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Uncut JANUARY 2023 - by John Robinson

ROXY MUSIC: 02 ARENA, LONDON, OCTOBER 14

Bryan Ferry and company celebrate their many selves at elegant 50th-anniversary soirée

Bryan Ferry arches an eyebrow and stares us down, as Roxy Music tear into Re-Make/Re-Model. Gold lamé, green eyeshadow... this is undoubtedly how you start off the final date of a fiftieth- anniversary tour. And, yes, grudgingly, while it's true that this version of Bryan Ferry (like the fleeting appearance of Brian Eno) is only here via the show's substantial audio-visual package, it does tell you plenty about how Roxy Music feel about Roxy Music these days.

Their guidance would seem to be for us not to think of the people on stage as young men who have become older. It's more to consider them in art-school terms: that this is simply a new edition of a classic work. There are some updated elements, but the essential features remain the same. Bryan Ferry's great inspiration Bob Dylan has made an ethos out of "don't look back". Ferry himself, however, is all about the do-over.

Over the last fifty years this has entailed him covering Roxy songs on his solo albums. This year it means tweaks to the catalogue via half-speed vinyl remasters, a collection of lyrics, and a vaguely exclusive world tour: large venues, but a mere dozen dates. Given the age of the participants - Ferry is seventy-seven now - the event has the air of a last dance at the end of a heady evening. It's a very Roxy Music kind of feeling.

Still, the mood in the room is not wistful but celebratory. Some here are honouring the band's image, others digging in for the music - and both are rewarded. Bryan Ferry has worked hard on the visual element of the performance, and it shows. Rather than the conventional big TV on which we see an artist perspiring, our view of Roxy Music is refracted across a three- screen deck, one stacked behind the other. On these surfaces, images and film of Roxy past sit side by side with their classic iconography and present live performance - an entertaining juxtaposition, like some updated Richard Hamilton collage.

In the room, it all speaks to the enduring tightness and hugeness of Roxy's concept and also to the innovation of Ferry the individual. Rather than asking you to pick sides in a received argument between the band's glam 1970s (aspirational, art-school, good) and the years 1979-1982 (affluent, pleated trousers, bad), it feels as if he is trying a third way: a new narrative which proposes a Roxy for 2022, all about continuity.

Ferry himself, though the architect of the whole deal, is entertainingly humble about his position in the scheme of things. At one point, he addresses the audience as if we, all twenty thousand of us, might just be mildly curious walk-ins. "I hope you enjoy our setlist..." he says, a still unconventional, still vaguely uncomfortable frontman, gesturing vaguely about the place, "...from across all the albums we've made."

Abundantly, from Ladytron to Oh Yeah and beyond, we do. Roxy's former EG management cohorts King Crimson have talked about their recent live shows as a "completion" and that might also be applicable to a degree here. At the show you are encouraged to hear Roxy's catalogue not as a game of two halves, but as a harmonious resolution.

There's a linking theme of colour on the screens, as golds and greens become a deep ocean blue during the later material, but it's in the playing and the sequencing of the music where the intention reveals itself. Roxy have superb songs, but their best moments come from their musical departures - say, the Hawkwindy kosmische that develops in Out Of The Blue; or in the creepy, Genesis-like The Bogus Man.

These moments, at which Andy Mackay's medieval sax lines and Phil Manzanera's guitar begin to blend with each other, are when it all really starts to happen. During If There Is Something ("written," says Ferry, "in the bloom of youth, as it were"), where a whole sequence of these noodling sections is stacked end on end, Ferry is beaming hugely. It's as if, for him, these bits - spooky, proggy, cinematic - are what it's all about.

Manzanera radiates great skills and much bonhomie, while Paul Thompson, absent in 2011, is back and hitting hard. Yet it's Mackay, recognisably himself but possibly a bit less nippy than the other original members, who is worked pretty hard to achieve continuity. While Ferry and Manzanera disappear offstage for a rest after In Every Dream Home A Heartache, Mackay bridges the time lapse into the 1980s with the instrumental Tara.

Perhaps the music that follows registers more subtly on the seismograph, but the same tricksy musical relationships are there. They could have done this setlist any number of different ways - To Turn You On appears but Take A Chance With Me does not - but clearly choices have been made to create a misty foreground which will show the more subtle peaks of the later material in greater relief.

Few though the audience interactions are - Ferry introduces the backing singers, who include Fonzi Thornton, who was there for Avalon in 1982, and Phebe Edwards, who wasn't born then but still hits the super-high note on Avalon itself - you feel completely engaged, in the grip of a performance, but also of something thoughtful and even cerebral.

For Ferry, the curator of this major retrospective, it has clearly been about delivering the best possible version of the band's many selves, in the person of their current one. When the band leave us, it's with a juxtaposition of eras: peak accessibility (Jealous Guy, 1981) and high art (Do The Strand, 1972), and a feeling that it couldn't have gone much better. This didn't recreate what Roxy were, or ponder what they might have been. More interestingly, it celebrated what the band are now.