Gavin B.

Song of the Day


Bryan Ferry- Roxy Music's elegant avatar of style

Dance Away- Roxy Music

Even if Bryan Ferry was given to fashion excess, as his lime colored dayglow suit in the video below demonstrates, Roxy Music was without peer in the fine art of crafting the stylish romantic pop ballad. Dance Away is the anchor song is from 1979's Manifesto. Manifesto along with Avalon (1982) is everything you need to know about the second half of Roxy Music's recording career.

All other Roxy albums from 1976 until 1982 are redundant to the point of being too much of a good thing . Only Manifesto and Avalon have the staying power of Roxy's first string of 5 near-perfect albums from 1972 through 1975 for Virgin Records, all of which have remastered and reissued over the past five years.

Face it, music lovers, Dance Away is deeply discoid song, but even so, Bryan Ferry's plaintive world weary lyrics will break the heart of anyone who ever searched for love in all the wrong places:

The best lines of the song come earlier when the lovelorn, star crossed Ferry sighs sadly, "you're dressed to kill and guess who's dying?" People simply don't write lines like that any more.

Alas, by 1979, Roxy Music was beginning to sound a bit out of step with the lead edge of contemporary music scene. Sad to say, but the sun was beginning to set on Roxy Music. The band that was the very epitome of style throughout most of the Seventies was going out of style.

As a Roxy loyalist I bought my mandatory copy of Manifesto but I was more attuned to that other great icon of the glam era, David Bowie as he released Lodger, the final volume of his Berlin trilogy, a fusion of high concept pop with avant garde experimentalism.

Ironically Bowie's collaborator on the Berlin project was Roxy Music founder turned ambient music theorist, anti-rock experimentalist, and future uber producer Brian Eno. Both Eno and Bowie's careers profited tremendously for the timing of their musical partnership. Bowie maintained his street cred with those on the cutting edge of music and Eno who was widely viewed as an avant garde curiosity by the mid-Seventies, expanded his work as a producer of other high profile musicians like Devo, the Talking Heads, and U2.

At the dawn of the post punk era Bowie's tranfiguration from glam rocker to musical provocateur was a shrewd move, as the mighty institution of 70s arena rock crumbled in the aftershocks of the punk revolution. Bowie was more important than he ever was in 1979. Bowie the Chamelon recalibrated his musical oeuvre and fashion sense to blend with the post-punk backdrop and survived, at least for the moment.

Litte did we know that Roxy Music was three years away from the release of Avalon their stunning 1982 swan song album which, for better or worse, was influential enough to alter the direction of post punk music for the rest of the Eighties.

So in the final analysis Bryan and Roxy Music trumped Bowie and forced him to move from the cutting edge to the center, as Bowie followed in 1983 with an album of synthesized post-disco dance music, Let's Dance an album that sounded very much like Roxy Music.

Let's Dance was a turning point in Mr. Bowie's career. Following Let's Dance Bowie spent the past 25 years unable to restore the delicate balance between the commercial and the experimental that made his music so important in the Seventies.

Roxy Music went out at the top in 1982 with Avalon, arguably their greatest album ever, while Bowie has floundered though the rest of the Eighties and into his middle age unable to recapture the musical glory of his "golden years."

I am not worthy, Mr. Ferry. The rumors of Roxy's death in 1980 were greatly exaggerated. Many of us thought Manifesto was about as good as we'd ever get from Roxy Music in the autumn of their years. That being said, Manifesto was still a pretty good gift to get in 1979, even in the glut of great post punk music being made at the turn of the 70/80s decade.

This song Dance Away was radically extended for a 12" mix. While the extension was only a drum beat break in the middle, everyone just had to have that extra 2 minutes to be stylin' on the dance floor. The video is a classic dance floor rendition with Ferry swaying in the aforementioned dayglow lime suit and using his patented "seductive right-eyebrow arch" to sing the lyrics to great romantic effect. Note Bryan's metallic silver loafers when he walks down the steps to the runway. The shoes are perfectly matched to his silver colored ultra-skinny necktie.

My older sister will never look at older photographs of herself because it documents the history of her taste for the lastest strange hair-do trends. The burgundy colored hair with the sleek and angular pageboy cut was really workin' for her back in 1980, but she woke up one day in 2009 wondering what the hell she was thinking about back then. A retrospective Roxy's videos would in the same manner provide a historical documentation for Bryan Ferry's taste for short-lived fashion trends. I'm betting Mr. Ferry makes no apologies because fashion excess is always a viture when you live the glamorous life.

Timeless? Maybe not. Endearing? You betcha. Dance Away remains a song that is near and dear to the fans of Roxy Music.