CityLife

Must see: Roxy Music

Frontman Bryan Ferry

MEN Arena - January 30, 2011 (Sunday)

Some 40 years on from when they first formed, the British band that took New Wave art rock to the top of the charts in the 1970s are back in Manchester. And while their sporadic visits might look like Mancophobia, they actually reflect a career full of down time.

The group and their music have endured down the decades, but whole generations have reached maturity during Roxy’s break-up years.

And while that means the band members may no longer be in the prime of their lives (frontman Bryan Ferry is officially a pensioner, aged 65), lead guitarist Phil Manzanera believes you can’t say the same about Roxy’s music... “A lot of these songs don’t sound dated,” enthuses Phil about the band’s eight-album archive of material.

“I don’t know whether that’s because they’re simple and we recorded and constructed them in a very organic way.

“They weren’t done on computers, just human beings playing together and capturing a moment in the studio.

“That has some intrinsic value.”

Like all great bands, Roxy Music were about a package. One listen to For Your Pleasure is enough to tell you they had the tunes, but they also had the looks and the lifestyle.

Just 20 and (in his own words) ‘hot to trot’, Manzanera understood the value of getting all the elements right from the beginning.

“I had this whole visual thing from the late 1960s and psychedelia,” remembers Manzanera, famous for his bug-eyed glasses and flowing locks, “the idea of getting your music, then deciding on a visually attractive way of presenting it and getting all the best bits of rock ‘n’ roll, films and glamour.

“Rock ‘n’ roll was always about music and image, from Elvis’s gold la­me suit to The Beatles in their jackets and punk with its safety pins.

“When you have image and music it can be very strong. Image and no music is a waste of time; music and no image is pretty good, but when you’ve got both you’ve got Elvis, The Beatles…”

Of course, the perfect package also tends to involve intra-band friction. At its best, it’s responsible for the creative tension and spark between the key songwriters; at its worst, it descends into a battle of the egos.

For Roxy Music, it was a bit of both. “Eighty-five per cent of the time it was very happy,” says Manzanera. “During that early period there was a lot of pressure and we were doing an enormous amount of touring, and people get tired and irritable.

“That’s part of being in a band. But no band that’s worth anything is a bunch of yes men. It’s difficult to live with the creative tension, but it does produce better work than a bunch of soppy yes people.

“If you know that what you do is going to be examined by the others, you work in a different way. It sharpens everything up.”

A producer since the 1970s for rock greats like John Cale and David Gilmore, Manzanera has certainly learnt a lot about what it takes to make a lasting record. And he says that none of his enthusiasm has faded; today’s music scene is just as exciting as it was in the 1970s, but also uniquely challenging.

“I see lots of very talented young people, lots of great young people who can sing, whether it’s watching The X Factor or hearing demos from people or watching new bands – I’m very heartened,” he says.

“The problem for those people is that there’s almost too many of them. It’s terribly difficult for them to earn a living.”

£50/£65.