Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Select JANUARY 1996 - by Clark Collis

ROXY MUSIC: THE THRILL OF IT ALL

You could have spent a long time scouring early '70s London for two more disparate-looking art-school types than Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno. They might, indeed, have made a good comedy duo (Smoothie and Slaphead perhaps), but chose perversely to form a band instead, in fact, for a few years. Roxy Music were pretty much the British band, tossing off pop gems (Virginia Plain, Do The Strand), classic albums and dramatic costume changes with a louche style that somehow the likes of Slade and The Bay City Rollers never quite matched. It didn't last, of course, and after recording 1973's For Your Pleasure, Eno left to pursue his own path of weirdness. Ferry and the other blokes, meanwhile, canned much of the aural experimentation and went on to achieve massive, if massively mainstream, global success before calling it a day in 1982.

Spread over four CDs and featuring seventy-odd tracks, The Thrill Of It All contains everything you need to know about Roxy Music. And quite a lot more. A lot of the early instrumentals, for example, now sound like rejected icecream Jingles, while there's little doubt that the band's later years contained more maudlin lounge lizardry than even the most down-at-heel Holiday Inn would wish to possess. The recently released single-LP compilation would suit the casual customer much better. Yet, listening to say, Love is The Drug, Pyjamarama or even their swansong Avalon, it's difficult to think of many bands who can claim such a consistency in music, vision or indeed really pointy wingtip collars.

Soundbite: "Life of Bryan and Brian"