by Simon Philo
In January 1972, Bowie had told Disc’s Dai Davies that it was “the youth that are feeling the boredom most; they are crying out for leadership to such an extent that they will even resort to following the words of some guitar hero.” Was Ziggy sounding the end of days? Was he offering a way out or through it? Whatever the “message” here—and however muddled—it surely represented something more intriguing and thought provoking than that being delivered by T. Rex. “At this point,” explained Bowie, “I had a passion for the idea of the rock star as meteor” (qtd. in Heylin, Madmen, 218); and, as Ziggy’s story indicated, this arc would not end well. For meteors burn bright, travel at great speed, and then just as surely crash and burn. So it is that in the album’s curtain call, “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide,” as prophesied, our hero meets a sticky end at the hands of his own adoring fans. Technically, then, not a “suicide.” More an act of (self-)sacrifice or martyrdom that does not appear to be in vain, as, in true glam spirit, the expiring Ziggy extends an invitation to his “wonderful” audience to join (“gimme your hands”)—the “leper messiah” offering “the kids” a real contact high. “You’re not alone,” he cries. “I’ll help you with the pain,” he promises. “Just turn on with me.” It was a further, even more dramatic, and powerful illustration of that genre-defining bond between performer and audience that could be found in the superinclusive “Starman.” With a sustained piano note recalling the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” as the song—and album—came to a close, it sealed a very glam moment of euphoric communion.
Unsurprisingly, even before related charges of irony and camp were taken into consideration, it was this shameless theatricality that was often the root cause of the poor critical reception the album received. Missing the point entirely, in Oz, Nick Kent, for example, complained that Bowie appeared to be trying to “hype himself as something he isn’t.” In Sounds, the reviewer noted that Ziggy Stardust “could have been the work of a competent plagiarist,” concluding that “a lot of it sounds as if he didn’t work on the ideas as much as he could have done.” Typically, both reviews would do little more than betray the journalists’ fealty to rock authenticity and naturalism. Only Michael Watts in Melody Maker appeared to be dialed in to what Bowie was trying to do and say. He noted that, while the album documented “the ascent and decline of a big rock figure,” it left “the listener to fill in his own details.” “In the process,” Watts pointed out, Bowie was “also referring obliquely to his own role as a rock star and sending it up” (qtd. in Doggett, Man, 151). Perceptive reviews were the exception, though. In New Musical Express, Roy Carr pegged Bowie on the evidence presented on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars as all “hype and hoax,” a “singing boutique who appeals to only freaks” (qtd. in Sandbrook, State, 353).
Such opinions tell us much more about the reviewer than they do about the musician and his work. That tiresome classic rock ideology might well have been “an inherently vague concept,” but its grip was mighty powerful and “certain features” were “indisputable” (Wyn Jones 84). Above all, then, the critical consensus on glam—which had begun to form and rapidly harden in response to T. Rex’s spectacular successes in the previous year and which was now very much in evidence in the majority of reviews of Ziggy—was undeniably shaped by what Barker and Taylor call the “spectre of authenticity” that had grabbed rock in a headlock in the mid-1960s and which showed few signs of loosening in the early ’70s. Glam emerged at a time when rock music was widely understood as “a mode of performance characterised by a strong desire to stop acting and get real” (157). In an affront and open challenge to this much-prized article of faith, it would clearly revel in its inauthenticity. So, in fact, there is a case to be made for glam being ultimately more honest in brazenly celebrating the fact that rock—no different to pop—is a performance. Writing about the “problem of how self-consciousness affects performers,” Barker and Taylor highlight the two ways in which performers look to negotiate “the gap between the person you think you are and the persona that others perceive.” The artist-performer who strives to minimize this “gap”—and so tries to “project the authentic person and also live up to the persona that he projects”—is guaranteed to win favor with classic rock ideologues. He or she invariably looks to communicate a “simple honesty” about who he or she is, and so seeks to “avoid dishonesty by becoming the person that [he or she is] perceived to be”—traveling a righteous path that “leads to the quest for personal authenticity, integrity and sincerity in music.” The alternative path, however, is the rock(y) road least traveled—one on which the artist-performer will “glorify the degree to which [he or she is] faking it” and so “theatrically celebrate [his or her] ability to perform a role, to take on a persona (or a series of personas) that is clearly not meant to reflect the real [self].” Such a “highly theatrical” approach is one that inevitably leads to accusations of “faking it.” Yet, such charges are absurd. For one thing, “authenticity is rarely an issue with music for which the performer intentionally adopts a theatrical approach” (243–45).
If Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust had given the rock orthodoxy palpitations, then an album released on the same day in June 1972 would threaten to induce a full-on nervous breakdown. Guest reviewing in Melody Maker, Slade’s Dave Hill had described “Re-Make/Re-Model”—the opening track on Roxy Music’s eponymous debut LP—as “very unusual” sounding, “like something from [King] Crimson,” albeit with a bit of Rolling Stones in there too. Hill’s conclusion was that, with “a lot of influences” on the album, Roxy Music “must be a very mixed-up band” (qtd. in History 1972, 68). He meant it as a compliment. Other reviewers would not be so generous. For starters, Roxy Music’s name alone appeared guaranteed to rile rock’s classicists. Music that was “roxy” was highly unlikely to be earthy and honest. Surely it would be flashy, kitschy even—like those movie houses up and down the land that bore the same name? Then there were statements such as this from the group’s leader, Bryan Ferry, that seemed deliberately designed to annoy—“I don’t honestly think that one has time these days to really be sincere about anything” (qtd. in Turner, Glam Rock, 75). More explicitly antirock in both word and deed than even David Bowie, Roxy Music’s work was replete with intertextuality, actively collapsing both the high/low and rock/pop cultural divides. Almost alone among a rather hostile British rock journalist fraternity, Melody Maker’s Richard Williams declared Roxy Music to be an “extraordinary album from an extraordinary group.” Music that “consciously displays echoes of pretty well every style of pop and rock” was not, he argued, “a hotch-potch,” but was instead “contemporary [as the band] use their awareness of earlier modes to inform and reinforce their own unique ideas.” If the word “postmodern” had then been in critical usage, it might well have represented a good fit for Roxy Music.
For Williams, “the adjectives—imaginative and intelligent—pretty much sum up where they score over the muddy morass of mediocre rockers truckin’ nightly up and down the M1” (qtd. in History 1972, 69, 104). Indeed, only Roxy Music’s drummer Paul Thompson came close to being the kind of dues-paying Brit-rock journeyman Williams had described. Even he, though, confessed that he had “always wanted to do something out of the ordinary. I can’t stand the heavy bands that just play riffs. . . . I try to play melodically as well as rhythmically” (qtd. in History 1972, 105). Andy MacKay had been an oboist with the London Schools Symphony Orchestra, before taking up the saxophone while studying English at Reading University. Here he had played in both a soul band and the college orchestra, finding time to cultivate an interest in avant-garde music too. Guitarist Phil Manzanera acknowledged and channeled a range of musical influences, including Chuck Berry, George Harrison, and Lou Reed. “I think,” he told Melody Maker, “people are getting fed up with long guitar solos. . . . I’m reacting the opposite way—getting into songs and simple rock ’n’ roll music. I like to be economical” (qtd. in History 1972, 105). Brian Eno had g
rown up near a US Air Force base in East Anglia. This, of course, had exposed him to a particularly rich, eclectic popular music mix. He had then gone on to art school, where he had booked a succession of avant-garde performers in his capacity as president of Winchester’s student union.
Roxy Music’s debut album had been swiftly—and, at an estimated £5,000, cheaply—recorded in March 1972. This speedy dispatch could be put down to the fact that the band had been honing many of its songs for over a year before going into the studio. One benefit of not schlepping up and down the nation’s M and A roads. The LP betrayed the band’s distinctive prehistory: channeling the art school, prog rock, avant-garde electronica, and even classic rock ’n’ roll; processing doo-wop, jazz improvisation, torch-song crooning, squawking sax, and Eno’s synthy squeals and squelches, throbs and pulses. Sometimes it seemed that the band had attempted to deliver all this in a single song. “Ladytron,” for instance, moved through a series of distinct musical acts in its four and half minutes—kicking off with a spacey 1950s B-movie mood piece, before going on to showcase a Spectoresque oboe solo and a section featuring synth-treated guitars. “We were interested in inventing different musical textures,” Bryan Ferry explained, to create “pictures in sound” (qtd. in Doyle 47). Here, the vocabulary drawn from the world of art is both telling and appropriate. The richly textured “Re-Make/Re-Model” had even been titled after, and directly inspired by, a 1962 painting called Rethink Re-entry by the British pop artist Derek Boshier.
Yet, alongside this engagement with the visual arts, Ferry was always very willing to profess a love for pop music. It is worth noting that, while many of his peers were embracing psych-rock, the mid- to late 1960s found him playing in a seven-piece rhythm ’n’ blues group called the Gas Board. Indicatively, he had hitched down to London in the “Summer of Love” not to check out the then-burgeoning underground scene but to see Otis Redding and the Stax Revue. This while studying art at Newcastle University, where he was taught by pop art pioneer—and Beatles cover designer—Richard Hamilton. Ferry, then, loved art as much as music—and so looked to find a way to integrate the two. His appreciation of pop art’s mission to dissolve the boundaries between high and low culture, for example, would consistently find expression, an outlet, through his own music-making. Furthermore, it was clear that his was a manifesto that was shared by all the members of Roxy Music. “I saw the songs in the context of pop art,” Brian Eno confirmed:
One of the things we didn’t like about bands that had preceded us was that they were so unironic, they were so serious about what they were doing. We were serious, but in a different way. We wanted to also say, “we know we’re working in pop music, we know there is a history to it and we know it’s a showbiz game.” And knowing all that we’re still going to try to do something new. (Qtd. in Hoskyns 58)
“Virginia Plain”—one of glam’s foundational triad of singles together with “Hot Love” and “Starman”—would most likely not have happened were it not for the band’s shared love of pop. Just as the other two had, it would also achieve much of its cultural power via a memorable TV performance beamed to millions. As Bryan Ferry admitted in an interview in July 1972, “Virginia Plain” was consciously created as a “a bid to get on Top of The Pops actually”:
I think a single is necessary: after all, most of the best things in pop have been done in that medium. We’ve always wanted to make them. . . . There’s nothing wrong with being commercial if it’s good. (Qtd. in History 1972, 104)
Indeed, at a shade under three minutes, “Virginia Plain” was a proper single—and arguably more radio friendly, more readily digestible, than anything found on the LP. This should come as no surprise. It was, after all, intentionally crafted as such. Initially peaking at a respectable number twenty-two, Roxy Music had done pretty well for a debut album. By the late summer of 1972, however, it was on the slide; and so—not hearing one on the LP—Island Records suggested the band write a bespoke single to hopefully reignite sales. Of course, Island was pushing against an open door here. The band was more than happy to oblige. Released in August, “Virginia Plain” would eventually top out at number four on the UK singles chart. Described by Stump as “bubblegum with brains” (60), “Virginia Plain” succeeds because it cannot be pigeonholed, because it operates—and so appeals—on a number of levels. It could be enjoyed as pop, but could offer the listener more if he or she wanted it. The song’s stream-of-consciousness lyric had been inspired by a piece of graphic art Ferry had produced in the mid-’60s. This work had been constructed around a three-way visual pun, “quoting” an American cigarette brand together with the motif of a woman positioned at the end of a plain—making cigarettes, woman, and landscape all “Virginia plain.” The song also featured plenty of what Ferry nonchalantly described as “little images and throwaway lines.” “I felt it was time for a bit of verbal dexterity,” he said (qtd. in History 1972, 104). And true to his word, “Virginia Plain” packed in a lot. It is soaked in Americana—what Ferry himself described as “that whole American Dream thing”—with its references to Las Vegas, Route 66, Studebakers, Robert E. Lee, Baby Jane Holzer, and movies The Last Picture Show and Flying Down to Rio. It is also “about” the glamour of travel—that jet-set life (“midnight blue casino floors”) that happens someplace else, in Rio, Acapulco, and Havana—and the sheer effort required to join this exclusive club (“We’ve been around a long time / Just try try try tryin’ to make the big time”). Yet, characteristically, it is not addressed without a degree of myth-busting irony and knowingness—“What’s real and make-believe?” Ferry sings. “Throw me a line / I’m sinking fast.” More ruminations on fame and stardom, then. Topics that, of course, make the song on message for glam.
“Virginia Plain” is a densely textured work, a genuine pop musical collage to which all band members contributed. There was Ferry’s lyrical smarts and that most un-rock vocal delivery; Eno’s weird, unnatural noises; MacKay’s minstrel oboe; Manzanera’s spiky guitar licks and improvised but brief solo; and Thompson’s muscular drumming. Reminiscent of campy Spector epics like “Leader of the Pack,” there were also handclaps and even the sound of a revving motorbike. “I’m still not quite sure whether I like them or not,” wrote one reviewer. “There are so many different things on the album, that sometimes I get the feeling they’re dabblers, playing with various forms without playing much music” (Peacock, n.p.). Roxy Music is disorientating, destabilizing, unsettling stuff. Perhaps laboring under the influence of that classic rock ideology, the reviewer appears unable to overcome the nagging feeling that the band are dilettantes who do not really mean it, man. A familiar suspicion that would prompt a similar response to Bowie and host of other glam acts.
As noted earlier, despite respectable LP sales and high-profile summer support slots with both Alice Cooper and David Bowie, it was the band’s debut appearance on BBC’s Top of the Pops that sealed the glam deal. “Virginia Plain” was a strong single, for sure, and did pick up radio play; but while hearing the band was—as Barney Hoskyns memorably put it—“like hearing a pop group from Neptune” (61), seeing this bunch of extraterrestrials was a whole different matter. Roxy Music was by far the oddest-looking act seen on Top of The Pops up to this point. David Bowie and Marc Bolan included. Of course, it could be argued that if it were not for Bolan and particularly Bowie, then Roxy Music would not have had this mainstream TV moment. On the back on his Top of The Pops debut as Ziggy Stardust, Bowie’s “Starman” had peaked at number ten just a few weeks earlier. In many ways a less conventional and so more challenging pop song, “Virginia Plain” would ultimately go six places higher. As an instantly transfixed and smitten Dylan Jones recalled, “It was their clothes that really turned heads. Leopard- and snake-skin. Gold lamé. Pastel pink leather” (38–39). For this prime-time TV outing, Bryan Ferry took up a position stage left at a stand-up piano, looking for all the (other)world like a glam vampire in his iridescent jacket and glittery green eye shadow; with Bri
an Eno, stage right behind his synthesizer, threatening to outglam his band leader in ostrich feathers and purple eye shadow. These two effectively framed the less outrageously attired band members occupying the space between. Although there was still the small matter of Thompson’s off-one-shoulder leopard-skin top, Manzanera’s oversized bug-eyed shades, and MacKay’s bottle-green, enormo-collared jacket. Among the ten-million-plus viewers that evening, there are many who have attested to the inspirational charge of this performance—including Bono, the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones, and Duran Duran’s John Taylor.
As the band’s TV performances demonstrated, Roxy Music was wholeheartedly committed to putting on a show. A commitment fueled by a love of the movies, familiarity with the world of art, a shared passion for classic rock ’n’ roll, and—in Ferry’s and MacKay’s cases—formative experiences playing in soul revues. “On stage, we felt like we were getting into costume or getting into character” (qtd. in Doyle 47), Ferry explained, noting with some satisfaction that audiences—at least in the UK—“really do seem to appreciate the fact that [the band] perform rather than just play” (qtd. in History 1972, 107). The band’s theatricality was, of course, anathema to the rock orthodoxy—which had witnessed first Bolan, then Bowie and now Roxy Music all “consciously celebrate their distance from the 1960s . . . with a mix of sensational gender blurring, teenage anthems, decadence, negativity and daft clothes” (Haslam 105). Yet, of glam’s triumvirate of pioneering acts, it was Roxy that appeared keenest to put the most “distance” between itself and the sixties. In part, perhaps because—unlike Bolan or Bowie—its members were never part of that “scene.” Although he was twenty-six in 1972—so in fact older than both Bolan and Bowie—Ferry explained:
