Supposedly this was a dissident blow against rock's anti-fashion stance. That same certain sort of glam fan never stops being thrilled by the nerve and verve of Roxy Music giving a credit on their debut LP to the person who did their clothes, hair and makeup. He needn't have worried.There's a certain sort of glam-rock fan who never ceases to be blown away by the fact that Bowie played a character, the imaginary rock star Ziggy Stardust. Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera mused in a 2003 interview about being 'considered old dogs that were about to be shot and put out of their misery' before the band embarked on this 2001 tour, their first in some 18 years. Avalon was the last album released by Roxy Music and following the band’s break up Ferry delved back into his solo career, releasing his highest praised album yet Boys and. He returned to Roxy Music in 1979 and put out three more albums with the group: 1979’s Manifesto 1980’s Flesh + Blood and 1982’s Avalon.

Roxy's new live line up had Eddie Jobson on Keyboards & Violin andBass player Sal Maida joined Roxy for this tour. On the record sleeve and in the promo film for Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby?, the Stones wore women's clothing four years before Bowie put on a frock for the cover of 1970's The Man Who Sold the World.Roxy Music did their first shows without founder member Brian Eno on their Stranded tour in 1973. Nor were Bowie or Roxy's Brian Eno the first flamboyantly androgynous figures in rock. Most 1960s British bands took an interest in clothes and hair.

'Everything went flat,' recalls Phil Manzanera, the guitarist who responded to Ferry's 'avant rock' ad and eventually got the job. The song was rehearsed for the Avalon tour but was dropped after the first show in.Still, it is true that around 1970-71, rock got awfully drab looking, with countless denim-clad blues-bore and boogie bands, dressed-down singer-songwriters and country-rock outfits, and virtuoso players too wrapped up in their endless soloing to bother with stagecraft. Andy Mackay - Oboe & Sax.Avalon is a music studio album recording by ROXY MUSIC (Crossover. Bryan Ferry - Vocals & Keyboards.

In truth, Eno's feather boas, Bryan Ferry's gaucho look of 1974… they haven't aged that well. In Roxy's case, the attention paid to the group's fashion world connections, pop art allegiances and other extra-musical credentials threatens to overshadow their achievements as a rock band. Glam historians tend to emphasise the lipstick at the expense of the rock'n'roll they focus overly on the gender-bending rather than the genre-bending. It was a tiny stage but it had theatrical lighting, so you had to wear make-up because that's what theatre people do, otherwise you look washed-out.'John Lennon once quipped that glam was just rock'n'roll with lipstick. We supported Bowie at the Greyhound in Croydon in June 1972: Bowie in his full Ziggy Stardust gear and us in all our regalia, performing to just 150 people in this little upstairs room. 'They were out of it, so they weren't even bothering to wear kaftans or other hippie stuff, which had been stylish in their own way.' Then, with the emergence of Roxy Music and Bowie in 1972, 'suddenly there was colour and exoticism and the spirit of rock'n'roll again.

Manzanera recalls listening recently for the first time in ages to The Bob (Medley), the six-part song-suite on 1972's Roxy Music, a sort of 'mini-movie' concept piece about the second world war. The music, though, remains timeless in its weirdness and wildness.What gets swept under the carpet by the 'first true band of the 70s' argument is that the Roxy Music of the first three albums is a post-psychedelic outfit: as much progressive rock as glam rock. Even the celebrated covers of the first five albums, with their lingerie-clad models, look cheesy and chauvinist these days (apart from the still-edgy sleeve of For Your Pleasure, a perversely stylised shot of Amanda Lear walking a panther).

And before Manzanera got the gig, the group's guitarist was David O'List, formerly of the Nice, the original prog band.Early on, Ferry went along with the progressive scene's disdain for chart pop, declaring: 'We're not a singles band, really. At one point Ferry actually auditioned to be King Crimson's singer. But Roxy's earliest champions were, in fact, John Peel, who invited them to record a session for his show, Melody Maker's Richard Williams, who got the hype ball rolling, and management company EG, whose other clients included King Crimson and ELP, and who hitched Roxy up with Island Records, the leading progressive label of the era. Roxy just wouldn't get signed today.'Those who view Roxy as pioneers of surface-deep postmodern pop regard the band as radically opposed to the earthy earnestness of what was then known as the underground: long-haired, beardy bands like Soft Machine and Family who played the college gig circuit, recorded sessions for John Peel, appeared on The Old Grey Whistle Test and got written up in Melody Maker. It's such a mish-mash of stuff. The whole of that first album sounds so weird.

Some, like The Bob or If There Is Something were more like several songs joined together. A fan of minimalist composers like Steve Reich, Eno was a non-musician who supplied Roxy with irruptions of abstract synth and tape effects: things that were 'part of experimental electronic music', recalls Manzanera, 'but we used them in the context of songs'.The songs themselves weren't exactly conventional either. Manzanera's previous band were Quiet Sun, an outfit influenced by Zappa, Pink Floyd and Soft Machine, while drummer Thompson worshipped Led Zep's John Bonham. 'We had some weird things that other bands didn't have, like someone playing oboe,' Manzanera says of Mackay, who was classically trained and whose interest in the avant garde later resulted in the fine book Electronic Music. I was astounded when we had a hit record.'More than half the band – Manzanera, Eno, Andy Mackay, Paul Thompson – came from experimental music, trippy-proggy or heavy rock backgrounds.

Even after Eno's departure, Manzanera continued to pursue the absurdism and studio-boffin experimentation on the third album, Stranded. The product of the strong bond Manzanera formed with Eno, For Your Pleasure is comparable with Hendrix circa Electric Ladyland or Tim Buckley's Starsailor in its use of the studio and recording tape as a canvas for sound painting.In late 1973, looking back at the first two Roxy albums not long after he was pushed out of the band, Eno enthused about the music's 'insanity… the element of clumsiness and grotesqueness', the 'terrific tension', caused by the group 'juxtaposing things that didn't naturally sit together'. Even more far out is the title track/finale to For Your Pleasure, especially its hallucinatory extended coda of pointillistic piano trills, like the Milky Way going down the cosmic plughole. 'That was my chance to vent my inner psychedelia,' Manzanera laughs. But there were also upsurges of maximalism, acid rock flashbacks like the second half of In Every Dream Home a Heartache, with its phased drumming and gaseously billowing guitar. Neither has a chorus, just a single verse melody repeated.This minimalist aspect to Roxy Music came from one of the motley crew's few shared passions: the Velvet Underground.

'It goes back to Tin Pan Alley and the 1930s,' says Manzanera. Because music publishing operates according to an antiquated, pre-rock conception of composition that rewards those who write the top-line melody and lyrics, most Roxy tunes are credited solely to Ferry. That first and only take is what you hear on the album.Amazona was the first song on a Roxy album for which Manzanera received a credit. It sounds like the work of several guitarists but it's just Manzanera playing through a complex relay of distortion, repeat echoes and vari-pitch, using a specially built contraption that worked just once.

But that's not reflected in the publishing.'It's all the more unfair because, according to Manzanera, from about halfway through For Your Pleasure and onwards, the band would write 'the music first – all the music, including the solos. I like to think that we produced the musical context for Bryan to put his vision into. Each member was contributing to the music and to all the arrangements.

Which is not to downplay the importance of Ferry's 'completion' role. Then Bryan turns up, and he sings it, and we're like, 'bloody hell, we've got a single'.'Rather than the players 'backing' their singer/leader, then, it would be more accurate to say that Ferry fronted them: many of Roxy's greatest songs would never have been written in the absence of what had been generated first by the musicians. Imagine, you've been working on Love Is the Drug for absolutely ages, with no idea that it's even going to be called Love Is the Drug. Because none of us knew what the song was going to be about until he recorded the vocal. When it worked, it was absolutely brilliant.

Roxy Music Avalon Tour