Re-make/Re-model: Becoming Roxy Music (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this innovative and intelligent book, British novelist and essayist Bracewell (The Nineties: When Surface Was Depth) explores how the 1972 release of the eponymously named debut album by Roxy Music—a manifesto written in the language of heavily stylized, nuanced and atmospheric pop and rock music—was actually the culmination of a decade-long British movement in which fine art and the avant-garde met the vivacity of pop and fashion with the goal of dissolving the boundaries between high and low art forms. Bracewell describes in fascinating detail a range of famous and obscure artists, first in the fine arts departments at Newcastle and Reading universities and later in the London of the swinging '60s, and delivers in effect a history of the British pop art movement, with special praise for the influence of artist Richard Hamilton at Newcastle, with whom Roxy Music's Bryan Ferry studied. By the time Bracewell ends his look at Roxy Music at its moment of becoming, he has definitively shown how the roots of Ferry's artistic vision of the band, both as a musical group and as a pop art concept, helped him produce one of the most original groups of its time, fusing an eclectic range of influences from modern music, popular culture and fine art (Dec.)
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Review

"Bracewell is an adroit cultural analyst." -- Sunday Times (UK), 10/28/2007

"Bracewell writes well, with a tailor's attention to detail. He's excellent, too, on the immediate cultural backdrop to the first, groundbreaking Roxy Music album..." -- Mojo, November 2007

"Bracewell chronicles a time between the summer of love and punk's year zero when young trailblazers in art, music, academia, and fashion collaborated. Bracewell's stylized prose and full interview access to all involved easily vaults this book past David Buckley's The Thrill of It All and Jonathan Rigby's Both Ends Burning. Recommended for all libraries." -- Library Journal, starred review

"Exhaustively researched...Bracewell offers a dissertation, not on the dry facts that led to the formation of this massively successful and influential ensemble, but rather, on the particular intellectual and artistic milieu which enabled and encouraged it." -- Buffalo News

"Looking beyond the obvious influence of artists-provocateurs like Duchamp and Warhol, Bracewell considers the impact of such members of the Roxy orbit as clothing designer Antony Price and hair stylist Keith Wainwright...Those with an endless interest in English art movements of the '60s may find Bracewell's work endlessly fascinating." -- Kirkus Reviews

"Michael Bracewell likes to draw wider cultural contexts into his books, so this is as much the story of British pop artist Richard Hamilton and his Newcastle Uni fine art course--where Ferry forged the ideas that would bloom into Roxy music--as it is about the band." -- Q Magazine

"Roxy Music left an enduring impression on British pop culture and Bracewell tracks all the connections with engaging thoroughness." -- Design Observer

"This book is a perfect fit between cool subject and stuffy author...Beautifully rich in not-necessarily linear history that jumps decades without much notice, Bracewell's tale elegantly, irksomely and so-very loquaciously tackles the most brittle of glam icons." -- Harp

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (April 7, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306814005
• ISBN-13: 978-0306814006
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #744,916 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Genuinely original , June 16, 2008

By	Harry Hardcastle - See all my reviews

Finding a balance between a forensic social history and something that anybody would actually want to read is a difficult one. This is an example that succeeds. Rarely have I been projected by a book into a different time and space and returned to feel so enriched by the experience. It is to Bracewell's credit that he has managed to do this by excavating the recesses of this brilliant band's pre-history by speaking with the protagonists, drawing upon their memories and personal archives intelligently and without prejudice. The result is a work that serves as a delight for true Roxy fans and those in any way interested in the middle-century history of England.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Art History, August 12, 2008

By	Steven Thornton (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a history of how Pop art was disseminated across Britain, and how the Sixties turned into the Seventies, as much as it is a story about Roxy Music. Bryan Ferry doesn't meet Brian Eno until page 335, of a ~400-page book! But Ferry, Eno and Andy Mackay didn't just pop out of suitcases in 1972; their careers started much earlier, in Newcastle, Reading, and Ipswitch, and this book brilliantly tells you how. He draws heavily on Jonathon Green's "All Dressed Up" (suppressed for idiotic reasons, but highly recommended) in explaining the milieu of Sixties art and fashion, and how important these provincial players ended up being. The stuff on Richard Hamilton in Newcastle, especially, is fascinating, and opens up the real Sixties in ways that more conventional rock bios could never approach. Roxy was an art project, and if you don't understand the art background, you don't understand the music.

I didn't give it five stars because of the exceptionally poor quality of the photo reproductions -- the book calls them "plates" but they look more like hundred-year-old newspaper cuts. You can barely make out what's in them, which is a shame.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not worth the effort, April 19, 2009

By	G. DeRome "minister-of-truth" (Greendale, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I found this book almost completely unreadable. I guess if you are interested in the obscure machinations of the avant-guarde art scene in 1950s/60s Newcastle then you might be able to slag through the leaden prose. I found it hard going. I just wanted to learn more about Roxy Music, how they formed, why, the stories behind some of their songs and albums, etc. Pretty hard to ferret that out of this book. To each his own.

And, yes, I did actually read it.