The Glam's All Here

Anyone who doubts Roxy Music's ability to deliver the goods 40 years down the line is advised to Google the band's recent two-song set on the final Friday Night With Jonathan Ross show. It's not so much that 'Virginia Plain' and 'Love Is The Drug' haven't dated – they still, against all odds, sound positively extra-terrestrial.

"It's strange isn't it?" chuckles Roxy guitarist Phil Manzanera. "I think maybe it's to do with the fact that technology wasn't as advanced as it is now with computers and everything. When you're constructing the songs you go in and just play together in a room. A lot of music recorded in the '60s and '70s that was done that way still sounds good. All those Tamla records sound fantastic. It's like a craft: you work at it, but in a really human way. A lot of the recording now is done to click tracks and on Pro Tools, digital recording, and it's almost like you're not capturing a moment.
“But definitely there's something about the longevity of the sound of those recordings. It's just a combination of five or six idiosyncratic people, making mistakes or accidents, trying to improve, but together it all added up to something more than the individual parts. We created a musical context, a musical world for Bryan (Ferry)'s lyrics, things that he wanted to get across, and in that it was quite different from songs written in a traditional way, like McCartney and Lennon.”
Indeed, Bono and Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols still refer to 'Virginia Plain' on Top Of The Pops as a sort of lightning bolt moment.
“Whenever I see it, it looks pretty intense,” says Roxy saxophonist and oboist Andy Mackay. “Top Of The Pops was such a ghastly programme – they seemed to select people especially for their inability to dance and then sort of push them around the studio, so they always looked confused. We were quite lucky to get on, I think it was a good push, because the single had just crept into the Top 10. It's still very flattering when people like Bono come up to us and say how much they like what we've done. Simon LeBon came up to us in London, and Bowie will come to our concerts when he's around."
The late '60s arts lab environment that spawned acts like Roxy and Bowie was another crucial factor. Here was a germ culture that facilitated the incorporation of avant garde film, fashion, art, design, theatre and literature. It was this intense curiosity that forged groundbreaking albums like the band's eponymous debut For Your Pleasure.
"That was definitely the legacy of the second half of the '60s,” Phil concedes, “the breaking down of barriers. It was just down to the imagination of the musicians, a lot of them who came from an art school background, or had a visual dimension to their art, and would want to incorporate some of that. It was defining the difference of the youth culture by what you wear, what you have on your walls, the music you listen to, and obviously going to festivals. That's still with us.”
"I have to say that tradition does carry on more with what would be called post-rock bands who are trying to incorporate unusual instruments and different kinds of influences," adds Andy, "but mainstream pop and rock does go a bit straighter I think. Arcade Fire are coming out now as kind of mainstream, and I was always a big Godspeed You Black Emperor fan."
The visual aesthetic was also crucial. Roxy Music looked like they'd been beamed from another dimension, a retro-futurist '50s (as in 2050s) manifesto in gold lame. Eno alone looked like he'd wandered out of a Martian diner.
"We did – as we still do – work on our own image or appearance," admits Andy. "There was always a feeling that someone was somehow behind us, whether it was Anthony Price or Bryan, but it didn't really work like that. To be honest, even on this current bout of tours, I don't think any of us discussed what we would wear on stage, and we'd usually end up having complimentary outfits.
“In the early days it was a mixture of exuberance and nerves. I'd only just started standing on stage playing music. Until then I was playing classical music with a sheet of music in front of me, playing the dots. And suddenly being on stage you just had to have some sort of prop really. I couldn't have gone on in jeans and a working shirt and sat and played the blues because I would have been too nervous. It helped to actually have the shiny lurex space colony look. Eno was always very nervous. Bryan Ferry was terribly nervous in the early days. It was difficult to get him into the middle of the stage, he used to prefer to play the pianette at the side. We evolved fairly quickly in that first year."
The extraordinary thing about the late '60s/early '70s London scene was how closely knit that community of musicians was. Presumably Phil and Andy were running into folk like Syd Barrett and Bowie on a regular basis?
Phil: "Well, the thing is, when I was 16 I met Dave Gilmour through a friend of my brother's, he was literally just joining the Floyd, and he was living in the same block of flats as Syd. Also Robert Wyatt was a friend of a friend at school, and Soft Machine were playing the Roundhouse, the Beatles were turning up. I saw Hendrix at one of his first appearances at the Saville Theatre, which was owned by The Beatles. There was him, an Australian band and The Who, in a tiny theatre."
Any particularly surreal moments he can recall from the Warhol collage that is Roxy's history?
Phil: "One of the most surreal things was having tea with Salvador Dali in his suite at the Meurice Hotel in Paris, all of us. There's a great picture of it. The girl on the cover of For Your Pleasure was Amanda Lear, who was Salvador Dali's girlfriend, who then got us invited inside this strange little sitting room where he insisted we all sit and have a cup of tea. He had his trademark cane and trousers and black jacket. All the furniture was covered in sort of fabric snakes, and we had to sit on them. So that was literally surreal! At the time I was like 22."
"That was quite strange," recalls Andy. "And our first tour of America threw up some very, very strange things. It was a disaster really, we were booked as a support band onto bills that were absolutely wrong for us. We played support at Madison Square Garden to Jethro Tull, and all of our equipment went wrong, it was all dodgy old synthesizers and experimental things that Eno had put together. The few people in the audience that remained there just talked all the way through. Jethro Tull actually rather shafted us by not giving us a proper soundcheck.
“And then you'd emerge in some town and find girls turning up unexpectedly in pillbox hats with nets over their faces, and all the closet queens would be out in their tuxedos and glam clothes – this would happen in the weirdest industrial towns, in the Ruhr in Germany or else in Akron, Ohio, which still have this big tradition of loving experimental English music. So you never knew quite what to expect. It could be indifference or wild enthusiasm.
"Having said that, we had a very bizarre gig at the Fuji Rock Festival a couple of weeks ago, where there was a tropical rainstorm all through our set, 80 degrees, 100% humidity, and some of the biggest mosquitos I've ever seen. We walked through the mist and gloom with umbrellas and suddenly we're on this very big stage with a lot of people huddled under capes. And the Japanese audience don't react very much, they tend to clap at the end. I had no idea whether we were doing well or badly. All the keys on my saxes stuck because it was so damp... but the reaction at the end was really good."
Phil: "One of the high points of my career was working with Bob Dylan in 1991, rehearsing with him for a week. He was very interesting, he knew what he wanted. I think he thought I was actually Mexican or something, he was asking me if I knew all these Tex Mex songs from 1948 or '49 that he wanted to play. We were going out to play live all over America and no one knew what he was going to play. I got Richard Thompson to come help us out, and we looked to him going, 'What chords are you playing? What song is this?' And we're already in front of people! Wonderful really, but chaotic. The looks on our faces: Jack Bruce is on bass going, 'What's the next chord!' There've been lots of experiences like that, really as a result of randomly ending up in Roxy Music. I was brought up in South America, in Cuba and Venezuela, and here I am now 40 years later. It's incredible."
And so to the business of Roxy Music's forthcoming Electric Picnic set. How will the band reconcile material from seminal early albums with the plush confections of Manifesto, Flesh And Blood and Avalon?
Phil: “That is the problem really. We've only done seven gigs and we've got 78 songs to choose from!”
Andy: "I think we're opening with 'Remake/Remodel' and then early ones like 'Ladytron' and 'Out Of The Blue', but 'More Than This' is fairly high up in the set order too. Alas, we weren't doing 'Avalon' on the last shows, but I hope we'll be doing it by the time we get to Ireland. There's no doubt the earlier stuff steams along. There's a lot going on on top, but the basic beats and chords are really quite simple. When we get into the later, more studio-produced stuff it is harder. We've never really been able to do 'Angel Eyes'. We've rehearsed quite a few numbers like 'Sentimental Fool' and 'Oh Yeah', which I'd like to get back in. But the shape of the set is good, it goes up to 'A Song For Europe', and the second half tends to be a sequence of singles. 'Do The Strand' is always a great number to do last."
Phil: "We're thinking about it every bloody day. Let's see what happens by the time we get to Electric Picnic."