Michael Bracewell, 2007, Re-Make/Re-Model, Faber & Faber For me one of the best books about rock music largely because it doesn’t really discuss rock music. Everyone knows that Roxy Music…
Source: Roxy (ism)
Michael Bracewell, 2007, Re-Make/Re-Model, Faber & Faber
For me one of the best books about rock music largely because it doesn’t really discuss rock music.
Everyone knows that Roxy Music, when they came on the scene appeared as the epitome of pretension and artifice with the music as an add-on, almost. (Of course they were shrewd enough to make sure they got some brilliant players around them – Thompson and Manzanera.)
Bracewell gives the complete rundown of where all this came from. Art school. Fashion, Design and Fine Art courses at Art school.
Thinking, making, talking, dancing and posing Art students.
I got great pictures of Ferry working Saturdays in men’s clothes shops in Newcastle. A naturally good dresser. The mixture of Mod and Ted addiction to style as a working class statement of importance and dignity. All this seemed to be going on within his peers too so that it could finally burst out in the new 1970s as Roxy.
It reminds me of the early post-punk era – those same people: designers, fashion students, non-painting artists…
The bands I played in seemed to be using the music as a statement too rather than for its own sake. In retrospect we could have pushed it further and developed the attitude and the ART but like Roxy it came to be recognised that some actual musical talent was needed when seeking recognition.
Mary Harron, 1980, ‘Pop Art/Art Pop: The Andy Warhol Connection’ in Hoskyn, 2003, The Sound and the Fury: A Rock’s Backpages Reader, Bloomsbury
No Warhol – no Roxy Music no Bowie no Talking Heads…(list incomplete)
I was lucky enough to see Talking Heads at the Hammersmith Palais in December 1980. They were stunning. Musically rounded and colourful. They smiled. They got off on the audience reaction. It has to be one of my favourite gigs.
Harron in her article argues that a significant difference between London and New York groups at the time was the respective stances on society, politics and moral issues. Young UK groups were apparently earnest and serious whereas their US counterparts taking from Warhol were largely curious and ironic.
Too neat of course but of everyone knows that Andy Warhol did play a crucial part in the creation of the most interesting pop and rock music of that era. Not a svengali but simply a fascinating human being.
Scorpios both. Absolutely no further resemblances. I saw the punk-rock, Adam & the Ants at The Marquee in Wardour Street. One of the most tense pre-gig atmospheres I’ve ever experienced but the tension didn’t seem to be released at any point. It was all held back, seemingly. Could he actually deliver or did he just not want to?
Source: Sam Smith and rustling packets
Spectre, Ritzy, Brixton, November 1st 2015
So on comes Sam with ‘Writing’s on the Wall’ – no, it’s not memorable – there’s little to entice me back for another listen let alone buy it – not that I ever bought a Bond theme song, not even ‘Live and Let Die’, which is the best in my opinion.
Screen One at the Rizty cinema. It’s full which means rustling packets, creaking seats and eventually quiet snoring (a bloke next to me). But that’s a necessary part of it. Maybe the surround-sound and giant screen of a ‘home cinema’ would give an even more thrilling experience, in private, but this is a people’s film, us people with all our annoying behaviours.
Sam for the people – even with their rustling.
Keith Richards, Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, 25th October 2015
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06kb0fw
I think Charlie Watts is the coolest but most people would consider Keith Richards to be the epitome of the Rolling Stones – paradoxically, nonchalant, aggressive, greedy and ‘bad’ (both connotations).
It is hard not to laugh just hearing him speak. I picture a very dissolute thespian or Danny the London hippy in Withnail and I although Richards could never be considered a hippy…never ever – see above.
His music choices were all ‘roots’, all US (apart from Venetian Vivaldi) and all by black artists apart from Hank Williams.
Just after listening to the programme, to go back to my ‘roots’ (?) I streamed ‘Dancing With Mr D.’, 1973 and ‘Fingerprint File’, 1974. Muddy, funky, sleazy – the recordings/lyrical content etc.. There are many more superior Rolling Stones songs but I loved them back then, just the same.
