The Necessary Artifice - Roxy Music and the collapse of modernism (1971/1974)

On August 24, 1972, when Roxy Music appeared on Top of the Pops for the first time, the British public was confronted with an anomaly: a band that seemed to have arrived onstage fully formed, without having gone through the usual years of apprenticeship. Space-age costumes, flamboyant makeup, a sound that fused the crooning of the 1950s with the electronic shrieks of the VCS3. This was no accident. It was the result of an intellectual approach born in Britain's Art Schools, where Bryan Ferry, a student of Pop Art pioneer Richard Hamilton, and Brian Eno, a self-proclaimed "non-musician," had learned to treat rock music as a plastic material. This essay traces, album by album and song by song, the three most radical years in Roxy Music's history: the sonic and cinematic collage of their self-titled debut; the conceptual darkness of For Your Pleasure and its satire of consumer society; the emotional song cycle of Stranded, which leads from the modern city toward a search for spiritual meaning; and the unstable balance of Country Life between worldliness and mysticism. Each song is examined in detail: its imagery, its references to cinema, painting, literature and mythology, and its role within the architecture of the album.