On the 24th August 1972, amongst the presentable Pop groups and
occasional long haired Rock band that were appearing on “Top of the Pops”,
Britain’s only ‘chart music’ TV programme, there was a debut performance from a
new group that no one had ever heard of, Roxy Music. They were there to perform
their debut single ‘Virginia Plain’.
I never missed Top of the Pops. I was 11 years old and Top of the Pops
was the central plank to my whole week. It was watched by millions of other 11
years olds across Britain, but despite its stature it was never as great as it
should have been. The really brilliant songs were all too often performed by
really dull Artists and the really exciting Artists were generally
intellectually uninspiring.
The friends that I watched Top of the Pops with tended to fall into two
categories, either they just accepted whatever it was that Top of the Pops were
offering them that week or they considered themselves to be way above Top of
the Pops and they exhibited this exclusivity by clutching serious ‘Rock’ albums
by Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd to their sides as they walked along our
Victorian school corridors. I loathed these ‘Rock’ people. The only use they
had for music seemed to be to demonstrate that they weren’t their parents. They
never showed any joy in the music they claimed to hold so dear.
And so it was on this particular Thursday in August in 1972 when Roxy
Music descended, seemingly from some distant galaxy, that along with hundreds
of other similarly weird, passionate, girly, mainly working class, alienated,
music obsessed, young British boys I discovered, possibility.
11, 12, 13 and 14 year old boys like David Sylvian, Simon Le Bon, George
O’Dowd, Gary Kemp, Holly Johnson and Philip Oakey saw their daydreams appear
before them in the flesh. A mélange of Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Noel
Coward, Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Andy Warhol, in fact everything that they
recognised as being intelligent, stylish and cool, everything that they loved,
there it was, right in front of them, on Top of the Pops, and it was making
music that sounded like nothing else they had ever heard. It was making, quite
literally, Roxy Music.
Nothing was ever the same again. The echoes of this debut
performance by Roxy Music would be heard and felt and seen time and time again
over the next 25 years. UK Punk Rock, Post-Punk, the New Romantics, Electro,
Ambient; all these musical genres, scenes and fashions had the seeds of their
existence sown on that night, 24th August 1972 when Roxy Music performed
‘Virginia Plain’ on Top of the Pops.
After seeing that performance I read everything I could find about them
and accompanying one early interview was a photograph that I studied for every
signifying element that I could adopt and utilise as part of my own identity.
On the table was a blue box. Clearer in the original than on this copy,
the box featured a dancing Señorita and a wisp of smoke and the word Gitanes.
My mother told me they were French cigarettes. Of course they were! Why would
Roxy Music smoke anything else?
Here’s that photo and another image, taken from the inside cover of
their second album ‘For Your Pleasure’. Even now, in 2014, you can see how
iconic the look of Roxy Music, and particularly Bryan Ferry, was.
Roxy Music made being a weird, girly, passionate, thinking,
working class, British boy on a council estate in Liverpool so much more
bearable. Roxy Music presented me, and others like me, with hope and
possibility.
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