CHAPTER 36

#65: ROXY MUSIC

"Re-Make/Re-Model"

from the album Roxy Music

Released: June 1972

Maybe I was ostracised and felt out of place in 1972. But I was too young to feel it that way. I was eight at the time. All I remember was D.V. in the school playground scolding me about not having gone to the Christmas church service. It was suffocating Scotland where, to paraphrase Ballboy a lifetime later, punishment was at the centre of everything. It was gradual and incremental. I was more interested in television, radio, Disney/Warner Brothers comic books and comedy in general than I was in music in 1972. I remember getting a copy of the first Goodies book for my birthday and harbouring a deep satisfaction at how up-to-date the 1972 publication date seemed. 1972! It didn't seem real.

I didn't really bother to keep up with pop music the way I had done the previous two years. I was dimly aware of things going on but much of it was...strange, to me. I watched that edition of Top Of The Pops on a crummy black-and-white portable TV in a second-tier boarding house while on a rainy and not overly friendly holiday in Blackpool - when it rains in Blackpool, there really isn't anything else to do except stay in - and was nonplussed. My life had not been changed.

So what happened then I only learned about subsequently, in some cases in a different decade. You knew the name Roxy Music and the hits, which I noticed got progressively higher in the charts the less weird they became. Not the albums; those came at a completely different time in my life when nothing much was going on and I needed inspiration from somewhere.

I got an equally crummy second-hand copy of their first L.P. for nearly nothing and...didn't get past the first song. Bloody hell! It was as if the whole of post-war music had been gleefully tossed in the air and cut up. Riffs, noises, words which might have meant something this side of Little Richard and that side of the album's producer Pete Sinfield, musical quotations (to a point - the bass finally veers away from the "Day Tripper" riff for legal reasons, the guitar makes you think of, but does not precisely replicate, the Peter Gunn theme) and lots of colourful cartoon costume fun with the band itself. I didn't want to get past that first track, the walk up towards the mansion where we hear indistinct voices, clinking glasses and a bass throb, the "solos," the final comedown towards neutrality before the burping oscillator makes one final tongue-thrusting comment.

I was perhaps right; the rest of the album, when I eventually got through to it, wasn't so good, a bit like an unholy crossbreed of Little Feat and King Crimson, and largely unlike their second and third albums, both of which were bone-stoned classics. Perhaps this introductory manifesto - and, like "Bohemian Rhapsody," it serves as a handy this-is-what-we-do guide to or advertisement for the band - was the only statement they ever needed to make. Its existence alone justified theirs.