Roxy Music - Would You Believe? (Live At The Bataclan, Paris / 1972)/Re-Make Remodel The Olympia Paris 1973

In the late 1980's Roxy Music VHS "Total Recall" (still not reissued to this day), there is a brief tantalizing clip of Roxy Music live in 1972 performing "Would You Believe" with both Eno and Ferry singing the chorus at the end of the song. The way the two camera shot is edited amplifies what split the band - Eno puts down his tambourine long enough to grab the mike and truly you know the end is nigh. This town aint big enough for the both us indeed. So, now in 2018 there is a 3 cd expanded version of Roxy Music's debut with a dvd including the full "Would You Believe" . . and it is from the Bataclan in Paris. Check out the second Paris clip from 1973 with Eno processing the whole proceedings through his board (except Manzanera who is just on fire) making the whole thing sound at times not unlike the electric fuckery of Hawkwind, Monoshock, Simply Saucer or Comets on Fire (name yer fave). Timeless!

Metro on German TV show Hits A Go Go/Criminal World live 17th April 1977 Hamburg

Metro’s self-titled 1976 album is one that I often pondered when rifling through second hand bins throughout the 1980’s. It was not until Roxymania struck that I actually took the plunge. Although yer typical beard scratcher collector type would not be caught out owning the lp, it is not unlike the perfect out of tyme - or ahead of your time - lps for the 70's albeit of the non-garage rock variety. Like Clap’s Have You Reached Yet or Fortune Teller's Inner City Scream, i.e., garage records 8-10 years too late or too early, the Metro album sits ahead of its time either like a great early 1980’s new wave record or the final album of Roxy’s great 1972-1975 run. Mind you Sparks' "Wonder Girl" from 1971-1972 was/is THE preminent pre-new wave, new wave song (and the first IMHO).  That the Metro lp is from late 1976 London meant that punk stopped it dead in its tracks for the most part. That is unless you were David Bowie. Although the Iggy cover on Let’s Dance may be what first one to gain traction, the cover of Metro’s 1977 single “Criminal World” on Let's Dance just shows that someone clearly was paying attention. Peter Godwin, Duncan Browne and Sean Lyons all had been playing for years prior to Metro - the timing was just slightly off.  I had never seen any live footage before so was pretty excited to see that Peter Godwin has posted the very first television appearance by Metro on German tv with what sounds like live vocals over a backing track.
 

Roxy Music "Full House" 25 November 1972/"I hope things will turn out right Old Man"

Unfortunately, the entire Roxy Music "Full House" performance from 25 November 1972 has not appeared in one piece. October 1972 has the group wait out while Ferry has a tonsillectomy, and December 1972 has Roxy in the US opening for the J. Geils Band, Humble Pie, Ten Years After, the Steve Miller Band, Edgar Winter, Jo Jo Gunne, the Allman Brothers and Dr. John the Night Tripper. I actually think in retrospect some of these pairings make a lot of sense, not sure how the crowd at the Miami Speedway would have treated Eno though. In between, we get Full House at the BBC studios in London. The clip below of "For Your Pleasure" with the unsynced sound comes from the 2007 collection The Thrill of It All: A Visual History 1972-1982 where it is synched (enjoy the screen grab). The review of For Your Pleasure in Rolling Stone amusingly noted: "The title tune ends the album, but is it a tune? It sounds like dogs barking repetitively for minutes on end. Maybe it is Eno's genius at work, but if so you've gotta be Mensa level to understand him or be so stoned you still think the drum solo on "In-a-Gadda-da-Vida" is a tour de force." Uh, I kinda take offense as I like Ron Bushy's solo on the lp version. "For Your Pleasure" is a concise statement of where the band was at - can you name another Krautrock-inspired art pop track that clocks in at around three minutes. There is a time coded clip from Full House in circulation as well but is incomplete. The BBC will likely unearth the whole session for one of its extra channels in the near future but until then . . .

"But no dilettante filigree fancy beats the plastic you"/Chris D. on Roxy Music's "Mother of Pearl"

About six years ago I approached Chris D. about publishing a collection of his music writing (from Slash and elsewhere) and sent him a dvd of James Frawley's The Christian Licorice Store. Never heard back from him though I was happy to see the publication in 2009 of A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die: A Collection of Writing by Chris D (New Texture, 2009). I have written about the collection previously here but the collection itself is not oriented towards his writing on music and film, though the book is loaded with enough references to both to keep you busy for a while tracking them down. The intros to the various sections (on poems, dream fragments, screenplays, lyrics, novel excerpts, etc.) remind me somewhat of the super dense (albeit short) film reviews that Chris used to publish in Forced Exposure. How many would he cram into an issue, fifty? Though in this collection, there is a lot of memoir contained in the short intro write-ups (generally 2-3 pages) to make the collection stand out from a mere compendium of work. So while I have never had a chance to ask Chris about Roxy Music, I figured like everybody else he would find the first five records unassailable. Who knew that he should have been interviewed for that doco on the band a few years back given his great articulation of why that period is/was held in such high esteem. In the discussion of his still unpublished first novel with the Ballard-esque title Sacred World (an influence on the novel along with Genet, P.K. Dick, Diamond Dogs era Bowie, Burroughs, noir, euro art film and his own "romantic 19th century literary damage from high school and college), he writes:

The title Sacred World was taken from a lyric phrase from Roxy Music's "Mother of Pearl" from their Stranded album. That song perfectly captures the kind of transcendental modern romanticism I was going for here, and it is perhaps Bryan Ferry's shining moment as a singer and lyricist (before he descended totally into artifice). It is a masterpiece of testimonial love that updates the type of high society amor fou found in 1940's films like Gilda, Humoresque and Notorious to profound tragic 1970's melodrama - a sung monologue of obsessive love which raises the object of affection to fetishistic heights, elevating glamour to a surreal cosmology, yet still miraculously retaining a heartbreaking poignance. Disturbingly confessional when the listener can easily interchange the love object: with one line it is the ideal woman, with the next, is it the narcissistic singer himself? Let's put it this way ... is the ideal woman really meant only for the ideal man? Thus making this a double whammy of interlocked circular obsession? That's basically what I was striving for in my elliptical fashion (though you would have to read my whole unevenly-written novel to really get that.

Second that Dr. Chris about "Mother of Pearl." Maybe add in some then contemporary Fassbinder period melodrama damage into Ferry's cultural mix (from the same 1973-74 period of the Musikladen performance below) and stir. Enjoy the screen caps and dig Sal Maida from Milk 'n Cookies on the bass.

Roxymania Cleveland Airport 1975/Non-Alignment Pact

Certain cities seem to embrace foreign artists and out of town acts like hometown heroes. It just seems that Cleveland had the best taste. See Exhibit A above. CLE were amongst the "early adopters" (to borrow the parlance of the cigarette profiteers) of the Roxy/Eno axis. Exhibit B, the various live tapes of the VU at La Cave recorded by Klimek and crew.

Punkitude, Roxy Music and the Greasy Trucker's Party

A 1972-73 barn archive review from the golden age of rock fanzines. Title from thee great Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. On the first Roxy Music lp: "A mixture of intellectualism, punkitude and a healthy understanding of what rock 'n roll is all about." That just about sums it up brother. No comparisons to Sha Na Na here which is where some of the early critics lost the plot. Hawkwind excerpt from the Greasy Trucker's review possibly next time. Prize for who can guess the source.