ROXY MUSIC

Random and bite-sized facts on all things from the mythical figures that made up Roxy Music. Totally random but totally fascinating if you're into it. Do you know Roxy Music now?

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Roxy Music
Bryan Ferry advertised for a keyboard player to join his new band — Andy Mackay showed up instead, a saxophonist and oboist who happened to own a synthesizer. Mackay then ran into an old university friend, Brian Eno, on the London Underground — recruiting him purely because he owned a reel-to-reel tape machine. Eno was meant only as a technical advisor; within weeks, he was a full performing member. 🎷🚇

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Roxy Music
Guitarist Phil Manzanera actually failed his own audition for Roxy Music, losing out to David O'List — so he joined instead as road manager and assistant sound engineer, quietly learning every song just in case his moment came. It did: he became the band's guitarist soon after. The band's original name was simply "Roxy," inspired by Ferry's love of old movie theatres. 🎸🎬

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Roxy Music
"Virginia Plain" was written and recorded with no rehearsal at all — Manzanera recalled: "Bryan played us these three incredibly simple chords on the piano, and we just started messing around with it there and then." The famous lyric "took a deal to Robert E. Lee" isn't about the Confederate general — it's a literal reference to the band's own real-life lawyer at Island Records, who shared the name. 🎹⚖️

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Roxy Music
Despite becoming their breakthrough hit, "Virginia Plain" wasn't even written when their debut album was released — it was recorded weeks later, purely at Island Records' request for a single. The band felt so strongly it wasn't a proper "singles band" statement that neither it nor its follow-up, "Pyjamarama," ever appeared on either of their first two studio albums. 💿🎹

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Roxy Music
Amanda Lear, the model on For Your Pleasure's cover, was already a genuine cultural figure before meeting Bryan Ferry — confidante and muse to Salvador Dalí, and her earlier relationship with Brian Jones inspired The Rolling Stones' 1967 song "Miss Amanda Jones." She and Ferry began dating shortly after the shoot. 🐆🎨

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Roxy Music
The black panther on For Your Pleasure's cover was so heavily sedated during the South London photoshoot that it could barely stand — its eyes and teeth had to be added digitally in post-production to make it look alert. 🐆📸

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Roxy Music
Before appearing on Stranded's cover, model Marilyn Cole was working a £12-a-week job at a Portsmouth Co-op coal yard. Within a few years she became Playboy's first Playmate of the Year to feature full-frontal nudity, the only British woman ever to hold that title, and later married Playboy executive Victor Lownes. 🐆📸

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Roxy Music
Stranded became Roxy Music's first-ever UK #1 album — recorded after the rest of the band learned of Brian Eno's departure only upon returning to the studio to find Eddie Jobson in his place. It was also the first Roxy album Bryan Ferry didn't write entirely alone, with Mackay and Manzanera contributing songs for the first time. 🎹🔀

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Roxy Music
On Roxy Music's only-ever UK #1 single, Bryan Ferry swapped out the expected guitar solo for a whistling solo instead — a skill dating back to his childhood paper round, when he used to whistle constantly on his rounds as a boy. 🎶🎸

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Roxy Music
"Love Is the Drug" began life as an untitled Andy Mackay instrumental — Bryan Ferry wrote its lyrics while walking through Hyde Park, kicking through fallen leaves. It became Roxy Music's highest-ever charting single in the US, reaching #30, after the band had long struggled to find an American audience for their art-rock sound. 🍂🎷

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Roxy Music
A video circulating online claiming to be a lost David Bowie recording of "Love Is the Drug" is a fake — it's actually Roxy Music's own original 1975 backing track, with a Bowie impressionist dubbed over the vocals. Roxy Music collectors quickly identified it, noting Bowie was filming The Man Who Fell to Earth in the US at the exact time it was recorded in London. 🎬🕵️

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Roxy Music
"Do the Strand" invented an entire fictional dance craze that never existed — the title borrowed from a 1959 cigarette advertisement's tagline, "You're never alone with a Strand." Bryan Ferry deliberately styled the lyrics after Cole Porter, weaving in Guernica, Lolita and the Mona Lisa — the song itself never actually explains how to dance it. 🚬🎹

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Roxy Music
Decades later, "Do the Strand" found an unexpected second life on television — actor Peter Mullen personally requested the song for his character's dance scene in HBO's Westworld. Co-creator Lisa Joy said simply: "If you're going to ask a wonderful actor to dance, the least you can do is ask him if there's a song he likes to dance to." 📺🕺

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Roxy Music
The entire New Romantic movement — Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Visage, Culture Club — began in London nightclub Billy's, which ran dedicated David Bowie and Roxy Music nights before relocating to the larger Blitz club in 1979. Spandau Ballet's own early sound was directly described as "Roxy Music-inspired robotic art-disco," before they shifted toward Bryan Ferry's later crooner style by 1983. 🕺🎹

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Roxy Music
Before forming Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry auditioned to be King Crimson's vocalist and was rejected — but guitarist Robert Fripp was impressed enough to personally recommend him to David Enthoven, head of EG Management. That connection secured Roxy Music's first record deal, with King Crimson's own Peter Sinfield producing their debut album. 🎹🎸

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When Flesh + Blood appeared in May 1980, Roxy Music sounded noticeably different from the band that had made For Your Pleasure or Country Life. The jagged art-rock experimentation was giving way to something smoother, more controlled and increasingly studio-based.

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There was also a major change behind the drums. Paul Thompson, Roxy's original drummer, broke his thumb in a motorcycle accident before the album was recorded and was unable to take part. He briefly returned for promotional appearances but subsequently left the band, having become increasingly unhappy with the musical direction Bryan Ferry was taking.

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That left Roxy's core as Bryan Ferry, Andy Mackay and Phil Manzanera. They were joined by a selection of additional musicians, including session players who helped create the album's much more polished sound.

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The result was enormously successful. Flesh + Blood spent four weeks at No. 1 in Britain and produced three UK Top 20 singles: Over You, Oh Yeah (On the Radio) and Same Old Scene.

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The album also revealed just how much Roxy Music's relationship with the recording studio had changed. Bryan Ferry later described the Flesh + Blood, Avalon and Boys and Girls period as one in which he worked closely with producer Rhett Davies, combining drum machines with real drummers and building songs from studio grooves.

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Even more revealingly, Ferry once named Flesh + Blood as one of his favourite Roxy Music albums. So although it can sound radically different from the early records, Ferry himself didn't regard the change as a betrayal of what Roxy had been.

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In retrospect, Flesh + Blood is the crucial bridge between the experimental Roxy Music of the 1970s and the atmospheric Avalon of 1982. The band hadn't simply become softer — they had discovered a completely different way of making Roxy Music.

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Roxy Music
The song "Avalon" was originally titled "New Scatter" — engineer Rhett Davies revealed Bryan Ferry would lay down nonsense scat vocals, which the team would then edit together exactly as if they were the finished lyrics: "It might seem stupid that we were comping mumblings, but that is basically what we were doing." The real lyrics and title only emerged in a last-minute burst of inspiration during final mixing at New York's Power Station. 🎤🎹

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Roxy Music
Avalon's dreamlike cover photograph was shot at Lough Ugga Beg in Ireland — the exact lake Bryan Ferry could see from Crumlin Lodge, where he began writing the album's songs while staying with his girlfriend, Lucy Helmore, who he'd marry the following year. 🦅🏞️

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Avalon
Photography — Neil Kirk
Design — Peter Saville
Styling — Antony Price
Model — Lucy Helmore

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Roxy Music
Bassist Gary Tibbs played with Roxy Music from 1978–1981, appearing on Manifesto and Flesh + Blood, before leaving to join Adam and the Ants — a genuinely striking career pivot. He remains the only Roxy Music bassist ever mentioned by name in another band's hit single, immortalised in Adam and the Ants' UK Top 10 track "Ant Rap." 🎸🐜

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Alan Spenner and Neil Jason, credited across different tracks on the album. Gary Tibbs had already left Roxy Music by 1981, joining Adam and the Ants before Avalon was even recorded in 1981–82.

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Avalon, released in 1982, was Roxy Music's eighth and final studio album. It was also their most commercially successful, reaching No. 1 in the UK — so their story didn't end because the band had run out of an audience.

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By this point, however, Roxy Music had changed enormously from the strange, flamboyant art-rock band that had appeared in 1972. Avalon was carefully constructed, atmospheric and increasingly studio-based. Phil Manzanera later recalled that by this stage around 90% of the material was being written in the studio, while Andy Mackay described the recording approach as very different from the band's earlier work.

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Bryan Ferry eventually felt that Roxy had gone as far as it could go. After the long tour supporting Avalon, he didn't want to continue touring. He later explained that he also needed a break from working within a permanent band and wanted the freedom to work with different musicians.

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Manzanera remembered the situation somewhat differently. He felt that Roxy had gradually become more about production than four musicians playing together, and that this had taken away some of what made the band satisfying to him.

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Roxy Music effectively ceased regular activity in 1983. There was no dramatic final studio album or formal musical farewell — Avalon simply became the last record they made together for many years.

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And perhaps fittingly, their final album sounds like a band deliberately arriving somewhere. The wild experimentation of the early Roxy years had evolved into something smoother, darker and more atmospheric. Avalon wasn't the end of Roxy Music because they had stopped being successful. It was the point at which Bryan Ferry felt the journey had reached its natural pause.

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The video for Roxy Music's Avalon looks almost like a dream within a dream. Released in 1982, it was directed by Ridley Scott and Howard Guard and filmed inside the magnificent Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire.

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Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music perform at what appears to be an elegant gathering, but the arrival of a mysterious woman played by actress Sophie Ward gives the whole film an increasingly strange and hypnotic atmosphere.

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The setting is particularly appropriate for a song named after the legendary island associated with King Arthur. The grand interiors, formal costumes and almost unreal lighting turn the performance into something closer to a short fantasy film than a conventional rock video.

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The video also gives us a completely different Avalon from the famous album cover. That photograph was taken by Neil Kirk in Ireland, with Lucy Helmore standing beside Lough Ugga Beag with a Merlin falcon on her gloved hand.

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By this stage Roxy Music were no longer the flamboyant art-rock band of the early 1970s. The music had become slower, more sophisticated and cinematic — and the Avalon video feels like a visual extension of that transformation.

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Roxy Music — Angel Eyes: The First Roxy Music Promo Video

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Angel Eyes occupies a small but important place in Roxy Music history. According to Andy Mackay, it was probably the first Roxy record to receive a video made specifically as a promotional film rather than simply using existing performance footage.

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The video was filmed on 3 August 1979 at the Churches Television Studio in Bushey, Hertfordshire, with William G. Stewart directing.

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The concept came from Bryan Ferry and the band's long-time fashion collaborator Antony Price. Mackay remembered pastel colours, billowing dry ice and two harp players, creating a deliberately whimsical, almost dreamlike version of the song.

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Roxy were still learning how to make music videos, though. Mackay admitted that their perfectionism and lack of filmmaking experience meant they ran short of time and had to piece together different sections to cover the final verse.

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Somehow, the slightly improvised result feels perfectly Roxy Music: elegant, artificial, glamorous and just a little strange.

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Roxy Music — Angel Eyes and the 1980s

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When Roxy Music released Angel Eyes as a single in 1979, they were already moving somewhere new. The original album version was reshaped into a much more dance-oriented recording, anticipating the increasingly electronic and polished sound that would become prominent in the 1980s.

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The single was a substantial hit, reaching No. 4 in Britain. It was also given an extended 12-inch version at a time when the format was beginning to transform club music.

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The accompanying video pushed the same idea visually. Pastel colours, dry ice, harp players and Bryan Ferry's carefully controlled image made it feel less like a conventional rock performance and more like a piece of sophisticated pop theatre.

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Andy Mackay later said he felt the song and its presentation anticipated both the music and style of the decade that followed.

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Roxy Music — When the Angel Eyes Video Ran Out of Time

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Roxy Music's Angel Eyes video sounds as though it was meticulously planned. Pastel colours, dry ice, harp players and Bryan Ferry's immaculate image all fit together perfectly.

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But behind the polished appearance was a surprisingly improvised production.

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Andy Mackay later recalled that the band were inexperienced at making films and were perhaps a little too perfectionist. They didn't have enough time to complete everything as planned, so different pieces had to be edited together to cover the final verse.

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The video was shot on 3 August 1979 at the Churches Television Studio in Bushey, Hertfordshire, with William G. Stewart directing.

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So one of Roxy Music's most elegant early videos was, at least partly, held together in the edit because they ran out of time.

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