The 1982 Listening Post - Roxy Music - Avalon

 Reviewed by Stephen Lam

Released: May 28 1982 Roxy Music Avalon Genre: The Only Worthy Soundtrack To An Antony Price Commercial In 1982 Allen’s Rating: 5 out of 5 Stephen’s Rating: 4.5 out of 5 Highlights: Avalon While My Heart Is Still Beating The Main Thing To Turn You On True To Life Allen's Additional Highlights: More Than This The entire studio output of Roxy Music - grannies of EuroTrash Art Rock - can be seen as one gradual shedding of the flashy, brash Art School/Electric Vaudeville innovation/weirdness of their 1972 debut. “Avalon” sat on the other side of the band’s artistic tangent - it’s the unabashedly stylish soundtrack for the late 70s in-crowd. Style over Substance. Vibe over Facts. This ain’t no disco, no “three chords and a truth”, no 25-minute song-cycles, and certainly no confessional singer-songwriter acid flashback. It’s not even “Country Life” or “Siren”. Roxy Music was a different band on “Avalon” than on anything before “Manifesto”. In fact, anticipating the backlash from old-school Roxy fans as I write this, I propose that one of the keys to enjoying “Avalon” is not to think of it as the same band you knew. Without the comparisons, “Avalon” was a fine record. It’s its own thing, its own focus, and its own excellence. By the time Roxy made this record, Bryan Ferry had assumed full control of the music. He’d been working with producer Rhett Davies since “Flesh+Blood” to finesse this new sound - sophisticated, atmospheric, multi-layered, danceable post-modern romantic songs sung by a honey-voiced but fragile British tenor crooner. That’s the sound of “Avalon”. No more atonality, prickly stiletto tartiness, 3-penny melodrama, cutting-edge melodies, and generally confrontational elements. “Avalon” swayed, floated, and pulsated in its own unhurried groove. It’s minimalist at heart. It’s purposeful at sounding exactly the way it did - this was not, in my opinion, “Roxy Music going soft”. It was exactly what they were aiming for - a different sound, a different trip. Something simpler, more spacious, more modern-sounding, more dance-y, yet more dream-like, with moodier cinematic. Ferry’s trembling tenor, once dangerous and feisty, now hummed with restraint, and trembled with fragility. It made “It’s been fun for a while, there was no way of knowing” sounded less like the condescending fuck he was than someone who’s telling you the plain truth. Songs like “While My Heart Is Still Beating” and “Take A Chance With Me” wouldn’t work as well if the singing voice wasn’t shot in self-doubt. Two songs on the album illustrated Roxy’s “state of the art”: “Avalon” (the song): this was the first time Ferry/Davies came upon the following approach: start with a medium-slow reggae-ish groove of simple drums and lots of percussion, then add a ton of tiny overdubs: synthesizers, guitars (I counted 6 guitar parts in “Avalon”), Andy MacKay’s saxes, Ferry’s CP70, harmony vocals, etc. However, none of these parts sustained or stayed on for long. A chord here, a note there, a swell here, a line there, forming a web of sounds coming in and going out of focus. The result, brilliantly executed in the title track - a slow-grind reggae supporting an instrumentation that “shimmered” at you - had since been blueprinted: listen to Ferry’s “Slave To Love”, “Windswept”, “Your Painted Smile”, “You Can Dance”, etc. It became a signature Bryan Ferry sound throughout his solo career. In “Avalon”, Ferry dropped his voice an octave and got close to the mic for his tired, intimate, and suggestive delivery. Lyrically, I’m still trying to figure out how the verses relate to the legend of Avalon. It hardly mattered, especially with classic Ferry lines like “When you bossanova, there’s no holding. Would you have me dancing, out of nowhere.” Naughty but classy. Yanick Étienne’s (nicked from a Haitian band recording next door, says Wiki) beautiful vocals at the end was the big Play Out, the screaming guitar solo of the song that was, thankfully, not done on a guitar. Not a song designed to work in skeletal form (a by-the-campfire version done on a beater acoustic would have simply sounded stupid), “Avalon” was the sum of its sonics, approaches, and atmospherics. “The Main Thing” was state-of-the-art Roxy dance music. It took nearly a full minute for the groove to unfold, showing, in real time, how it’s constructed. The wah-wah bass, which pulsated and “pumped” the groove enough to be a signature part, made its appearance for the first (but certainly not the last) time in Ferry-lore. The aforementioned shimmering web of instrumentation continued to be at play: a myriad of small parts weaved in and out, alternately active and thinned-out, animating the otherwise very straightforward drums and vocals. The fact that there was no chord change - the entire song camped solid on an F minor - made the song feel less of a “dance version” of a song than a tune deliberately constructed as a dance number. It wasn’t a straight made-for-dance-only, proto-underground-club thing, either. “The Main Thing” was just the soundtrack to that particular scene in the imaginary movie of “Avalon”, in which the protagonist resolved to hit the dance floor, the lyrics being what you’d tell your partner while you danced. Certain things were just better said while you danced. I am not a fan of “More Than This”. The song could have easily been on “Flesh+Blood”, and the pretty melody could not hide the awkwardness of the “hey, it’s just sex, baby” sentiment. I would’ve been happy with “The Space Between” as the album opener. “While My Heart Is Still Beating” shared the same musical DNA as “Avalon” (the song), but its sentiment sprung more from the sighing, “tragic but beautiful” classic Bryan Ferry. Lyrically, “Take A Chance With Me” and “To Turn You On” tied the band back to its earlier stylings: with word-plays like “I was blind, can’t you see?”, “I could walk you through the park if you’re feeling blue, or whatever”, and “Must phone me, you know me” Ferry was pulling a bit of the old Art/Vaudeville Brat. “To Turn You On” even had a little of Ferry’s “sing/talk” vocals - his signature style on early Roxy records. The album’s proper closer, “True To Life”, was a slight departure from the rest of the album, in that it was sober, reflective and “content”. The arrangement hung over Ferry’s mesmerizing Prophet 5 pulse (recycled on “You Can Dance” almost 30 years later), and contained some of Phil Manzanera’s and Neil Hubbard’s (Hubbard was the absolute unsung hero on the album) finest playing. This end-of-album resolution was also on their previous record - the emotional arc on the 2nd half of “Flesh+Blood” that built to the resolution in “Running Wild”. However, “Running Wild” and “True To Life” resolved in very different ways, with the former ending on the bitter (reminded me of what Milan Kundera referred to as “Litost”) line “I could even pretend that I’ll fall in love again”, and the latter ending with the hopeful “But arm and arm with my seaside diamond, I’ll soon be home”. “Running Wild” was more of a resignation than “True To Life”’s genuine resolution. “Avalon” sounded smooth, but it was complex and methodical, and was hardly muzak. The sonics - the webs of shimmering instrumentations, the economy and restraint of “underplaying” each instrument, the care to put each sound in its own place - was an integral part of what the album was about, which altogether showcased how deft and masterful the band had become, and how successful the Ferry/Davies pairing was (the two would go on to make many of Ferry’s solo albums). There was a lot going on, but nothing was out of place, nothing sounded congested, and each song floated to the next as if the album was through-composed. It’s a record that’s great to listen to in its entirety. It was also the most airy and spacious-sounding Roxy record, light years away from the dense bombardment of “Do The Strand”, etc. Many have named “Avalon” one of their “make out” records. I prefer to think of it as the “dancing and wooing before making out” record. “Avalon” was not about sex, per se, but suggestions of possibilities. Suggestions that were alluring, stylish, shimmering, groovy, and - if you fall for them - irresistible. And as much as it was a finale for Roxy, “Avalon” also became the blueprint of Ferry’s solo records. Take the album’s formulae, replace the drummer with punchier drum machines/samples, add an army of top-shelf players like Hubbard, Marcus Miller, David Gilmour, Mark Knopfler, etc., and you have “Boys and Girls”, “Bête Noire”, and so on. p.s. Yes, Bryan Ferry was the rightful heir to the Antony Price suit - not Duran Duran, who’d managed to fuck the whole thing up by rolling up the sleeves. You don’t fucking roll up Anthony Price jacket sleeves. You just don’t.

The 1980 Listening Post - Roxy Music - Flesh + Blood

Roxy Music - Flesh + Blood

#198

May 23 1980

Roxy Music

Flesh + Blood

Genre: New Romantic

Allen’s Rating: 2 out of 5

Anthony’s Rating: 4.5 out of 5 

Flesh and Blood is the midpoint album of the Bryan Ferry evolution to the smooth international Lothario image that would see him all the way to the current century. By this point in his career, Ferry was becoming kind of the Male version of Sade. He started cranking out one smooth martini of a song after another. Avalon, the ultimate Smooth Operator album would follow Flesh and Blood and be the final Roxy Music album and I am sure it was in the top 4-5 make out records of my youth and the youths of so many other black-dyed hair, army surplus, eyeliner-wearing New Wavers. Flesh and Blood could easily have been part 1 of a double album with Avalon. The formula that we see in both is the formula that landed his songs in 80s advertising and soundtracks (check out his Soundtrack credits on IMDB). It also gave rise to a generation of Alternative emulators, in particular Duran Duran and Adam Ant. It’s a far cry from where Roxy Music started. In the beginning, Roxy Music didn’t just push the envelope., they were heavily involved with creating the envelope. They were leaders in the early 70s Art Rock movement. There were new electronic musical toys, new looks, new sounds, new attitudes, and new ways of putting it all together. Few bands were better at making it up as they went along. They had early hits like Virginia Plain and The Strand and Ferry sounded more like he was aping Lou Reed, with ironic up talk at the end of every line like a perpetually questioning millennial dressed as Dracula. Flesh and Blood is not that. It’s clear that by this time - really by the previous album, Manifesto - Roxy Music was Bryan Ferry’s band. Brian Eno had left years and albums ago and he likely took his electronic experimentation with him into the Bush of Ghosts with a successful stop on the U2 World Domination tour. There wasn’t a counterpoint to Ferry’s influence and he just got smoother and smoother. Which brings us to the Album First, Don’t pay any attention to the lyrics about boy losing girl, boy tripping, boy wanting girl, boy driving around with girl, blah blah blah. They’re not good.  But that’s not the point. The lyrical hooks and incoherent choruses are just the right amount of woozy confusing wistfulness to support one 80s gem after another. It’s mood over substance. 

The songs: 

I don’t know why you lead off with a Wilson Pickett cover. But if you were going to put that song through an 80s New Wave prism you could do worse than this. I want to hate it but it works for me. There’s no balls to it. I imagine Pickett would have hated it but it gets the Ferry treatment - he gives it 100% and I can tolerate it. I give it a 3.5.

 Oh Yeah - this is another song about the same schmuck who cried and danced away his heartache in Dance Away on the last album. Nobody does 80s heartbreak montage better than this. I can see Kevin Bacon driving a pickup across the prairie with just. one. tear. kissing his cheek. 4.5 

 Same Old Scene - Starts out with the Casio drum track from Blondie’s Heart of Glass and Discos its way through synth strings, sax, reverb guitar, jittery bass and falsetto. Delicious piece of New Wave disco pop. An ancestor of Duran’s Hungry Like the Wolf. 4.5 

 Flesh And Blood - As close to a Bad Company tune as Ferry gets. 4 

 My Only Love - precursor of later Ferry, like Windswept. More mood. More keys. More lonely guitar. More formula. It works for me. 4 

Over You - Hand claps, Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Marshall Crenshaw. All with the Ferry gloss. He’s hurt but it’s all good because he’s got a keyboard he can make quavery wah wah noises with. Sax solo aaaaaand we love it. 4.5 

Eight Miles High - Duran stole they keyboard licks around 3:45 for Save A Prayer. This song is fine. Meh. 2.5 

Rain Rain Rain - Vince Clark did this better with Alison Moyet - Ode To Boy. But then there’s a Dub section. What? I’m reminded of the comment in Bring On The Night when Sting tries to do blues (Down So Long) and I think Branford Marsalis corrects Mr. Sumner’s notion that he has any such soul. Don’t do it, Bryan. 2 

No Strange Delight - I’d say this was formulaic Ferry but it’s the beginning of songs like Slave To Love, Windswept, the Taxi album, Mamouna, etc. 3.5 

Running Wild - starts out like it’s a Scorpions tune - Still Loving You - but ends up like the acoustic tune the lead singer does while the rest of the band rests before coming out to do the big crowd pleasing hit for the final encore. 2 

You can see on this album with a dose of hindsight where Mr. Ferry is going. So much of this record sets the stage for the next 10-15 years of butter-smooth New Wave hit after hit. He covers a lot of ground and musical styles but they all end up sounding very Bryan Ferry. This is a near classic of the genre. 4.5

https://open.spotify.com/album/1qPdwK9Ew939DdtkACLMvD?si=ZPx_AfNpQ7eHCR5w9YJ0YQ

The 1985 Listening Post - Bryan Ferry - Boys and Girls

Bryan Ferry - Boys and Girls

#200

June 3 1985

Bryan Ferry

Boys and Girls

Genre: SynthPop

4.25 out of 5

Highlights:

Sensation

Slave to Love

Stone Woman

Does Bryan Ferry get the kudos he deserves? I don’t think so. I think he gets forgotten in David Bowie’s wake and I think he’s a better singer and has a more solid finger on the pulse of sensual AOR. And maybe that’s why he doesn’t. He’s making music to drink wine to or have a communal experience in the desert. He’s not pushing the form into new areas as much as he’s deepening those that already exist (and that he helped create!)

This album is hypnotic and very obviously deftly made, look at that damned pedigree! Like most of Ferry’s work it’s human but from the outside. The core is…not empty…just not warm. He doesn’t seem like a person I’d want in my family. But I enjoy his music. 

If you loved Roxy Music’s Avalon, you will love this. This is almost Avalon II.

https://music.apple.com/us/album/boys-and-girls/724305502

Listening Post: Roxy Music - Avalon

Roxy Music - Avalon - 1982

Just how influential was Avalon? Besides being the crowning achievement of the New Romantic movement that Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry started, it is also the flashpoint for just about every other band of the era that is associated with the movement. The Psychedelic Furs, Echo and the Bunneymen, Simple Minds, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet even Qarterflash and Romeo Void and Yaz, just to name a few. Most of them were already recording already but there's no doubt they all count Roxy as an influence. And this is Roxy Music's salvo of relevance.
The white soul of the title track calls to mind every single John Hughes movie or John Hughes moment you ever lived. It doesn't matter if it was featured in St. Elmo's Fire, or Breakfast Club or About Last Night or She's Having a Baby or not. THIS is the music that, when played, immediately transports you back to a time. The sounds are clean, the spaces between (The title of the second track!) are as important as notes themselves. Never had Ferry and Eno sounded to similar and so disparate. What Eno was investigating with music deconstruction Ferry was incorporating into listenability and pop. Just to prove he can, Ferry dabbles in instrumentals ("India") which lasts about as long as its supposed to, ala Another Green World, and then gives over to the lamentation of "While My Heart is Still Beating".
And that opener! "More Than This". Why isn't THAT played at every wedding???
And with the last, eulogic, "Tara", Roxy Music was over. New Romantics had just begun to hold sway and they would for a few more years before giving over to...a host of other movements. But can you think of a better way to say goodbye?

If you don't have Avalon in your record collection there's no way you can really say you're a fan of the 80s. Or music.

Grade: A+
ASide: Avalon, More Than This
BlindSide: Take a Chance with Me

Listening Post: Roxy Music - Country Life

Roxy Music - Country Life - 1974

There's no way I was going to look back at Brian Eno's solo work without taking a good hard look again at one of the most important New Wave records from his old band, Roxy Music. I've never heard the band WITH Brian Eno just with Bryan Ferry so I have no frame of reference. Country Life is considered one of the seminal works of the second British Invasion, right? (it also has the benefit of the greatest album cover a teenager could hope for in 1974 (there it is, again! 1974. Wow, what an amazing year!)

From the outset with "Thrill of It All" there's no way anyone would mistake this for a Brian Eno led band. In fact, I would say that David Bowie's LATER 80s music owes much to this record. As do a number of new romantics. Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, Psychedelic Furs, Culture Club, so many others, this is their template.
For the most part, Country Life is a pretty, well produced, easy pop rock record. It occasionally gets a little treacly like on "out of the Blue" but I think much of that is due to Ferry's unctuous, slippery voice. Only Tony Hadley of Spandau Ballet could out lounge him in the era. One gets the feeling that Ferry would be more comfortable in docksiders without socks and Izod shirts. That doesn't mean the music isn't great, it means that just as the teeth begin to bite in a song, he's there to make sure the rip is clean and that when you die, it's from exsanguination not from the pain of the bite.
The second side of Country life is the more experimental, darker, british side, opening with the almost somnabulant "Bitter-Sweet" and following it the sad harpsichord led "Triptych" and devolving into the libertine "Casanova". It's great that you can choose like this, almost two different albums or eps. I prefer side one, but the Resident/Romeo Void part of me loves the second side.

Grade: A
ASide: Thrill of it All, Prairie Rose
BlindSide: All I Want is You, Bitter-Sweet