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📰 Roxy Meets Dali, Climbs Out On Ledge – Feature : Aug. 1973

  • Writer: Roxy Music
    Roxy Music
  • Aug 1, 1973
  • 3 min read

A colourful, surreal one-page feature in Circus magazine recounts the infamous meeting between Roxy Music and Salvador Dalí in Paris, where the band hoped for artistic inspiration but ended up with a chaotic, disappointing encounter.


The piece blends dry humour with vivid description of the eccentric evening, including a drunken Lloyd Watson climbing out onto a ledge.


This August 1, 1973 Circus article captures Roxy Music at the height of their early art-rock mystique, playfully contrasting their avant-garde image with the absurd reality of meeting one of the 20th century’s greatest surrealists.


🗞 Circus

📅 Date: August 1, 1973

⏱ Length: 6 min read


📰 Key Highlights

• Detailed account of Roxy Music’s much-anticipated meeting with Salvador Dalí in Paris

• The band cruising up to Dalí’s apartment in the Hotel Meurice elevator, only to be disappointed

• Lloyd Watson (Roxy’s friend and opening act) getting drunk and climbing out onto a ledge

• Humorous description of the evening’s anticlimax and the group’s surreal expectations

• Reflection on the clash between Roxy’s art-school theatricality and Dalí’s unpredictable eccentricity


📰 Overview

In the summer of 1973, with Roxy Music riding high on the success of their first two albums and their distinctive glam-art-rock sound, Circus magazine ran this entertaining feature about the band’s much-hyped encounter with Salvador Dalí in Paris. The story perfectly illustrates the collision between 1970s rock theatricality and one of modern art’s most legendary figures.


📰 Source Details

Publication / Venue: Circus

Date: August 1, 1973

Format: One-page feature article

Provenance Notes: Verified directly from the preserved page; large headline “Roxy Meets Dali, Climbs Out On Ledge,” accompanying black-and-white photo of a female model or associate, and dense, witty text columns.


📰 The Story

The article opens with the band’s excited anticipation of meeting Dalí, hoping the encounter would spark creative inspiration. They arrive at the Hotel Meurice, take the elevator to his apartment, and ring the bell — only to be met with surreal disappointment when the meeting fails to live up to expectations.


The evening turns chaotic when Lloyd Watson, Roxy’s friend and support act, gets heavily drunk, delivers flamboyant speeches, and eventually climbs out onto a narrow ledge outside a window. The piece humorously describes the whole affair as an anticlimax, with the band leaving without the profound artistic exchange they had imagined.


The tone is light and self-aware, gently poking fun at both the band’s art-school pretensions and the unpredictable nature of meeting a living legend like Dalí.


📰 Visual Archive

One-page layout with bold headline, several columns of text, and a black-and-white photograph (likely of a model or associate linked to the story) positioned on the left side. Clean, magazine-style design typical of Circus in the early 1970s.


Caption: Roxy Music’s meeting with Salvador Dalí recounted in the Circus magazine feature “Roxy Meets Dali, Climbs Out On Ledge,” August 1, 1973.


📰 Related Material

See tabs at foot of page


📰 Closing Notes

This witty August 1973 Circus feature remains one of the most entertaining anecdotes from Roxy Music’s early career. It humanises the band by showing that even their most ambitious, art-world aspirations could dissolve into absurdity — a perfect illustration of the glamorous chaos that defined the glam-art-rock scene of the early 1970s.



📝 Copyright Notice

All magazine scans, photographs, and original text excerpts referenced in this entry remain the property of their respective copyright holders. This Chronicle entry is a transformative, non-commercial archival summary created for historical documentation and educational reference. No ownership of the original material is claimed or implied.


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