Writing in his blog on the News Letter website, Phil Crossey recently argued that the chief interest of young people in 2008 is more likely to be fashion than a contemporary music scene whose heart is less than vibrant.
I was reminded of one way in which this observation might be added to while watching vintage performance footage of Roxy Music, the band whose records formed the apex of 70s pop and whose story was the focus of a documentary that has been streaming o
n the BBC’s iPlayer this week.
As anyone familiar with pieces on Roxy produced for print, radio or television will know, it is all but mandatory for any account of the group to quote some music biz worthy – in this latest case, Bono – on the subject of how startling it was to witness the otherworldly glamour of Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno and company when Roxy emerged in the early 70s.
Those commentators often avow that the rarefied inventiveness of the band’s sound and image made one feel, at the time, as though one were catching a glimpse of an exciting future. In contrast, to watch recordings of those early performances now may be to invite an uncanny sensation of past, present and future being leveled out in the production of a frighteningly static plateau.
The reason for this, is that with their tight leather jackets and jeans, checked shirts, silk scarves and floral print dresses, a crowd of bright young things dancing at a Roxy Music performance in 1972 looks remarkably similar to its 2008 near-equivalent at any given indie show or disco.
What’s more, we have grown accustomed to bands on stage acting as a mirror to this rather than challenging it, as Roxy and others once did, with something strange and new and pregnant with possibilities in terms of how various art forms – and, or including, fashion – might cross-pollinate.
So, from a 2008 perspective, the words of Simon Puxley in his sleevenotes for the first Roxy Music album seem to take on a kind of haunting irony: “The mind loses its bearings. What’s the date again? (It’s so dark in here).”
At the same time, it must be recognised that part of what makes Roxy’s output such an intriguing proposition, is that it seems to anticipate our strong 21st century nostalgia for a bygone glorious age (or ages) of popular culture. Time and again, Bryan Ferry’s songs bear witness to the pull of nostalgia for a pre-1940s world of elegant George Gershwin and Cole Porter pop, art deco architecture and décor, immaculately crafted clothing and a general trend in favour of adding aesthetic beauty to the everyday.
It is significant that the early Roxy did not attempt to produce a seamless recreation of this world on their records. Instead, they chose to evoke it through incorporating its elements among diverse others in a fractured collage of iconography and musical styles.
As Ferry himself mentioned in the BBC documentary, this approach was influenced by his studies at Newcastle University under the tutelage of the Pop Art collage-painter Richard Hamilton.
The full article contains 533 words and appears in News Letter newspaper.
