Roxy Music - The Thrill of It All: A Visual History 1972-1982

Your high-class night in at the Roxy

Watching Roxy Music’s earliest filmed performance, a take of Re- Make/Re-Model from June 1972, they seem more like space invaders than Bowie did. Phil Manzanera’s beard and bug-eyed glasses, Eno’s cross between an ostrich and The Child Catcher, and Ferry, the sort-of-suave, sort-of-ragged gang leader presenting a motley crew singing odes to blow-up dolls (In Every Dream Home A Heartache) and bringing the world a twisted chic (Virginia Plain).

How beautiful it was for four years. Disc One proves Roxy the quintessential “art-rock” band, right up until about the 1976 live shows. Regrouping three years later, however, the MOR edge (or, rather, blunt) they could teeter on comes to the fore. A few “I remember that” moments endear, such as Angel Eyes, but the we’re-punks- gurning Trash is a wholesale embarrassment. Watch Re-Make/Re-Model again: it’s hard to determine how this happened. The answer’s probably wrapped up somewhere in the entire Manchester Apollo football-chanting their name in 1979. Seven years previously, it would have been unthinkable.

You just would not get a Roxy these days. Hopefully this will remind the major labels they need to allow new talent to be nurtured, and not run them out on a hit-byhit basis. This is most definitely for your pleasure.

4 stars 4 stars 4 stars 4 stars

EMI | VDVD 12 (2-DVD)

Reviewed by Jason Draper
<< Back to Issue 345

Login Here

Free Newsletter


Subscribe to
our email newsletter by emailing:

anna.bowen@
metropolis.co.uk