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Hey, Danica McKellar, did you ever get high with Fred Savage?
Published on 8/5/08
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Still heavily imitated, Roxy Music remains a model of full-spectrum eclecticism and informed unconventionality. The band was highly distinct from its ’70s glam-rock peers, the hippie icons it helped displace and the postpunks it prefigured. But fans already know this, so Michael Bracewell wisely ends his chronicle in 1972 with the release of the group’s first album—the point where conventional music bios kick in. The author’s elaborately detailed account explains how the band conceived itself—mostly in London’s 1960s art-school scene—and entered the public eye and ear almost fully formed. This genealogical approach offers way more insight than any career-trajectory doorstop ever could have.
Re-make/Re-model is also chewier than garden-variety pop-music books, which is hardly surprising given its subject’s complexity and Bracewell’s insistence on discussing every source of inspiration for core members Bryan Ferry, Andy Mackay and Brian Eno—from the ways Marcel Duchamp influenced Ferry’s pop vision to the ’60s visual-art scene all three musicians inhabited with a vengeance. Records, books, films—this tireless researcher explores all. Who could blame him? A respected novelist and culture writer, Bracewell is the first Roxy biographer to enjoy the full approval of band members, access to their inner circle and the opportunity to nab dozens of killer quotes from people in myriad disciplines (including Pop Art pioneer Richard Hamilton, another prominent muse). He couldn’t be more in his element, and it shows. By simply setting out to write about a band, Bracewell’s produced not just an invigorating cultural history of late-midcentury England but a handbook for aspiring aesthetes.
