POLLing and turning, how can I sleep?: The Roxy Music & Bryan Ferry Results Thread

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HoDeR8aov4c/UPkkaDbFZsI/AAAAAAAAALM/TTNHpWyXqzY/s1600/Roxy%2BMusic.png

after what feels like an epic couple of weeks of listening, campaigning, and voting, i'm thrilled to be at the helm to roll out your TOP 40 ROXY MUSIC & BRYAN FERRY tracks.

43 ballots were received in total, 28 of which mentioned album covers. bravo everyone for your contributions, and also for making the ballot thread such a blast!

i hope you enjoy what's in store.

let's kick off with our TOP 5 ALBUM COVERS, shall we? then i'll reappear after some rest for tracks 40-30.

http://files.myopera.com/rato53/albums/69018/RoxyMusic.JPG

5. Roxy Music
18 points (9 votes)

that's a good start

too low

TOO LOW

http://www.carteblanche-x.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/roxy-8.jpg

4. Siren
19 points (11 votes)

^ that truly is a great one

Jerry Hall'ss makeup melted from the heat, reportedly.

When I was about 19 I spent a weekend away in Newcastle with a girl. We borrowed her father's flat in Jesmond, which was ground floor with a room in the basement. When I went exploring I found a pile of LPs in that room, prize among which were Dare by the Human League, and Siren. What a aleeve, what a record. That image! That trident!

I spent pretty much the entire weekend holed up alone downstairs with those two, playing the hell out of them.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/81eh-NQOAqL._SL1300_.jpg

3. Flesh + Blood
20 points (10 votes)

I adore it, but I do get irrationally annoyed that the lowest spear isn't quite parallel with the top two.

that's a pretty special way to be introduced to Siren, Ismael.

i have memories of being about five or six years old and being completely infatuated with the cover of Let's Stick Together, which my parents owned on vinyl.

xpost Well, her eyes are aiming somewhere else.

yeah, i can look past the directions of the arrows, because i tend to follow the gazes when i look at this cover.

Siren cover TOO LOW

http://www.soundstation.dk/images/products/large/85/125685-b.jpg

2. For Your Pleasure
30 points (13 votes)

I can't get with this one; too much black, too indistinct. itt: Ismael not reading the signs, though.

would have been so much better if the left panel was the front cover

http://www.carteblanche-x.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/roxy-7.jpg

1. Country Life
33 points (16 votes)

Best sleeve ever imo

lol nathey, true, the left panel is amazing!

Ismael, it is pretty spectacular, huh. i used to see it record stores before i was a Roxy fan and be in awe of it. for a long time i thought the women were actually lying down.

Was fashion photography like that before, or has its last four decades been an extended Country Life tribute?

Um, I think we're missing one

http://musicglue-wordpress-bryan-ferry.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Another-time-another-place4.jpg

I imagine Helmut Newton might have been an influence. (Manifesto was robbed BTW.)
xp

sorry about the size of the Flesh + Blood picture by the way (though it does come to life in quite a spectacular way when enhanced to those dimensions).

http://www.salsalipm.com/media/thumbnail/spotlight-image/522dc6fdcc91c11aec9df89090c4050a/20121118_BF-Another-Time-Another-Place.jpg

I mean, come on

i'm off to sleep now. songs will commence in about 8 hrs.

AT, AP came in seventh place for the record, after Stranded (most raunchy in my opinion) and Avalon.

surprised by For Your Pleasure's ranking.

this is the one thread where photographs should be as large as possible

the more i stare at it, the more the left panel really delivers re. FYP

haha, glad to hear Iago

Are there Roxy singles sleeves of note? I've never seen one, and in fact it only occurred to me when somebody posted a Thrill Of It All image yesterday.

Not this one

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/65/Do_the_Strand_cover.jpg

sorry, meant to say just before that Another Time, Another Place came in at 8th place.

haha, yeah that Do the Strand sleeve is an all-round clunker.

haha what the hell is Ferry holding there

http://www.londonlee.com/chipshop/chippics/rmcover4.jpg

wow! is that a 45 sleeve??

wow, that's awesome

Very surprised Avalon didn't make the top five. It was my number one.

xps just an outtake

it looks like the photo-shoot from which the cover painting was made

I have to say I struggled to come up with 3 covers I actually like for this poll. Contrary to perhaps most ppl itt, I don't think Ferry has good taste (or a good eye) at all!

Part of the reason Country Life works is that there wasn't much if any pre-planning for the photo. I do like the For Your Pleasure cover a lot, but largely for the reasons Ismael doesn't. The photo sleepingsignal posted does nothing for me.

Voted for those two and, after much dithering, plumped for Taxi as my #3.

beggars belief that the crappy 'do the strand' cover is same photoshoot (& principle, sort of) as FYP gatefold, a roxy image that always always brightens my day.

some info on the country life cover

it's always bugged me that they are wearing identical underwear.

^ not actually true. If you look closely, the woman on the right isn't actually wearing a bra.

lol. panties then.

^ how you should start every meeting

Very surprised Avalon didn't make the top five. It was my number one.
--Kitchen Person

Mine too. I expected Country Life to take it but IMO Avalon is their best. So moody and evocative, even with tongue in cheek.

thankin u for that. seeing him in a week and now even more stoked.

Not sure where to put this. Article on EG founder David Enthoven's funeral had this great passage on the Roxy/Crimson nexus:

The congregation included Robert Fripp, the founder the founder of King Crimson, and all five surviving members of Roxy Music from the sessions for the band’s debut album in the summer of 1972: Brian Eno, Bryan Ferry, Andy Mackay, Phil Manzanera and Paul Thompson, who came down for the funeral from Newcastle, where he now plays the drums with Lindisfarne.

One of the morning’s pleasures, over which the man in whose memory we were gathered would certainly have shared a chuckle, was the sight of Fripp, Eno and Ferry (so much history there, from Ferry’s failed audition for King Crimson to Fripp and Eno’s collaboration on No Pussyfooting and beyond) joining the singing of “All Things Bright and Beautiful”. You don’t get that every day.

Peter Buck and Corin Tucker's new project just dropped a fun, faithful cover of "Editions of You." Corin's Ferry-isms are really entertaining. (starts at 3:17 mark)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkI1SsQ0Up8

Even the gods become mortal on occasion.

I like "Trash". But I might like any song with the word trash in it.

Suede's "Trash."

There are worse songs than "My Only Love" on Flesh and Blood.

I almost threw "Rain Rain Rain" on there

Not many tho

X post, referring to My Only Love.

you people are nuts - manzanera’s work on “my only love” is sublime

The problem isn’t Phil, it’s that his solo comes in after I’ve nodded off four times and taken two trips to the loo. The song is interminable.

I love the wounded romantic Rodgers and Hart-isms of "One Kiss."

Here's my least-loved Ferry tracks, in chronological order starting from the 80s. The 70s records, while not always great, are attractive enough for their sound alone to rank higher than these:

"Jealous Guy"
"The Chosen One"
"Seven Deadly Sins"
"The Name of the Game"
"Don't Want To Know"
"Wildcat Days"
"Make You Feel My Love"
"All Along the Watchtower"
"Driving Me Wild"
"Send In the Clowns"

I adore "The Name of the Game," basically his "Live to Tell."

The moment where he lowers his voice for the second verse, "Out in the cold/in the wilderness again/Where I fight for my soul/I can see no end" never fails.

To me it's a faceless lighter-waver. I like "My Only Love", though! And "NYC" gets a pass on account of including the word "topiary" in the lyrics.

That's a rather subdued, echo-y song to wave a lighter to!

heh I said the same thing about "NYC."

Given its prominence on the reunion tours, I think at least one of Ferry/Mackay/Manzanera, if not all three, have a fondness for “My Only Love”

The verses of "Name of the Game" are OK, the choruses are where the bombast comes in.
Actually I like the little piano melody in the bridge, maybe it's not so bad. Substitute "No Strange Delight" or "Over You".

Me too -- it's the part that most reminds me of "Live to Tell."

I'll take "Day for Night" as my Ferry-does-Madonna pick.

I love it. Another solid keyboard break too. Maybe a minute too long in the last third.

Ferry published Lyrics last year. Even before reading it, I was touched to see that the book title is written in the same font as he used on the cover of the first Roxy Music album; he hasn't forgotten or abandoned his roots!

Some thoughts after reading it cover-to-cover:
- the switch from highly-specific, referent-thick words to elusive, vague ones (starting around Flesh and Blood) is less dramatic than I thought; certainly the density of the words thins out, but there's still striking imagery that gets lost in the swirl of the music
- the later lyrics almost all adhere to very precise rhythmic phrasings and scan as if words have been dropped in to fit the metre
- most of the lyrics to the Mamouna album are straight-up automatic-Ferry word-spew garbage, definitely his worst set; Avonmore is just dull by comparison
- for a writer who's regarded as specializing in glamour, urbanity and events taking place indoors, he uses a whole lot of nature imagery, some of it quite startling; not all of it can be explained away as a writer who is just trying to stick to archetypes

I noticed only a couple of typos in the text (one of the German lines in "Bitter Sweet" is omitted). They misspell Ferry's name on the publishing credits page though.

As far as I could tell, these are the only original lyrics (from released songs) omitted from the book:

As the World Turns (b-side of "This is Tomorrow")
Four Letter Love (b-side of "Sign of the Times")
Going Strong (recorded by Roger Daltrey in 1984)
Help Me (from The Fly; lyrics might be written by Nile Rodgers)
Is Your Love Strong Enough (from Legend)
The Way You Do (recorded by Frida in 1982)

The book also underlines how his productivity as a writer declined after 1987:

Mamouna: 7 years in the making, 10 sets of lyrics
Frantic: 8 years, 7 lyrics
Olympia: 8 years, 8 lyrics
Avonmore: 4 years, 8 lyrics - but apparently nothing in the 9 years since

Mamouna doesn't have any more spewage than Bete Noir or B+G

But, yeah, I don't get the point of owning lyrics. Are you supposed to study them like Donne or something?

You are supposed to descant aloud in melancholic fashion while pondering the sunset standing by your swimming pool. (Book in one hand, drink in the other.)

Even THAT defeats me.

I don't get the point of owning lyrics.

It's for times like this, when you'd sit at home and reminisce!

Mamouna doesn't have any more spewage than Bete Noir or B+G

But he'd lost or abandoned any attempt to make the individual lyrics coherent, either intellectually or emotionally, in stuff like "39 Steps", "Gemini Moon", "Don't Want to Know".

The most charming pretension of the book is an index of first lines; second most charming pretension is a string attached to the binding to use as a bookmark.

The most elegantly sexy lyric collection to have on your coffee table.

I quite disagree about "The 39 Steps." I like how the verse can go either existential ("Where do we go from here?") or practical ("Your place or mine?"). There's also that neat chord change for the middle eight.

Happy birthday, old boy!

Phil Manzanera has already told the story about Jay-Z and that schmuck who shall remain nameless sampling the title track to Manzanera's 1978 solo LP K-Scope. In 2015, he said he hadn't been paid yet but was owed "six figures plus, which is more than I've made in the past 15 years with Roxy."

Either he was misheard or that number kept on growing because in his upcoming memoir, he says it ended up making him more money than everything he made from his entire 50+ years with Roxy Music.

Did he get paid?

I think so. I only read the excerpt that was published in a newspaper, but that seemed to be the implication.

He actually uploaded a snapshot of the article.

IG upload has better resolution when you zoom in.

He must've been paid, he's so effusive with gratitude and it's been so long by this point. Worth reading, there's more amusing details to the story.

I didn't expect him to disclose the figure but I'd love to know it anyway.

great article. i've seen 88 keys in plenty of kanye production credits but didn't realize that his main role was to source samples from vinyl released between 1975-1979. fun job!

Roxy Music are one of my top 5 all-time bands but I don't think I've ever read any books about them... what is there that is worth reading? iirc there isn't any all-encompassing biography?

Not much. David Buckley's 2005 The Thrill of It All: The Story of Bryan Ferry & Roxy Music, solid of its kind, is worth reading.

That the three principals rank among the most reticent members of any seminal band doesn't help matters.

I ask because it seems notable that Manzanera is putting out a book.

Michael Bracewell's Re-make, re-model : becoming Roxy Music is a fascinating pre-history of the band, but it literally ends in 1972. I enjoyed it but not everyone wants to read 10 pages about Ferry's hairdresser or his job as a tailor's assistant.

the three principals rank among the most reticent members of any seminal band

Manzanera participated in the recent 33 1/3 book about Avalon, but don't remember any particularly striking details.

Maybe he saved them for his own book!

...lots of eagerly anticipated gossip about James Wraith.

There's a terrible one published in the late '90s or so that I read about 20 years ago; it's suffused with ponderousness. I can't remember the title.

Ah! It's Unknown Pleasures: A Cultural Biography of Roxy Music . Must to avoid.

I think I have that one, but never finished it.

"Unknown Pleasures?" Wow.

That Bracewell book is a best-ever rock book IMO