Cover & Four-Page Article: 1973

Roxy's Hollywood to Tomorrow Journey

Published in France in January 1973, Rock & Folk magazine’s cover and four-page feature on Roxy Music carried the headline “From Hollywood to tomorrow, via Bo.”

The article opened with a flashback to Hollywood luxury — a scent of the past, velvet, wall hangings, marble, bronze, statues, and vast sofas, anachronisms of an outdated refinement — at the lounges of the George V Hotel in Paris. This was where the members of Roxy Music — Bryan Ferry, Eno, Andrew Mackay, Phil Manzanera, Paul Thompson, and Rik Kenton — had established their Parisian quarters. It was also there, in this setting they wanted to integrate, that they would try to analyze, before their concert, the

genesis of their music and situate themselves in the vast panorama of rock, which tended more and more to divide into schools and trends (sometimes) totally contradictory.

Article In Full

From Hollywood to tomorrow, via Bo.

Flashback to Hollywood, its luxury. A scent of the past. Velvet, wall hangings, marble, bronze, statues and vast sofas, anachronisms of an outdated refinement: we are in the lounges of the George V Hotel. This is where the members of Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry, Eno, Andrew Mackay, Phil Manzanera, Paul Thompson and Rik Kenton have established their Parisian quarters. It is also there, in this setting in which they want to integrate, that they will try to analyze, before their concert, the genesis of their music, to situate themselves in the vast panorama of rock which tends more and more to divide into schools, trends (sometimes) totally contradictory.

Let us note that there are now audiences, therefore different needs and for this reason groups which by their attitude, their stage bias as much as by their music, bear witness to their time, to the contradictory aspirations of these audiences. Roxy Music is in this respect an exemplary group since it is built in such a way that it carries within it a duality: Bryan Ferry and Eno are intellectuals, dandies and refined who distance their musical proposals, their stage attitudes; Phil Manzanera, Paul Thompson and Rik Kenton are essentially professional rock musicians who bring their musical know-how to the whole; Andrew Mackay, for his part, ensures the link between these two poles which coexist and which thus make the strength of Roxy Music; a duality which makes the seduction of the group "work" on several different levels.

Andrew Mackay wears a high-waisted apple green suit, silver shoes, his hair slicked back with a streak dyed the same colour as his clothes; Bryan Ferry is the refined intellectual, elegant aristocrat; Paul Thompson is at their side, he is more traditionally an "English musician": jacket, boots, almost ill at ease in this setting. More than an interview, it is a conversation that is established, and this on precise themes.

The relationship between painting and music.

Bryan Ferry: "I studied for four years with the best English pop art teacher, and I can say that the difference between visual art and the music that concerns us is very small. There is a very specific force in the way that the great pop artists used elements of popular art, magazines, illustrations, as elementary materials. We use in the same way what can be considered musical equivalents of short pastiches borrowed from musical tradition, particularly from rock of the sixties. So a certain number of the pieces that we compose are like collages of the elements brought together, juxtaposed, and most of them then manage to "work" in a new way. But this is not true for all of our compositions."

Rock culture.

B.F.: << ... Very interested since always and of course, especially, by the rock of the 50s. »

Andrew Mackay: << It starts with Bill Haley and not so much with the English bands of the 50s. None of them were really original. They were just imitating Presley, Buddy Holly and all the American rock. The only band that you can pick out from the crowd is the Shadows. >>>>

B. F.: << Yes, the Shadows played interesting music. Then it was necessary and the rest improvised, otherwise it becomes very "loose". We have to tighten up the musical figures. In fact, the environment is very carefully delimited in advance. When we play "live", it is one of our constant concerns to put the audience in as many different climates as possible. >>>

Voice work. Collage.

B. F.: "I try to sing by varying the intonations of my voice as much as possible, a bit like actors who play different roles in different plays. Each piece that we

Rick Kenton.

Let's Play is, in the same way, for me, like a different play. For some songs I take on an American accent, for others I try to sing them following an English tradition. I play on the widest register to vary my singing as much as possible. >>>>

A. M.: "My way of playing the saxophone is very influenced by Bryan's vocal interpretation. I also try to play with the American accent or the English accent. >>>

Roxy: reference to a certain cinema. B. F.: << It is very difficult to explain why we chose this name, <<< Roxy >>. It is a bit of a reference to a certain cinema like Ritz, Odéon, Gaumont; it is a very American notion. We were looking for a name << attractive >> and vague enough to cover a quantity of different things. We liked the Hollywood connotation of the word: Roxy recalls << glamourous >>. In England, this word evokes something "decrepit", and it is very much related to the 50s. It is a very beautiful word. >>>

The conversation will continue this time with Eno, Phil Manzanera and Rik Kenton. Here too some themes or problems raised by Roxy's music will be discussed. It is especially Eno, elegant and mannered, who, through the words used, the references he will make, will confirm the feelings aroused by listening to the record.

Rock and avant-garde.

Eno: << More than those of John Cage and David Tudor, I am interested in the musical experiments of composers like La Monte Young, Terry Riley,

Steve Reich and Philip Glass. I find them less of a "reaction" to musical tradition than Cage, for example. Roxy's music is closer to Riley's: he and especially Steve Reich establish within their music a discipline that distances it from improvisation to function as in jazz: an impulse or a movement that is developed from a pattern. I am particularly interested in this notion of repetition, this idea of monotony: the same short phrase being reproduced at length and without interruption. In the synthesizer part of "Virginia Plain", I could have varied the sonorities, but I preferred to play the same notes several times: when a certain number of patterns are reproduced identically, new "in phase" relationships are created. I came to these composers through painting. I was working in a group that practiced process art, which consists of putting more emphasis on the activity of painting itself than on the finished work: the reason why you do it and the way you do it. And I discovered a lot of composers who worked in the same field, according to the same rules and in the same conditions: they treated the act of performing music as a ritual game, as opposed to the ideal of others for whom the important thing is the final result. Since I could not organize sound or image as a product, because that requires a state of mind that I do not have and that I have never tried

having, I focus my attention rather on the process that is the reason why I was able to penetrate easily into the world of avant-garde music: there was already a large open field to start composing in this way, paths cleared. >>>

Rock and the notion of duration.

Eno: "I like short pieces. It's a notion that rock has recently rediscovered and that it had totally lost around 67-68 with the idea of duration, solos, etc. Before the 67s, with Bob Dylan I think, no one had composed a piece of more than three or four minutes. <<<The House Of Rising Sun>> was the first piece of more than four minutes. Before that time,

Rock musicians managed to keep their solos under ten seconds, and what is surprising is that they managed to make them <<<< dense >>. It is interesting to work with this limitation, even if one can also build on the duration. I gave an eighteen-hour concert and in fact nothing changed, I repeated the same motif. >>>

Rock et spectacle.

<<<< Going to a concert must be different from listening to a radio broadcast or listening to a record; it consists of taking another source of information, this time in relation to the environment, the presence of the musicians who create the music in the moment, information that can really modify the listening: we receive the music differently depending on whether the light is 1 red or blue. And this is something that are aware of: they <><><><> always dress >> especially for concerts. In the same way, I dress >> especially for a concert, in a different way of course, to be in close relation with the music. >>

The function of the guitar.

Manzanera: "I joined the band in February. Before that, I played for two years in a band in the Soft Machine tradition, a jazz-rock experience with electronic means, a purely instrumental music, very European. I have always been interested in feedback and all the possibilities offered by electro-acoustics. Also, in some pieces of Roxy Music, the sound of the guitar is processed by the synthesizer. But I also like to find the rather particular guitar playing of the first two Velvet Underground albums, due, I believe, to Sterling Morrison. Sometimes, I also like to play in the style of Robert Fripp.

>>>

Pioneer rock.

Eno: "I lived, as a child, near an American army camp, so I could get all the "singles" that were hits in the States at the time and that weren't necessarily released in England. I had a huge collection of 45s from the late '50s and early '60s: Joey Dee and the Starlighters, etc., over a hundred groups like that. All of this came to me under the name of rock'n'roll, but I knew nothing of its ethnic roots, I had no idea what Latin American or Negro American music was. To me, rock'n'roll meant only something wild: I must have been subjected to the most bizarre influences. When I heard the first records of Bill Haley, Elvis (continued on page 107)

"wait for the Beatles and the Stones. It's actually very difficult to name an important group in English rock of the 50s."

The idea of the work-disc.

B. F.: "We tried, in our first album, to put a whole variety of musical trends, a bit like in <<< Sergeant Pepper ". Besides, it is my favorite album in English pop music, and that is because there is in it a multitude of different contributions, a bit like a journey through sounds. It contrasted with all the pop music of recent years. It is boring to have to play the same thing for two or three hours, we prefer to vary the styles as much as possible ".

A. M.: "That's what we want: a wide range of styles, but still sound like something specific to Roxy Music. When we are asked to define our music, it is impossible to answer except as Roxy Music music." >>>

B. F.: << It is about putting the different sounds in an ever-diversified environment, according to arrangements that are also different, and it then becomes something truly new.

A. M.: "We don't want to just play old music or refine it, but to build a kind of bridge between the music of the 50s and the 60s-70s up to the 80s."

Importance of electronics in this progression.

B. F.: "We use a synthesizer, tapes, serial music recordings. The synthesizer is sometimes used as a conventional instrument, other times to expand the possibilities of each instrument, the sound of the piano or the saxophone. Two musicians can then play a single instrument: so when Andy plays the saxophone, the notes are taken and transformed by the synthesizer. >>>

The stage-record relationship; the theatricalization of music.

B. F.: << Everything we do on record, we try to reproduce on stage. But by integrating the notion of spectacle. If we are serious musicians, we are no less interested in the visual heritage of rock which has always had theatrical aspects, especially in the 50s/60s. Our taste for finery also comes from a reaction against the stage sadness of rock musicians of the last two or three years. A small school which includes people like Bowie, Alice Cooper, is once again practicing theatricality on stage. We are especially interested in the finery of our London friends, the mod lists design our clothes. It is more pleasant for us and for the audience to cause an event on stage by dressing up, putting on makeup rather than presenting our music in a dull way. If artists took the trouble to put on spectacular shows, which we do, we would want to be spectators in turn. >>>

A. M.: "We want to put the spectators in a condition to listen to our music, that's the main reason for this theatricalization. If we have noticed that clothes can destroy the impact of the music, we want to reverse that and make sure that they allow on the contrary to listen to it better by presenting a real show to the spectators. >>>

B. F.: "Especially since we recorded a 45 rpm which, in England, was a huge success. We reached a new audience, teenagers, that we didn't have before, and they come mostly to see us, because they expect an "event". If we can influence their taste in some way, that's a good thing. That said, I don't know how far we'll go in this area. >>>

A. M.: "Rock music is not really theatre. I just think that rock musicians make every moment of their lives an "event". So, it's not a question of dressing in a banal way off stage and then putting on sublime clothes for a concert."

The record business: the single.

B. F.: "A lot of the best creations in rock music have been on 45s, but that doesn't mean we should play below our limits just to sell more. I have conflicting ideas about the purpose of the music we make. I like to think that our music, i our names, will be remembered later; I also like the idea of ephemeral music ("throw away music"). The two tendencies can probably coexist. On an album, you can exploit your ideas completely, over time. It's a much better "medium" in a way. But if we find

We have a short piece of music that can be developed over two or three minutes and that can become popular, we do it on a "single". It's a fascinating feeling to be abroad and to hear your music coming out of a jukebox in a café. >>>

The ambivalence of the group

B. F.: "It's true, there are very big differences between the individuals who form the group, i but they complement each other. And that was intended. To simplify, we could say that we achieve a synthesis, I hope, between music "for the mind" and music for the body, sexual. Achieving a balance between the two means being able to reach a very wide audience. If you're drunk or "stoned", you can only grasp the rhythm. The music is then received on several levels."

A. M.: <<< We can do such interesting experiments in the Roxy Music context as in avant-garde research. >>>

B. F.: << To take an example: King Crimson, I really liked the first album. The following ones became too <<< polished, they lost the physical power of the first one. >>>

A. M.: "The difference between us and a band like Van Der Graaf is that for them each song becomes a real musical experience that can last more than twenty-five minutes. It's not like with Brian who is an "individualist" singer. Van Der Graaf, like Pink Floyd, exploits more sound ideas; I prefer short solos to long ones. >>>

B. F.: "It's easier to control." A. M.: "But that's mainly because things quickly become boring when they're too long." >>>

Improvisation and written music. A. M.: "We play a mixture of improvisation and written music. Sometimes we have pre-arranged guitar, patterns and very often solos. When we play, there is 60 to 70% improvised music."

B. F.: "It seems to me that it's the opposite: 60 to 70% of written music