Roxy Music's Avalon

Simon A. Morrison

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501355363
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique

Having designed Roxy Music as an haute couture suit hand-stitched of punk and progressive music, Bryan Ferry redesigned it. He made Roxy Music ever dreamier and mellower-reaching back to sadly beautiful chivalric romances. Dadaist (punk) noise exited; a kind of ambient soft soul entered. Ferry parted ways with Eno, electric violinist Eddie Jobson, and drummer Paul Thompson, foreswearing the broken-sounding synthesizers played by kitchen utensils, the chance-based elements, and the maquillage of previous albums. The production and engineering imposed on Avalon confiscates emotion and replaces it with an acoustic simulacrum of courtliness, polished manners, and codes of etiquette. The seducer sings seductive music about seduction, but decorum is retained, as amour courtois insists. The backbeat cannot beat back nostalgia; it remains part of the architecture of Avalon, an album that creates an allusive sheen. Be nostalgic, by all means, but embrace that feeling's falseness, because nostalgia-whether inspired by medieval Arthuriana or 1940s film noir repartee or a 1980s drug-induced high-deceives. Nostalgia defines our fantasies and our (not Ferry's) essential artifice.

Notes

On Modernism

1.John Donohue, “Night Life,” New Yorker, June 4, 2015, www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/cultural-clicks-caitlyn-jenners-predecessors-bryan-ferrys-new-video.

2.It is instructive to compare Ferry’s songs with the more sensual, somber ones by Poulenc discussed by Alex Ross in “Francis Poulenc’s Drunken Angels,” New Yorker, August 10, 2020, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/17/francis-poulencs-drunken-angels.

3.Adrian Glick Kudler, “A Totally Incomplete History of Trouble at the Chateau Marmont,” Curbed, July 30, 2019, https://la.curbed.com/2013/6/26/10227258/chateau-marmont-hotel-history-deaths.

4.As defined by Timothy D. Taylor, “Performance and Nostalgia on the Oldies Circuit,” in Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices, ed. Karin Bijsterveld and José van Dijck (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009).

5.Juline Costa provides an example in her cover of Ferry’s cover of “You Are My Sunshine”: YouTube video, 2:45, November 1, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2fh8vqXip8.

6.The phrase, ironically, was not coined by Pound. It is from Confucianism and the scholarship of Chu Hsi. See Ezra Pound, Ta Hio: The Great Learning (Seattle: University of Washington Book Store, 1928).

7.Michael Bracewell, Re-make/Re-model: Becoming Roxy Music (Boston: Da Capo, 2008), passim, 330–1.

8.The French title is La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (1923); it’s also called Le Grand Verre or The Large Glass.

9.The literature on Duchamp (and this particular work) is vast, but for an introduction, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “The Large Glass Seen Anew: Reflections of Contemporary Science and Technology in Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Hilarious Picture,’ ” Leonardo 32, no. 2 (1999): 113–26.

10.Stephen Holden, “Bryan Ferry Portrays Darkness of Romance,” Chicago Tribune, August 11, 1988, www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1988-08-11-8801220148-story.html.

11.Simon Philo, Glam Rock: Music in Sound and Vision (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), 63.

12.Jonathan Rigby, Roxy Music: Both Ends Burning (Richmond, UK: Reynolds and Hearn, 2005); David Buckley, The Thrill of It All: The Story of Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music (London: Deutsch, 2004); Paul Stump, Unknown Pleasures: A Cultural Biography of Roxy Music (London: Quartet Books, 1998).

13.The following information is from Michael Hamilton, “Going Back to His Roots: BF Talks to Michael Hamilton on North East Life,” Bryan Ferry’s official website, November 20, 2009, http://bryanferry.com/roots/.

14.Studio One archive.

15.Mitchell Morris, “Lists of Louche Living: Music in Cole Porter’s Social World,” in A Cole Porter Companion, ed. Don M. Randel, Matthew Shaftel, and Susan Forshcher Weiss (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 84.

16.“Bryan Ferry,” World of Harmonica (blog), August 14, 2012, http://worldofharmonica.blogspot.com/2012/08/bryan-ferry.html.

17.Sarah Larson, “Instrumental Ferry,” New Yorker, March 4, 2013, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/11/instrumental-ferry.

18.Jeremy Allen, “Roxy Music: 10 of the Best,” Guardian, February 25, 2015, www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2015/feb/25/roxy-music-10-of-the-best. “Cocaine avarice” likely refers to the yuppie culture and middle-class excesses of Thatcher-era Britain.

19.Andrew Gaerig, “On Second Thought: Roxy Music; Avalon,” Stylus, September 17, 2007, http://stylusmagazine.com/articles/on_second_thought/roxy-music-avalon.html.

20.Réginald-Jérôme de Mans, “A Hall of Famer,” No Man Walks Alone, July 1, 2019, https://nomanwalksalone.com/newsroom/a-hall-of-famer.

21.Taylor Parkes, “An Unsettling Creation: Bryan Ferry Interviewed by Taylor Parkes,” Quietus, November 13, 2014, https://thequietus.com/articles/16665-bryan-ferry-interview.

22.Patrick Gale, Friendly Fire: A Novel (New York: Open Road, 2016), 3.

23.Ian Buruma, “The Invention of David Bowie,” New York Review of Books, May 23, 2013, www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/05/23/invention-david-bowie/.

24.The aviator’s uniform was for a 1975 video of “Love Is the Drug.” The patch was real; he injured his eye walking into a door.

25.David Bowie, “Without You (2018 Remaster),” YouTube video, 3:09, August 15, 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXoD5Gz-Aak.

On Avalon

1.Ian Little, future producer of Duran Duran, was involved in the design of the studio, which was called “Gallery” at the time and is now called “Songphonic.”

2.Sam Inglis, “Recording and Remixing Roxy Music’s Avalon: Rhett Davies and Bob Clearmountain,” Sound on Sound, August 2003, www.soundonsound.com/people/recording-remixing-roxy-musics-avalon.

3.Bryan Reesman, “Looking for ‘Avalon’: Bryan Ferry Talks about His Past, Present, and Future,” Goldmine 33, no. 20...