The Glam's All Here
It's been a long, strange trip for glam art-rockers and Picnic headliners Roxy Music. In an exclusive interview ahead of their long-awaited return to Ireland they talk about taking tea with Salvador Dali, being 'shafted' by Jethro Tull and gush about their love for Godspeed You Black Emperor.
Peter Murphy, 02 Sep 2010
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."
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