Roxy Music On Track

Michael Kulikowski's day job is teaching about ancient Rome as the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Classics at Penn State University, USA. He is the author of academic books and articles, as well as Imperial Triumph (2016) and Imperial Tragedy (2019), which are written for the general reader and narrate the history of ancient Rome from its height around AD 100 to the end of the western empire in the fifth century. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books and has been listening obsessively to Roxy Music for forty years.

In ten short years, Roxy Music made two of the most experimental albums in popular music history and one of the most smoothly romantic. Conceived by Bryan Ferry at the turn of the 1970s, the band released its first album, Roxy Music, to wide acclaim in 1972 and swiftly followed up with the ground-breaking single 'Virginia Plain'. Ferry, Andy Mackay, and Phil Manzanera remained Roxy's core players over seven more albums, in three distinct phases. The debut and For Your Pleasure (1973) featured all manner of electronic weirdness from Brian Eno, while Stranded (1973), Country Life (1974), and Siren (1975) marked the peak of Ferry's songwriting and struck a delicate balance between edgy art and gorgeous craft. Finally, Manifesto (1979), Flesh + Blood (1980), and Avalon (1982), the last two without powerhouse founding drummer Paul Thompson, framed Ferry's tales of doomed romance within a sophisticated wash of sound that used the studio itself as an instrument. The members of Roxy Music have had long and distinguished careers outside the band, but nothing can surpass the eight albums they made together. This book tells the musical story of this most enigmatic of British bands.