed by The New Musical Express, on its release, to be one of the
greatest first albums ever released, and the group then embarked on an
initial ten-year career in which their gorgeously packaged albums and
singles seldom failed to reach the top of the UK charts.
Above all, however, Roxy Music’s unique glamour became the aspirational style
of a generation. As Ferry has remarked of the cult of style that the group
inspired, “We would actually get fans turning up in full black-tie”; while
young women would attend Roxy concerts dressed as Chandleresque sirens or
flapper girls of the Twenties. Alongside the boys in greatcoats shaking
their fringes, the audience at a Roxy concert in the mid Seventies might
have stepped from the pages of a novella by Colette, or a scene from a
Hollywood musical – it was all precision-constructed cool.
As Brian Eno’s girlfriend of the time, the artist and ceramicist Carol
McNicoll (who also created Eno’s legendary “feather collar” costume, now in
the V&A) has observed: “Central to all of this was the notion that you
could take serious ideas from the world of art and apply them directly to
the front line of popular culture – without compromising the intentions of
either.” In short, Roxy Music brought to the mainstream the concept of an
“art-directed lifestyle” – a cult of self-recreation that, even 35 years
later, can be found revived in the contemporary craze for burlesque, and the
latest exchange of casual club wear for extravagant dressing up. In this,
Roxy Music have proved that style is indeed more enduring than fashion.
© Michael Bracewell 2007. Extracted from Remake/Remodel, which
is published by Faber & Faber on Thursday and is available from
BooksFirst priced £18 (RRP £20), free p&p, on 0870 1608080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
