Fourteen months after 1979’s comeback record Manifesto, Roxy Music returned in 1980 with a 42 minute work that solidified a notable transition in their sound. Bryan Ferry and co had moved away from the experimental art rock that had characterised them in their early days to elegantly embrace the nuances of disco, new wave, and luxuriant sophisticated pop.
The result was a more accessible album, but no less intriguing. The second of the band’s three number one albums in their recording career, this is Flesh + Blood.
The seventh Roxy Music album is generally accepted to have been released in the UK on 23 May. Pedantry details following, because as veteran record peddler Marshall Jarman tells me, back in the day, ‘release dates’ were always given as Friday but they weren’t in the shops on Friday … a ‘release date’ referred to the day they left the label’s premises.
“Most stores didn’t receive their stock until Monday. So, as far as punters were concerned the release date is the date they could go to the record shop and buy them i.e. Monday. In the US they had ‘release date’ for the day they were released by the record label and ‘street date’ for the day they went on sale at retail.”
“When the chain stores first started in Britain, they were buying directly from the label as opposed to from a wholesaler and so received theirs on Saturday. Due to complaints from independent shops, the BPI ruled that the chains couldn’t sell them before Monday to keep it fair.”
Now we’ve cleared that up, a brief recap of the contents, then. RMLP number seven received decidedly mixed reviews from the music press in 1980. A Rolling Stone review by someone called Ken Tucker panned it, but then when have Americans really ‘got’ the arty side of glam rock?
“Flesh + Blood is such a shockingly bad Roxy Music record that it provokes a certain fascination. The line on early Roxy (when Eno was a member) was that the band radiated high-tech decadence, and Flesh + Blood connects with this historical interpretation by confirming the decadent part: e.g., what could be more outré right now than an art-rock disco album?”
Back on home turf, Smash Hits’ David Hepworth thought “original followers may find it low on character and surprise while lovers of the mighty Over You should be suckers for its mature, silky charms.”
As I wrote for Record Collector magazine back in the nineties, a new romanticism had crept into Bryan Ferry’s work, and Manifesto and Flesh + Blood were the records that presaged his musical direction for the next 15 years.
From then on it would be series of impeccably crafted, sophisticated pieces of ‘quality’ music, ever more smoother, ever more slicker, ever more richer, with an ever-increasing roll call of blue chip session men to fill out the spotless sound in a string of studios in the world’s most expensive and exclusive locations.
Despite only containing eight new songs (no better or worse than For Your Pleasure, and three up on Station To Station by their art rock rival David Bowie), Flesh + Blood was a considerable commercial success — Roxy’s first No. 1 album since 1973’s Stranded — and contained three substantial hits:
Over You and Oh Yeah (On The Radio) were both UK No. 5s, while the mighty Chicisms and unstoppable groove of Same Old Scene (“Roxy’s most perfect dance record”, opined our colleague David Buckley) peaked at twelfth place.
There were also two slightly questionable cover versions: the Byrds’ Eight Miles High and Wilson Pickett’s In The Midnight Hour. Featuring future Ant Gary Tibbs on bass, the latter was released as a single in some territories, which explains its slightly incongruous inclusion on the Ferry/Roxy compilation Street Life: 20 Great Hits, the band’s and indeed Ferry’s last chart-topping release from 1986, and the first Roxy Music record I ever bought.
All I’ll say is that I’ve never been able to listen to that slightly lethargic take of In the Midnight Hour since Mark Winsborough heard me playing it that year on my Walkman at Bletchley Park college and burst out laughing.
C’est la vie.
Steve Pafford
Adapted from The Record Collector archives: Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music here
