The air of mystique that pervaded Roxy Music’s 1970s prime has, in recent years, been replenished by their absence from the live arena. It’s been more than a decade since the debonair art-rock contrarians last played in the UK, a span of time longer, incidentally, than the band’s entire eight-album recording history from 1972-1982. And so intrigue as much as expectation greets Roxy’s return for a 50th anniversary tour, with a line-up anchored around four core members from their imperial phase, including guitarist Phil Manzanera, drummer Paul Thompson and saxophonist and oboe player Andy Mackay. Still a vision of unreasonable chicness and good looks at 77, County Durham-born frontman Bryan Ferry glides onstage and on to his piano stool in a dark suit, white shirt unbuttoned and splayed to the chest. To borrow a lyric from Love Is the Drug: dim the lights, you can guess the rest.
A career-spanning set begins appositely with the opening track from Roxy Music’s self-titled 1972 debut album Re-Make/Re-Model – practically a manifesto to rip it up and start again with its rogue synth squiggles and squawking vocals. All glam, glitter and peacock feathers in the denim-clad age of bluesy hard rock, funky in the time of punk, soulful transatlantic smoothies by the time other British bands had caught up to their hitherto flouncing ways, Roxy’s originality and influence was something everyone from David Bowie to Kate Bush could agree upon. With his genius synth playing and mysterious sonic “treatments”, Brian Eno burnished his leftfield credentials as a founding member of the band before quitting in 1973, but Roxy’s reputation for invention well outlived the oblique strategist’s tenure.
Ferry’s hairline has withstood the ravages of time much better than his once luxuriously silken croon – he’s reliant on a trio of backing vocalists to help do most of the heavy lifting tonight, particularly during a run of Roxy’s most effusive numbers. And yet a delicate speak-sung delivery somehow befits an irony-dripping oeuvre that reads as if written entirely in inverted commas. Among an opening slew of songs from the more chin-strokey end of the band’s catalogue, disquieting funk vamp The Bogus Man – judiciously abridged from its full nine-minute version on 1973’s For Your Pleasure – slithers and slinks, before Ladytron sees tartan-suited Mackay treat the Hydro to almost certainly the wildest oboe solo the venue has ever witnessed. A band with such aversion to choruses should surely have no place filling arenas half a century on, but it helps that whenever they do unleash one – such as the buttery, arms-swaying refrain to Oh Yeah, Ferry’s wistful ode to faded Hollywood glamour – it tends to be massive.
Nine further musicians including three keyboard players fill out the stage, testament to the labyrinthine arrangements of songs such as the proto-sophisti-pop workout The Main Thing. In Every Dream Home a Heartache – part critique of hollow opulence, part romantic ode to an inflatable sex doll – Ferry revisits his darkest lyric to a shivering organ and Manzanera’s creeping guitar lines, the stage lit sinister green, before the rest of the band kicks in with a thundering boom and the singer wanders offstage to let Roxy rock. He remains in the wings as Mackay takes centre stage for Tara, an extravagant instrumental oboe odyssey surely beloved of high-end hi-fi salesman everywhere.
For all that Roxy Music’s catalogue revels in texture and shade, their best and most enduring songs paint emotions in simple colours. In the swoonsome chorus and Bontempi and castanet-embellished electro-disco beat of Dance Away, the origins of every new romantic band to ever raid their mum’s makeup cabinets are plain to hear. It barely matters that Ferry doesn’t even bother attempting the swooping falsetto of More Than This – people are out of their seats and in raptures. The final flurry is Roxy Music at their most unrestrained, from soaring horndog anthem and punk-funk progenitor Love Is the Drug, to a stomping, skroning Editions of You and, either side of the band’s saccharine cover of John Lennon’s Jealous Guy, a pair of ageless original glam bangers in Virginia Plain and Do the Strand. It’s all in the past now, but has any other band made the future look and sound such fun?
