Guilty Pleasures (Part 19)

GUILTY PLEASURES (Part 19)

I wonder what a Roxy Music audience looks like? Would it include anyone under the age of forty or might it be solely an over-fifties thing? Might a proportion be lisping, middle-aged homosexuals or balding, pot-bellied ex-lotharios? Would it be a men only thing or would women be equally represented? Who might the men be as in what kind of work might they do as a living? Brick layers, carpenters and navvies or office middle-management and shopkeepers? Who might the women be? Housewives, divorcees, and the kind who work behind the perfume counters at John Lewis and Debenhams? Who knows?

A few of the early Sex Pistols followers were Roxy Music fans – Siouxsie Sioux and the Bromley contingent et al, so there's obviously pedigree there. David Bowie was a fan. Roxy Music always straddled the lines between glam rock kitsch and art school weird with a layer of sexual ambiguity slapped all over them. Brian Eno was always an alien, Andy Mackay was a porn film extra and Bryan Ferry was a lounge lizard. The other two were just Sixties throwbacks painted with a sprinkle of glitter. Though what kind of name is 'Brian' for a pop star? What kind of name is 'Bryan' for an oily, sexually perverted, cocktail bar crooner?

Is it fair to suggest Roxy Music were one of the most interesting yet largely unacknowledged bands of that whole 1970s Top Of The Pops era? Is it fair to suggest that not Virginia Plain, not Street Life, or not any of their hits but a song called If There Was Something from their debut album is one of the greatest songs ever?

There's only one way to find out, I suppose. So see you at the Exmouth Pavilion in January, windowlickers, where an approximation of Roxy Music will be trying to seduce, bugger and abandon a selection of sexually ambivalent farmers and fishermen (along with their fishwives?) from various towns and villages dotted along the East Devon coast. It's going to be the first gig of the year and probably the best gig of the year also...