Tag Archives: Roxy Music

BRYAN FERRY AT ALBERT HALL

[The solo album covers] aren’t cynical renditions at all. If you read great writers you find that their language has layers, double meanings. You take a great song and you can transform it, add some sort of twist to it…

It’s not a question of hiding behind masks. I’m very much myself all the time. I’m not that good an actor, I couldn’t pull it off, I don’t know… everybody’s very complex. You can move in different directions. Have an adventure with yourself…

I’ve drawn most of my inspiration from the cinema. I’m interested in fantasy, things which are slightly unreal. Like the album cover of Another Time, Another Place. It’s a very bleak kind of cover, it tells a story. It has a sort of Last Year at Marienbad feeling. — Bryan Ferry

To mark the release of his live album BRYAN FERRY LIVE AT THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL 1974, the singer-songwriter and Roxy Music founder returns to the venue this week for a pair of concerts.

BRYAN FERRY

Wednesday and Friday, March 11 and 13. Doors at 6:45 pm.

Royal Albert Hall

Kensington Gore, South Kensington, London

Bryan Ferry, photographs, letters, and album covers related to the 1974 solo concert at the Royal Albert Hall and the early days of Roxy Music, including tea in Paris with Salvador Dalí in 1973. Below, photograph from recent solo tour. Images courtesy and © the artist, his record companies, the photographers, and E. G. Management.

STARDUST — COMPLEXIONS CONTEMPORARY BALLET

STARDUST, a new work by Complexions Contemporary Ballet celebrating the music of David Bowie, will be performed at the Music Center this weekend in its Los Angeles premiere.

For many years following the 1972 release of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, Bowie had discussed staging alternative versions of his work beyond the concert stage:

Songs by Roxy Music replaced the Bowie material Todd Haynes had planned to use for his film Velvet Goldmine (1998) after Bowie made it clear he was still planning his own movie. But this never came to pass.

Similarly, talk of a Broadway show went nowhere until, at the end of his life, Bowie and Enda Walsh put together the off-Broadway musical Lazarus, directed by Ivo van Hove.

Bowie worked with Montréal’s La La La Human Steps for his Sound + Vision tour in 1990, and elsewhere in the dance world, Michael Clark is well known for his homages to Bowie. Come, Been and Gone utilized vintage numbers like “Jean Genie” and the title cut from Aladdin Sane, and after Bowie’s death in 2016, Clark reformated and retitled the work as To a Simple Rock ’n’ Roll… Song, which opened with “Blackstar” from Bowie’s final studio album.

Now, Complexions Contemporary Ballet’s founding choreographer Dwight Rhoden and his powerful company bring us STARDUST, which had its world premiere in Detroit in 2016. The show—which opens with “Lazarus”—brought down the house at the Joyce Theater last fall.

STARDUST will be preceded by the 30-minute piece BACH 25.

STARDUST—COMPLEXIONS CONTEMPORARY BALLET

Friday and Saturday, April 20 and 21, at 7:30 pm.

Sunday, April 22, at 2 pm.

Dorothy Chandler Pavilion

135 North Grand Avenue, downtown Los Angeles.

Top and above: Photographs by Moira Geist.

Below: Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Stardust. Photograph by Breeann Birr.

RE-MAKE RE-MODEL

“I loved American music. From the age of about 10, every week you’d discover somebody new. I was very much into jazz. You know how English people are; there’s a certain amount of musical snobbery. I mean, I loved Little Richard and Fats Domino, but when I heard Charlie Parker for the first time, this was something I really loved, and nobody else who I knew knew anything about him. It’s good to have your private obsessions.” — Bryan Ferry*

Roxy Music has revisited their 1972 self-titled debut album with a 45th anniversary reissue packed with unreleased demos, outtakes, radio sessions and more. ROXY MUSIC—45TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION is out now in a variety of formats, including a 3CD/DVD super deluxe edition that also comes with a 136-page book.”**

The DVD includes video footage of “Would You Believe,” “If There is Something,” “Sea Breezes,” and “Virginia Plain” filmed in 1972 at Bataclan.

Roxy Music, from left: Paul Thompson, Bryan Ferry, Andy Mackay, Phil Manzanera, and Brian Eno. Image courtesy Roxy Music and the BBC.

DUNCAN HANNAH’S DIARIES

A New York Dolls costume party at the Waldorf, a Roxy Music concert at the old Academy of Music and after-party in Larry Rivers’ loft, Lou Reed’s scatological proposals in Max’s back room… It was all part of artist Duncan Hannah’s young New York life in the early 1970s.

Naturally, he kept a diary:

“Patti Smith told me she put me in a poem. She started a week’s residency [in The Paradise Room] at Reno Sweeney. I go every night and sit at the bar nursing a beer, watching it on the closed-circuit TV, because I can’t afford the cover charge. One night I had the misfortune to be joined by Bette Midler, who said through mouthfuls of food, ‘Gawd, what is this? Who does she think she is? Bob Dylan? Laura Nyro? Lawrence Ferlinghetti? This stuff went out of style in the ’50s!’

“Unable to contain myself, I turned to her and said, ‘Well, you went out in the forties, and I wish you’d stayed there’…

“Television play every night at a biker bar on Bleecker and [the Bowery], called CBGB. The decor is neon beer signs and giant blowups from bygone theatricals… Television have only one set’s worth of songs, so their second set is the same as the first. Only a couple dozen people show up, but there’s a real rough excitement to this band…

“Reading about alcoholism in Time magazine. I fit the profile. I am unable to choose whether I drink or not, and if I do, I’m unable to stop…”

 

From Duncan Hannah, “Diaries, 1973–1974,” excerpt from The Paris Review 223 (Winter 2017): 173–204.

A more complete selection of Hannah’s diaries will be published in spring, 2018 as 20th-Century Boy—Notebooks of the Seventies (Knopf).

See: John Leland, “From CBGB to the Galleries of the Met,” New York Times, May 6, 2016:

nytimes.com/duncan-hannah

Television singer-songwriter-guitarist Tom Verlaine and Patti Smith in the early 1970s, New York City.

(Verlaine’s childhood friend Richard Hell—also in Hannah’s diaries—was the band’s bassist, but left before they recorded their first album.)

Image result for tom verlaine richard hell

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