roxy music live 1975 - viva! and wembley

Viva! Roxy Music, the brilliant live album, was issued in late 1976 after it was announced that Roxy was on hiatus. Phil Manzanera went through about a dozen properly recorded concerts and cherry picked the best tracks - not the most obvious, not the big hits, but the ones he thought best represented Roxy Music in concert. Then he assembled the songs and added some judicious instrumental overdubs - bits of Andy's sax playing here and there when mics hadn't picked everything up, some of his own guitar playing, tidying up wayward notes. Not much was needed as Roxy live was a well honed machine.

Five of the tracks came from the Newcastle show in late 1974, including all of the second side of the album. Two tracks - "Pyjamarama" and "Chance Meeting" are from Glasgow in 1973 on the first tour with Eddie Jobson, and "Both Ends Burning" is the sole track from Wembley in October 1975. Another Wembley song - "For Your Pleasure" was issued on the b side of the "Both Ends Burning" single.

Now, a few years ago the complete Newcastle show leaked out the internet. Lovely soundboard recording, the whole show, no overdubs, the band on fire and a terrific audience. And when that happened I pondered the whereabouts of Glasgow Apollo 1973 and Wembley Empire Pool 1975.

Well, just recently I became aware of a full soundboard recording of Wembley 17/10/75. It's superb! The whole show, except it's oddly missing "For Your Pleasure", but a bit of nifty CoolEditing later and I've reinserted "FYP" from the single. It was a little bit tricky as "FYP" sgeues straight into Manzanera's "Diamond Head" - and as this faded in on the soundboard I nicked the join from the radio broadcast of a US show from March 1976. There's a slight dip in quality but it's only over a few seconds so it's not really obvious.

One of the interesting things about this gig is that it actually preceded the release of Siren, but they still perform most of the new album anyway. Siren's release had been delayed slightly due to the printing of the cover so I guess that the tour was planned to follow the originallly scheduled release date…

Anyway, the gig opens with "Sentimental Fool" and then current single "Love Is The Drug". The band is tight, Ferry is on form, the Sirens adding some screechy backing vocals, and it's all good. Some surprises - "Strictly Confidential" is performed for the first time since the Eno days (and dropped again after the two Wembley shows apparently) and "A Really Good Time" makes a rare appearance too - it's beautifully performed, so I don't know why it didn't feature much. A cracking "Virginia Plain" ends the main set, though the audience are a bit weak at the end - "what's her name?" sings Ferry, expecting the whole crowd to chant back "Virginia Plain" but there's just a few voices at this point rather than usual bellow. Perhaps it's a quirk of the soundboard, although the crowd seems loud enough between songs. "Both Ends Burning" is interesting too, as you can clearly hear what overdubs were added to the official Viva! version. Mainly Andy beefing up his saxophone intro, though some of Ferry's vocal excesses may also have been sorted out. 

The encore is a stomping medley of "Re-Make/Re'Model" / "Do The Strand" / "Editions Of You" and back into "Strand" again, then a further encore of another rarely played song "The Thrill Of It All" - this one rocks like mad, and is brilliant live so again it's a little baffling that it didn't get played often. A final encore of "A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall" is a little surprising as it's a Ferry solo track, not a Roxy song, and it's perhaps a little cheeky to end a Roxy show with it.

Mid-set Ferry takes a short break (I expect he went off for a clean shirt, plus a fine cognac and a cigarette, lit for him by some beautiful girl) while Manzanera's "Diamond Head" was played, followed by "Wild Weekend" from Mackay's Eddie Riff album. Usually Ferry returned to the stage to take on "The 'In' Crowd" which kind of completes a little segment of Roxy solo tracks, but on this show "A Really Good Time" is slotted in before "The 'In' Crowd" where it doesn't actually fit terribly well. Oh well. However "The 'In' Crowd" is fantastic, arguably the best track performed at this show. Everyone having a real blast, Ferry shouting out the lyrics breathlessly, the Sirens wailing away, Manzanera delivering a storming solo. Tremendous stuff.

Now all we need is the complete Glasgow Apollo 1973 show and I'll be delighted!

bryan ferry - these foolish things

After two albums with Roxy Music Bryan Ferry decided to cut a solo record, an album where he could indulge himself, not worry about songwriting, an album of covers of some of his favourite songs. These Foolish Things was recorded in a matter of weeks in the spring of 1973 and shows the lighter side of Bryan Ferry. Many of the songs are delivered with a mischievous sense of fun that didn't often manifest itself in Roxy. Ferry rarely sounds like he's having fun - making music often seems to become something of a chore for him - but what immediately strikes the listener is the sheer amount of fun Ferry is having with these songs.

 

Bob Dylan purists hated Bryan's take on "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" but I love it. Thumping drums from the Great Paul Thompson, cheeky backing vocals and Ferry getting his tonsils around every syllable. This was the first track recorded for this project apparently, in Spring 1973, and marks the first time that one Edwin Jobson first worked with Ferry. The whizzy violins on this track are all Jobson and Ferry soon realised that Eddie was a genius on the synth too. Eno's days in Roxy were numbered, and here was a natural replacement, and at only 18, wasn't likely to argue with Ferry the way that Eno did! 

 

The rest of side one is fascinating - mixing well known songs like "Piece Of My Heart" with more obscure tracks like "Please Don't Ever Change" (a Buddy Holly-less Crickets b-side if I remember rightly). What's so good is that Ferry also mixes total sincerity (like his brilliant and moving version of the Beach Boys' "Don't Worry Baby") with camp pastiche - such as the frantic and comic "It's My Party" where Ferry doesn't even switch the genders round, so he's still the one who's jealous of the fact that Judy has stolen Johnny away from him… It somehow actually works, despite Ferry's well known reputation as a ladies man by this time.

 

We also get a lovely Elvis impersonation on "Baby I Don't Care" which has every bit of reverb turned up to the max, and some cracking drumming from TGPT. Oddly, listening to it today, I realised that Ferry wasn't alone in this sort of rock'n'roll revivalism - the sound on this track, and elsewhere on TFT, isn't actually a million miles from the sound of contemporary bands like Showaddywaddy or Mud. But Ferry delivers these songs with such verve and a knowingly ironic archness, which sets Ferry's work well apart from the chart fodder of some of these bands. The album cover also shows Ferry as something of rock'n'roll throwback - with a simple black teeshirt and his hair in quiff he looks more like the Fonz than anything else. And a million miles from the bow-tie / tux image that appeared on his next album cover, which he's been saddled with ever since.

 

Side two begins magnificently. Trying to cover the Rolling Stones is never an easy option, and trying to cover "Sympathy For The Devil" is almost impossible (Guns 'n' Roses did an appallingly lumpy cover in 1990ish, around the same time as their similarly dreadful "Live And Let Die"). But Ferry ditches quite a bit of the Stones original and wisely turns the song into a swampy, swirling mass of horns, spooky backing singers, and a snarling, cackling vocal quite unlike anything else he's ever done. It's quite breathtakingly brilliant. The whole song is basically one long climax, gradually building in tropical, steamy intensity, the stabs from the horn section getting ever more pronounced and urgent, the wurlitzer style organ becoming more and more unhinged, the backing vocals gradually more prominent and more insistent. It's wonderful and I’d forgotten quite how much I love this song. Sacrilege maybe, but I actually prefer it to the Stones version. Really.  

 

Tracks Of My Tears" is a real anticlimax after "Sympathy" - it's as if Ferry knew that nothing could follow it, so he chose to sacrifice the weakest song on the album. It's not actually that bad, but Ferry simply doesn't have the right voice to tackle real soul songs, and certainly at this point in his career his vocals are so mannered that they rarely sound truly sincere - and sincerity is what this song needs. This is not really a criticism of Ferry as his voice is wonderful for so many songs - but it just doesn't suit truly soulful tunes. Look how weedy he sounds on later covers like "Take Me To The River" or "That's How Strong My Love Is" - it's just not the right sort of voice for those songs. And by having the band play "Tracks Of My Tears" so straight it can only be compared with Smoky Robinson's original and can therefore only come off worst from such a comparison. Same thing applies to side one's "Piece Of My Heart" - only a few years after Janis Joplin ripped your heart out with her showstopping version, Ferry plays it safe and polite and it just doesn't really work. 

 

But things pick up with the Beatles' "You Won't See Me" - love the chirpy piano on this and it's clear that Ferry is once again having fun with the song. A nicely jaunty guitar solo from Phil Manzanera too. Ferry was a huge Beatles fan and would go on to cover a number of other Fab songs over his career - my favourite being a lovely version of "She's Leaving Home" in 1976.

 

Then another jaunty track - "I Love How You Me" begins with a harpsichord - or rather Jobson on synth impersonating a harpsichord - and features some sterling saxophone work too. Nice doo-wop backings.

 

"Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever" is terrific, again the horns are really on form and TGPT is superb. Beyond Andy Mackay's sax and oboe Roxy Music never really used horns, and never in this sort of big band way, but Ferry's solo albums are often full of meaty horn arrangements. I really like the throwaway backing vocals on the verses. The girls echo most of Ferry lines but in a very offhand, casual kind of way which is very endearing. They are full on during the choruses, but extremely laid back in the verses, it's rather amusing. 

 

And then we end with the title track. A real smoky nightclub situation… A tinkling piano, the barman clearing away the glasses, Ferry all alone with his memories and his regrets. This song was made for him. But I can't help wondering why he decided to beef it up. I still think it would have worked fine just with the piano and lonesome trumpet, but after the first verse the drums kick in with a surprisingly robust beat. But somehow it does still work, in an oddly jaunty yet wistful way, and suits Ferry extremely well. The fade out is excellent, the girls aaaahhhing everywhere, leaving Bryan to fade away into the darkness with a bottle of cognac amid a haze of cigarette smoke… 

 

A really good, solid album. I first heard this aged about 14/15. The album was nearly 10 years old then, now it's 42… It was out of it's time even then, and I knew that these songs were throwbacks to the 60s, 50s and further back, but as with all good albums, it sets up a mood and creates images and ideas and the fact that it was weird mish-mash of musical styles and eras simply doesn't matter. Crucially, the songs are all excellent - unlike Ferry's follow up Another Time Another Place (which was saddled with a few stinkers and only really has half an album's worth of genuinely good tracks). It's probably easier than ever before to get hold of any album in the world, but I really can't imagine any 14 year old buying this record now, and being transported, as I was, even further back into rock history.

 

 

bryan ferry - avonmore

Avonmore is rapidly becoming one of my favourite Bryan Ferry albums. It took a little while but it's one of those albums that really does improve dramatically with repeated plays.

 

It's much better than my first impressions led me to think. But also it's far less of a new album than I first thought, with, I reckon, just two recently composed songs out of ten!
 

The good points first - it sounds terrific, the musicianship is as slick and fluid as you'd expect and the tunes themselves have sneaky little hooks that really lodge themselves in your brain. I do wonder about Ferry's ongoing quest to lose himself entirely within a cocoon of backing singers, and a cast of thousands of musicians, but the overall impression is still one of a cracking album, albeit led by one of the world's shyest men.   
 

On the downside, it sounds remarkably similar to 2010's Olympia, to 1994's Mamouna, to the unreleased Alphaville (1997) and Horoscope (1990) too. But that's because many of the tracks have actually been recorded, constructed and layered over the last 25 years. Albums like Frantic from 2002 or Dylanesque from 2007 had more of an organic band feel, genuinely sounding like a smallish group was actually playing these songs together in real time. But here we are back once again to Ferry lost in the studio surrounded by hundreds of hours of recordings of hundreds of musicians and painstakingly stitching them all together to produce a swirly densely layered patchwork. And quite clearly much of this album has been recorded over the past  25 years. Guitar licks from Nile Rodgers recorded in 1990, nudge against licks from Oliver Thompson recorded 20 years later. Indeed one of the guitar players, David Williams, sadly died about ten years ago - yet here he is, all over Ferry's new album! 

 

"Loop De Li" and "Midnight Train" are little altered from their original forms on Horoscope, the unreleased album recorded between 1989 and 1992. There are more overdubs, more of those seemingly endless little guitar licks and riffs, a newer breathier vocal in the up to date Ferry style and a good number of extra backing vocals - but the basic rhythm tracks for these two are the same as those laid down in 1989. Over the years Ferry has actually mined Horoscope extensively - "NYC", "The Only Face", "Gemini Moon" and "The 39 Steps" were reworked for Mamouna and the updated version of "Mother Of Pearl" was issued on a film soundtrack ten years later. Now we have "Loop De Li" (called "Your Love Has Died " on Horoscope) and "Midnight Train" which only leaves one track from Horoscope ("Death Of Me") that hasn't been eventually issued. And to be honest I'd argue that there are lot of elements of "Death Of Me" in the cracking Avonmore song "One Night Stand".  

 

Other reworks on Avonmore include a number of songs that originated during the Taxi sessions of 1993. Fed up with getting bogged down in Horoscope Ferry decided to record an albums of covers quickly and with minimum of fuss - so Taxi was recorded, mixed and released within six months! That's incredibly fast for Ferry! He recorded many more covers than he needed - the wonderful version of "Send In The Clowns" on Avonmore is just a mildly updated version of a 1993 recording. And various other Taxi era tracks have been used over the years - for example "All Along The Watchtower" on Dylanesque, "Goodnight Irene" on Frantic, "One Night" on Olympia. But the Taxi sessions also succeeded in getting his own songwriting going again and there were a good number of unreleased new songs recorded during 1993 - they are mostly unfinished with fragmentary vocals or la la la murmuring, but three of them have now been finished - a lovely ballad now called "Lost", the sharply rocking "Driving Me Wild" and the very catchy "Special Kind Of Guy". But all are still very recognisable from their 20 year old original forms.  
 

So that leaves us with just three tracks that originated in the last few years - "Johnny and Mary" is a cover of Robert Palmer's song, recorded last year with Norwegian DJ Todd Terje. On Ferry's new album it's been slightly remixed.
 

The title song - "Avonmore" is the hardest song on the record, with some cracking lead guitar work from Oliver Thompson. He co-wrote the track which is how I know it's quite recent as Ollie was a member of Ferry's band between 2007 and 2011 - and that's very recent in Ferry terms. The only other new song is the unusual "Soldier of Fortune" which was written and recorded with Johnny Marr, who has guested at a number of Ferry's live shows over the last couple of years. Marr also worked with Ferry on Bête Noire back in 1986, but apparently this is a newly written song.
 

So it may be Bryan Ferry's new album, but only two genuinely new tracks have been written since 2007 (plus a cover recorded last year) and the remaining seven songs were actually begun between 20 and 25 years ago! 
 

But, ultimately, does it matter? For everyone but the hardcore Ferry fans these are technically new songs, the album hangs together remarkably well, and it sounds superb, Ferry is out there plugging away, doing more publicity for this album than he's done for years, the live shows are still enjoyable and well attended, he looks good, and, although he's lost a fair bit of vocal range, he still sings well.

 

By any standards he's keeping very busy, for a man of 69 he's doing remarkably.

 

rambling thoughts - sea breezes

The first Roxy Music album is stunning. More on this another day.

 

But I've just heard "Sea Breezes", the penultimate song on Roxy Music and despite me knowing this song for getting for 35 years now, it utterly floored me again. Mainly because I couldn't understand how Roxy thought they could get away with such a truly bizarre song, possibly the most bizarre on a very bizarre album!

 

Beautiful oboe work and gentle electric piano underpin Bryan Ferry’s very delicate and pretty opening section, though Eno’s otherworldly wooshes of VCS3 take the dreamy edge off the piece rather (this synth makes sounds that no-one else can replicate, even today, and it makes many early Roxy songs sound genuinely futuristic, even 40+ years on). Ferry sings at the top of his range, lending the song a ghostly croon which sounds like it's floated in from another world. Then the atonal, stop start second section crashes in with Paul Thompson playing random drum fills which have no relationship with the steady pulse of the bass whatsoever, as Phil Manzanera sounds like he’s throttling his guitar into making hideous death rattles, but Andy Mackay is still playing an extremely delicate oboe melody that again has nothing to do with what the rest of the band is playing. It’s incredible, baffling and still makes me think – what the hell were they thinking?

 

I mean, really – who on earth thought this could work? But, against all expectations it DOES work, and somehow, inexplicably, it’s utterly brilliant.

Also completely mad, but in a full on rock and roll runaway train kind of a way is the version of “Re-make / Re-model” from an August 1972 BBC In Concert. Drenched in VCS3 white noise courtesy of Professor Eno but absolutely anchored by Thompson’s thunderous drums this is perhaps even better than the studio version on the debut album. Everyone is pushing forwards, everyone is having the time of their lives, everyone is battling to be louder than everyone else. Again, though, it ought to be a total mess, but weirdly it isn't. The sheer power of the band is never more obvious and it’s probably the best example of why early Roxy were so totally thrilling.

rambling thoughts - bryan ferry can't dance

BBC4 showed the classic Roxy Music at Frejus Arena gig a while back and I recently got around to watching it. I've seen this August 1982 show many times before but it's always worth another look.

 

It was recorded at a beautiful Roman amphitheatre in the south of France, a terrific venue for the louche cool of Roxy (and King Crimson was the support act that night!). This is Roxy Music on the Avalon tour and what a darned fine show it is.

 

Excellent musicianship, cracking performances, and loads of Bryan Ferry lolloping across the stage in a weird attempt to dance. His singing was spot on, but the man simply cannot dance. He hasn't got a funky bone in his body. Every movement is jerky, out of time and supremely awkward. He's always been like it, but the gently insistent funkiness of the Avalon era band seems to inspire him to attempt to dance more than usual at this show.

 

The result is the King Of Cool basically doing embarrassing Dad dancing.

 

roxy music - stranded & country life

Today’s music is a couple of genuine 100% classics. Roxy Music’s Stranded and Country Life.

Both contain some really top notch songs (among the classics are “Mother Of Pearl”, “Song For Europe”, Street Life”, “Amazona” on Stranded and “All I Want Is You”, “Out of The Blue”, “A Really Good Time” and “Casanova” on CL) and both albums are brilliantly produced with even the weaker songs garnished with delightful little touches. “Triptych” is especially cleverly constructed with both startling choral vocals on the middle section and harpsichords on the opening and closing parts.

Both albums have striking covers (with perhaps CL having one of the most striking covers by anyone, ever), both feature the stunning violin work of Eddie Jobson, especially on “Out Of The Blue”, Manzanera plays a blinder on both (“Amazona” is a real tour de force) and Andy Mackay contributes some of his best ever saxophone work on “A Song For Europe”. Paul Thompson’s drumming is never better (just listen to his power drumming throughout “The Thrill Of It All” or at the start of “Mother Of Pearl” and the sudden switch when the song changes down a gear – brilliant). Ferry’s lyrics are beautifully bitter sweet and perfectly sung (listen to the high notes that he reaches on the gorgeous “Just Like You”). And there are even touches of humour – the backing vocals on “Mother Of Pearl” are terrific – as Ferry sings ‘well I’ve been up all night’ the backing vocals chip in with a sarcastic ‘again?’ which is a very clever touch. Also very funny are the strident German vocals on “Bitter Sweet” as the oompah chorus contrasts brilliantly with the lovely oboe-led verses, and the cry of ‘ahhhh more champagne…’ in “If It Takes All Night” always makes me laugh - the imagery of Ferry smoothly stalking his way round party after party would come to haunt him in later years, but back in 1974 that’s exactly what he was doing.  

Both albums are so good, but for me Country Life just edges out Stranded for position as my favourite RM album. Mainly because of the beauty and self pitying melancholy of “A Really Good Time” which contains one of my all time favourite Ferry lyrics and arguably Jobson’s prettiest violin work.

But whatever, they are both superb records.