Roxy Music

The key to understanding Bryan Ferry's career is watching the opening credits of Fantasy Island. Ricardo Montalban's Mr. Rourke, a character blatantly based on Bryan Ferry, spends his life fulfilling everybody else's wildest fantasies while keeping his own private heartache discreetly tucked away inside his white dinner jacket. He makes tragic faces and murmurs words of regret in an all-purpose pan-European accent. Note that during the opening credits of the television show, Mr. Rourke looks out his window and sees the plane landing before Tattoo rings the bell and yells, "The plane, boss! The plane!" Of course, Mr. Rourke already knows the plane is landing: He can hear it. So why make Tattoo go through this? Because he loves the ritual, the elaborate performance of his Fantasy Island melodramas, just as Bryan Ferry loves the pop song and its inherent ritualistic romantic repetition. Also like Mr. Rourke, Bryan Ferry makes sure he never gets upstaged by always surrounding himself with much uglier men in public.

With Ferry on hand as the prime singer and songwriter, Roxy Music made the most seductive glam rock of the '70s. Bryan Ferry explored his obsessions -- the allure of romantic delusion, the narcissism of "looking for love in a looking-glass world," the compulsion to dash his heart on the rocks of beauty over and over again -- amid Phil Manzanera's guitar, Andy MacKay's sax, and Brian Eno's synthesizer. Stranded in his own world, where music and passion are always the fashion, Ferry indulged his most pathetic romantic fantasies. His blatantly artificial lounge-lizard trill and ironic Eurotrash glam moves sent up every tawdry emotion that has ever been buried in a pop song, without washing his hands clean of any of them. The debut, Roxy Music, is an explosion of wit and imagination, even if the songwriting and sound still seem a little thin, with the Humphrey Bogart tribute "2 H.B." and the proggy epic "If There Was Something." There was a vaguely sinister fashion model preening on the cover, which became a Roxy tradition.

For Your Pleasure was a bigger, richer, fuller-sounding album, giving Eno more room to experiment in the dense instrumental rush of "The Bogus Man" and "For Your Pleasure" (which didn't keep him from leaving the band for a solo career immediately afterward). Ferry soars in the glitter-gasmic convulsions of "Do the Strand," "In Every Dream Home a Heartache," and, best of all, "Beauty Queen," a tortured torch song pledging eternal devotion to an invisible sex wraith. The vocals drip with wit and remorse, while the music ventures into outer space. Eno was gone by Stranded, but that just gave Ferry a bigger stage to dance on, and Eno himself called it his favorite Roxy album. "Just Like You" refines the piano-based cocktail-ballad style that became a Roxy trademark; "Mother of Pearl" veers from abrasive art-rock clamor to moody introspection; and "Street Life" settles for fast sex. Country Life and Siren hold up alongside For Your Pleasure as Roxy Music's best; somehow, the music got glossier and bolder at the same time. Country Life opens with the ultimate Roxy tune, "The Thrill of It All," a roaring, bombastic, self-lacerating, but unabashedly passionate love song named after a terrible old Doris Day movie. "Prairie Rose," "All I Want Is You," and "Casanova" are sleek guitar rockers; "A Really Good Time" is all piano and strings, as rock's most Wildean dandy finds himself out on a quiet spree, vainly fighting the old ennui. Siren is smoother; it's the first Roxy Music album without any failed moments, as the debonair funk grooves of "Love Is the Drug" and "Both Ends Burning" set up the world-weary balladry of "Sentimental Fool," "Could It Happen to Me?," and the climactic "Just Another High," on which the Divine Bryan finally breaks down and confesses that he's just another crazy guy. When Ferry's on fire, smoke gets in your eyes.

After a layoff and the weak live album Viva!, Roxy returned in 1979 as a very different band: The surface was all gloss and the guitar freakery was kept to a minimum. Roxy became, for all purposes, an arty disco band. This phase of its career was hugely influential on the New Romantic synth pop and Euro-disco of the '80s, inspiring tribute bands like Duran Duran, ABC, and the Blow Monkeys. On Manifesto and Flesh + Blood, superb U.K. pop hits -- "Dance Away," "Over You," "Oh Yeah" -- are surrounded with filler, including the worst version ever of "In the Midnight Hour." Avalon was the culmination of Ferry's pop obsessions; in steamy synth-pop ballads like "More Than This," "True to Life," and "Avalon," he became the sincere romantic smoothie he'd always halfway wanted to be, and a great one at that. The world has been swapping spit to this album ever since.

Avalon was an appropriate way for Roxy to blow a kiss and wave good night, though the band's last official release, the live quickie EP The High Road, had a cover of John Lennon's "Jealous Guy" that became a huge U.K. hit, no doubt because of Ferry's impeccably elegiac whistling solo. Heart Still Beating is a live rehash. Street Life contains the best of the band's various best-ofs, collecting the early art rock (1977's Greatest Hits), the pop success (1983's The Atlantic Years), and the best of Ferry's solo work. More Than This is a lesser Street Life, with too much solo Ferry. Beginners who start with Street Life are guaranteed not to stop there. Roxy's best line, from 1979's "Dance Away," is: "I hope and pray, but not too much/Out of reach is out of touch/All the way is far enough." For better or for worse, all the way was never far enough for Roxy Music. (ROB SHEFFIELD) From the 2004 The New Rolling Stone Album Guide