As Roxy reunite to mark their 50th anniversary, Bryan Ferry looks back at the group’s eight fabulous creations

FIFTY years ago this month, Roxy Music emerged from an old movie theatre on London’s Piccadilly clutching the master tapes for what would turn out to be an epochal debut. Though conceived by bandleader Bryan Ferry as an “exploration of many styles” created by six wildly diverse musical personalities, the glamour-starved audience instantly recognised it as something fresh, urgent and seductively postmodern.

“Making the Roxy Music albums was a life-changing experience for me,” reflects Ferry today – and also for everyone who devoured them at the time.

Like a swan gliding across a moonlit lake, Roxy Music often gave the impression of moving with effortless grace. But what Ferry remembers most is the hard work going on beneath the surface, “working intensively with such a unique group of people. It was an amazingly productive time.” Ahead of Roxy’s 50th anniversary tour in the autumn, he recalls intense recording sessions and painstaking photoshoots, chasing something “in the air” from The Strand to The Bahamas. “I have many good memories of the camaraderie we shared, as well as the tensions that are part of the collaboration. I’ll be looking forward to celebrating all of this with our audience later in the year.”

SAM RICHARDS

Cool cat: Ferry, from the first album photo shoot, 1972

KARLSTOECKER

ROXY MUSIC

ISLAND, 1972

Re-make! Re-model! Roxy strike gold straight away with an enthusiastically arch rifle through pop’s dressing-up box

I started putting the band together in 1970 when I began working with Graham Simpson, who had played in my college band, The Gas Board. Later that year I met Andy Mackay and he joined us with his synthesiser and oboe, and later saxophone. At this point I was writing the songs on piano and at the same time trying to put together the band to play them. We didn’t have a tape recorder, so Andy suggested his friend Brian Eno could come and record us. Eno brought his huge reel-to-reel Ferrograph machine, and ended up staying on and becoming part of the band, using Andy’s VCS3 synthesiser to create sounds and treat the instruments we were playing. We hit it off, and by the time we started recording the album we had the complete band.

I liked many kinds of music, so stylistically I was keen for the songs to be wide-ranging and not follow one particular channel. I was lucky with this band in that we had so many different sounds to play with and it was a great opportunity for me to write interesting stuff. Consequently, the first album was an exploration of many styles and so diverse that it indicated many different futures the band could follow. The first Roxy album is an unusual collage of musical elements, and the songs themselves, if you break them down, are just simple experiments in different genres.