Customer Reviews

Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music

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David Buckley's presentation of Bryan Ferry is jaundiced and often completely wrong. He begins by asserting that Roxy Music (and David Bowie) was the first Punk band and proceeds to evaluate them from that point of view, thus discarding anything that doesn't fit into this view. This view is unfortuantely just absolutely WRONG. Though their "content over ability" might link them to Punk, Roxy Music and David Bowie were extensions of the Hippy Movement and Flower Power. In 1972-73 Punk was just not on the horizon. No doubt this is the result of David Buckley not discovering Roxy Music till much later (he says he saw Roxy Music on Top of the Pops in Dec 1973 when he was nine, but admits on page XV that "his" Roxy Music was from Manifesto onwards) so it seems that he is attempting to see their 1972-73 period through the lens of Punk, which is neither "history" nor "research", it's just opinion and it's erroneous.

Furthermore, David Buckley seems to be of the opinion that Brian Eno WAS Roxy Music. He repeatedly cites Eno and the first two albums as if they were the only acceptable output Roxy Music ever made, and as if Brian Eno was responsible for EVERYTHING on those albums.

To give but one example, he says on page 120 that "For Your Pleasure" reached a "thumping No 4" on the albums charts. We all know that there was nothing "thumping" or spectacular about reaching No 4. A few pages later Buckley barely mentions that Stranded got to No 1 in the UK, as if that album didn't matter at all because Eno had left. It was not however how it was perceived at the time. It was and still is the apex of Roxy Music's output and the beginning of their mature work.

Inconsistencies like this abound. David Buckley seems not to understand or appreciate Bryan Ferry's aesthetic intentions or development as an artist. (Frantic seems to be the first album Ferry has made since For Your Pleasure that seems to appeal to David Buckley!!). He prefers to praise and exult Eno while failing to to see that Ferry has continued to develop and expand on the ambience and atmospheric textures of Roxy Music's first two albums in the same way that Brian Eno has done but using completely different means and ends. He rubbishes most of Ferry's work because it is not like the first two Roxy Music albums. This is just a completely ridiculous position to take and only shows how compleltey misguided this "history" of Roxy Music is.

Wordsworth was similarly "punished" and condemned by self-appointed experts whose expectations we not met when Wordsworth did not continue to write in the style and with the verve he had written in his first book of poems!!

This kind of expectation placed on artists is completely ludicrous and has been responsible for ruining many a talent. Why should a 60 year old man write like an 18 year old? Just because one starts out being radical doesn't mean that one has to be radical in the same way forever. Who's to say that one can't go from radical to conservative and then to radical again and any other combination of those in between?

People like David Buckley ought to write novels. There he could put his creative expectations (and frustrations) onto his own characters and not on great artists like Bryan Ferry who has his own trajectory independent of David Buckley's expectations.

David Arthur-Simons