Having designed Roxy Music as an haute couture suit hand-stitched of punk and progressive music, Bryan Ferry redesigned it. He made Roxy Music ever dreamier and mellower-reaching back to sadly beautiful chivalric romances. Dadaist (punk) noise exited; a kind of ambient soft soul entered. Ferry parted ways with Eno, electric violinist Eddie Jobson, and drummer Paul Thompson, foreswearing the broken-sounding synthesizers played by kitchen utensils, the chance-based elements, and the maquillage of previous albums.
The production and engineering imposed onAvalonconfiscates emotion and replaces it with an acoustic simulacrum of courtliness, polished manners, and codes of etiquette. The seducer sings seductive music about seduction, but decorum is retained, asamour courtoisinsists.
The backbeat cannot beat back nostalgia; it remains part of the architecture ofAvalon, an album that creates an allusive sheen. Be nostalgic, by all means, but embrace that feeling's falseness, because nostalgia-whether inspired by medieval Arthuriana or 1940s film noir repartee or a 1980s drug-induced high-deceives. Nostalgia defines our fantasies and our (not Ferry's) essential artifice.
Simon Morrisonis a music historian specializing in 20th-century music. He is the author of
Bolshoi Confidential(2016) and
Lina and Serge(2013). The latter was featured on BBC Radio 4 (as Book of the Week ), BBC World News (TV), and WYNC. He has written for the
New York Times,New York Review of Books,London Review of Books, the
TLS, and
Time. An incisive overview.
Choice1. On Modernism
2. On Avalon
3. The High Road
4. The After-Party
Notes
Bibliography
![Roxy Music's Avalon [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/0/0/2/2_4476605.jpg "Roxy Music's Avalon [Paperback]")