In the mid to late 70s I was in my early to mid teens and a radio DJ, a club DJ (under age), a DJ service owner, and I spent as much of my money as I could traveling to find punk and funk live shows. And, I very much liked Roxy.

In Roxy there is Stax and American blues and rock. There is a bit of the (then) new glam and prog in there (Crimson and Bowie). There was a bit of Krautrock and avant-garde and post WWII electronic.

Virginia Plain

Honkytonk piano and rock and roll horns and synthesizers and Ferry's voice. Something from the past in future dress. Kind of like Star Wars would be in a few years.

Bryan Ferry projected a kind of seemingly effortless cool. A guy who probably never left a party or bar or club without someone under his arm (although Eno was the one getting all the action). The sort of cool the James Bond franchise has always seemed to shoot for but never quite ever hit. A seducer, and yet not a raging bastard. A guy who could show up at a wedding in a suit he had slept on a bench in and still somehow look more together than you in your new suit. This appealed to me.

It would be sometime in the late 90s when I would understand that appeal more. Born about two decades apart and thousands of miles apart in different countries we had some things in common. Working class industrial backgrounds, some arty pretensions and a idea to live in the skin of a different class.

She’s dressed to kill
And guess who’s dying?

As Roxy went on they became more coherent but still maintained that old stuff but in a new way kind of feel. It was always Ferry's band but for some reason he started making solo albums too. He did some good stuff and they did ok in sales but he moved his image from arty kind of taking the piss sophistication to a more serious presentation of sophistication and people kind of reacted badly to it. I don't fully understand it. I think you would have to be raised British to truly get the subtleties of the backlash.

I think I understand what drove him to strive for that. I mean, when you pull up to the club in a stretch and the driver opens the door and you step out with your all female crew and instead of standing in line for 40 minutes and paying $30 a head a woman comes and unhooks the velvet rope and leads you straight to a prime table, that's fun. It's also easy to see how that can get old faster than you do.

Still, both solo and as Roxy the U.S. market was getting in to it. Americans are suckers for that British stuff.

Avalon and Slave To Love are smooth and polished and not at all wild but they still have that odd old done new thing. Latin sounds are incorporated and the imagery is timeless. It's not old music (I mean at the time it came out) but you can imagine yourself in some earlier time dancing in some dim dancehall.

So I guess the addition of pop art to music and a love of old sounds but done in a new way is what people respond too. So many punk, new wave, and new romantic, bands sounded like decedents of Roxy and many have said they were.

Anyway that's off the top of my head. Not sure if that helps.

Interesting take. I'll have to keep exploring. (Supposedly, John Mellencamp, of all people is a big fan.)

Oh man, I hate Roxy Music. Bryan Ferry is such a fake, such a poser with a face I want to punch and a horrible voice. Other than Virginia Plain, everything I've heard from Roxy Music is pretentious and Ferry is so up his own arse with 'coolness' that he comes across as comical, not sexy.

So I'm probably not the person to be able to give a reasoned answer to this question.

I think you would have to be raised British to truly get the subtleties of the backlash.

It's because it's fake. Ferry is from a working-class background, his father working in the mines, looking after pit ponies. The British do love a posho, but what they hate is someone pretending to be posh when they're actually "common as muck". Once Ferry started pretending to be one of the landed gentry, he became an object of ridicule.

Here's a really interesting history of Ferry's early life, in a two-up, two-down, and then a council house, and details of the bands he was in when he lived in the North-east.

"There’s an expression “you can take the boy out of the north but you can’t take the north out of the boy”. This certainly applies to people like Eric Burdon and AC-DC’s Brian Johnson whose ‘geordie’ dialect is still is unmistakable. There’s no pretence by Burdon and Johnson to be anything other than native north easterners. When asked about his early life in interviews, Bryan Ferry talks about his upbringing in County Durham. However, outwardly there are no traces of that background in his current persona of a wealthy upper class country gentleman."

Woah, I didn't know I was stepping into such a culture sore spot. I was just curious about a band so many people rave about but that never really hooked me.

(and well, as long as I've got you Brits here, I was fixing to write soemthing for MeCha about some other older videos like this one. Quick and Dirty version, my 13 year old self read an ad in Kerrang! and my local mall record store that these guys were offering free beer and food to their fans to come to a location in Belfast to be in the video. I'll fill in more detail when I write the longer peice. But anway, the building shown with all the kids rocking out-is that council flats, a council estate, bot neither or am I getting my terms totally wrong?)

Yes, those are 1930s council flats. The terminology is that council flats and houses when there's several streets of them form a council estate. Some estates, like the Becontree estate in Dagenham, or Mackworth in Derby, cover many, many acres. But, particularly in cities, you can get odd random small blocks of council flats on streets of private houses, generally as a result of WW2 bombing leaving gaps in streets.

When that video was made, those flats would have been 100% rented to council tenants, at rents that were well below market value, as council properties were generally for low income people who couldn't afford to rent privately or buy a property. But Thatcher introduced the Right to Buy, as a result of which millions of council properties were sold off to tenants at a huge discount, and none of the money could be used to build new council housing. The buyers couldn't sell for three years, or they had to pay back the discount out of the proceeds of sale. But once the three years were up, they could sell, and commercial landlords swooped in like sharks to buy up the houses and rent them out.

The result of the Right to Buy is that there is a massive shortage of social housing for low income families, nothing at all for single people, and councils are having to rent (at full market rent) from these commercial landlords the very properties they were forced to sell in order to house people on the housing list who, but for the Right to Buy removing these houses from the councils' inventory, would have a council house available to them.

Thanx. Sadly, I was not able to catch a bus or hitch a ride to Ireland, so missed my chance to be in the video. Too bad, looks like they were having a blast.

(In the US, we have HUD houses which tend to be ugly 2-families painted unnatural colors, or huge sprawling complexes like this one near my subway stop. And they always call the "Houses" or "Garden," when they're apartment buildings. Gets under my skin for some reason.)

On preview, there's similar shenanigans happening in many cities. In NYC (or Manhattan anyway) it's not unusual to see a Zagat rated retsaurant across from the projects.

Thanx. Sadly, I was not able to catch a bus or hitch a ride to Ireland, so missed my chance to be in the video. Too bad, looks like they were having a blast.

That was definitely London, not Ireland. That style of flats is specific to London.

You sure? The band is from Northern Ireland (County Fermanagh) and I could've sworn the ad said Belfast, but it was almost 40 years ago so who knows? Still looks like they were having a good time. Maybe somebody out there in internet land has a copy of that Kerrang!

Yes, I'm certain. I'm fairly sure it's the Rockingham Estate in Bermondsey.

That style of blocks of flats is specific to London, I've never seen it in any other UK city.

Oh, well then. Another mystery solved.

I actually like Roxy Music and, while there's not much of theirs on my usual playlist these days, I still like their music. I've always known (without knowing details of his background) that Ferry was a bit of a pretender and I think that was part of the appeal - working-class man made good etc. I get the disdain in the UK based on that very thing, though.

While I still like the music, I think the reason I was so into it all those years ago was likely because Ferry seemed to live the sort of life I would have if only I wasn't so awkward and uncool (still awkward and uncool, but I know better now).

BUT. I would never (then or now) consider them on the same level as the Stones, Led Zep, The Who, et al. I mean, I like their music and all and I guess I had a bit of a Bro-crush on Ferry, but their music never really had any influence on anything and both Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry were definitely lightweights in the music scene.

Best show I ever saw was Bryan Ferry, Hampton, Virginia, sometime in the mid 80s. He has a beautiful beautiful voice.