Advertisement

Roxy Music still sound like music from the future

Finding new paths through old melodies: Bryan Ferry performing with the band at the OVO Hydro in Glasgow - Stuart Westwood/Shutterstock
Finding new paths through old melodies: Bryan Ferry performing with the band at the OVO Hydro in Glasgow - Stuart Westwood/Shutterstock

At the end of a weird and wonderful set at Glasgow’s vast OVO Hydro arena, on the opening date of Roxy Music’s 50th anniversary UK tour, Bryan Ferry stood grinning, one arm raised with the imperious grace of a matador who had just slain a sacrificial bull. The 12,000-strong audience were all on their feet, loudly applauding.

“Just one more thing,” the 77-year-old frontman casually announced, and then suddenly roared “THERE’S A NEW SENSATION!” as this ancient band of sonic adventurers snapped into Do The Strand, a half-century-old anthem that still sounded like a declamatory pop manifesto from revolutionary young guns. Meet the new sensation, same as the old sensation.

Synthesizers warped like a spaceship landing, Phil Manzanera’s guitar charged the rhythm with garage energy, Andy Mackay’s saxophone fired strange melodies into the ether while an eight-piece backing band locked tight around drummer Paul Thompson’s jerky stop-start motion. You can’t help but marvel that something so artfully peculiar, so provocatively absurd, was once accepted as pop music. “The Sphinx and Mona Lisa! Lolita and Guernica! Did the Strand!” Ferry exulted. Yes, we all did once. Will we ever do so again?

When Roxy Music released their debut single, Virginia Plain, back in 1972, they were already crafting something rooted in nostalgia for the kitsch elements of rock’n’roll but transforming it into determinedly modernist art. They stopped releasing new music 10 years later in 1982, having lost the services of synthesiser boffin Brian Eno along the way, and somehow transmuted, across eight extraordinary albums, from sci-fi glam rock provocateurs into debonair purveyors of sinuous soundscape soul. Chief stylist Ferry preferred to focus on his successful solo sideline, with the core quartet occasionally reuniting to perform live.

This short anniversary tour represents Roxy’s first shows since 2011, and may well be their last, as the old futurists celebrated their legacy. The nosily confrontational Re-Make/Re-Model was recreated as a period piece whose challenging dissonances were celebrated with the same reassuring warmth as sublime shifts through the mellifluous Oh Yeah and sensuous Dance Away, now staples of smooth radio. It is as if Radiohead and Sade were the same band.

The 50th anniversary tour represents Roxy Music's first shows since 2011 - Stuart Westwood/Shutterstock
The 50th anniversary tour represents Roxy Music's first shows since 2011 - Stuart Westwood/Shutterstock

I suspect the reunited Roxy would have struggled to tie such disparate strands together without the reverent indulgence of an audience who had come to pay homage to our own lost youth. The sound in the vast Hydro was a bit too flat and open to make the most of the subtleties of complex arrangements, although Manzanera did his best to amp things up with some scintillating overdriven solos. Ferry remained seated at his keyboard for much of the show, no longer compelled to take the battle to the front row, but whenever he found the energy to get to his feet the audience visibly lifted with him.

With his wiry eyebrows and lined face, the septuagenarian star looks less like a glamorous gigolo these days than a battered old gentleman, as if Ranulph Fiennes had returned from one last Polar expedition and been shoved into a dinner jacket to regale us with tales of his adventures. Ferry’s voice has become low and whispery, and he had to use warrior skills to find new paths through old melodies. But find them he did.

Seated at his electric organ, he conjured an intense intimacy for the poetically perverse narrative of In Every Dream Home a Heartache from 1973’s For Your Pleasure. You could have heard a pin drop as Ferry paused for the punchline: “But you blew my mind!” Then Paul Thompson’s snare slammed like a guillotine dropping, and the band exploded into one of the wildest flurries of rock noise ever heard. Half a century on, it still sounded like music from the future.


Touring until Oct 14; bryanferry.com