"More Than This" by ROXY MUSIC

Smooth, suave, and seductive, Roxy Music's swan song captures how romance is both a beginning and an end. [Summer of '82, pt. 6]

Like a dream in the night

Richard Hamilton, The Father of Pop Art who designed the cover of The Beatles’ White Album, called Bryan Ferry his “greatest creation.” Ferry, whose father tended the pit ponies in coal mines, studied under Hamilton at the Fine Art Department of Newcastle University in the mid ‘60s. He had grown up enraptured by Hollywood glamor, and Hamilton, Ferry said, validated his “romantic leanings towards American culture.” A few years later in London, Ferry started a band named after the largest of New York’s movie palaces, The Roxy; thanks to Ferry’s tiger-striped suit jacket and Brian Eno’s feathered space suit, their bracingly progressive pop art pastiche got slotted into a hot new genre, Glam Rock — “glam” for glamor. 

Roxy Music made music that sounded like the future by plundering the past. “Re-make/Re-model,” the opening track on the band’s 1972 debut album, works as a sort of manifesto in this regard. Each player gets a solo spotlight, and for each, it’s a stylish imitation of a bit pulled from pop history: Guitarist Phil Manzanera riffs on ‘50s rocker Eddie Cochran’s “C’mon Everybody”; Graham Simpson drops in the bassline from The Beatles’ “Daytripper”; and Andy Mckay honks out the refrain from Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” on saxophone. Standing at the front of this art-school challenge to Rock’s conventions was Ferry, a retro-modern crooner with a flair for masculine elegance at a time when Rock ‘n’ Roll had mainly retreated into denim, sang earnestly in a tight vibrato that flickered like a film projector. It wasn’t an ironic pose: Ferry would release a solo album of covers from the Great American Songbook¹ the next year. 

“More Than This” comes from Roxy Music’s eighth and final album, Avalon, named for an enchanted island of Arthurian legend. It doesn’t get much more romantic than that, and the 1982 album marks the full evolution of the group — now down to just Ferry, Manzanera, and Mckay² — into the kind of urbane pop artistry that they used to brazenly quote. Its lush soundscape is immersive, pulling you into a romantic vision befitting its title with slinky grooves and Ferry’s by-now worn, knowing croon. It’s also a touch somber, weighted by end-of-the-evening epiphanies and honest emotion. 

Maybe I'm learning

Why the sea on the tide

Has no way of turning

More than this

You know there's nothing

More than this

Much of pop music is built on the frisson of new love; “More Than This” captures love’s deepening without ever saying the word. Manzanera’s chiming guitar announces the song; a gentle swell of synths and an unhurried drumbeat well up around it before Ferry’s swoony chirrup joins in near the top of his range. His voice swoops lower for the choruses, but his phrasings are impeccably subtle. So, too, are his spare, poetic lyrics: The loveswept realization that there’s “nothing more than this” is conveyed by musings on once unfathomable forces like ocean tides and the change of seasons. The tune and the lyrics finesse you into feeling the song’s meaning. The effect is less like a pop song than a film where you cry at the end.  

From the video for the song “Avalon”

Avalon was Roxy Music’s best-selling album, sticking in the U.K. charts for a year, and while never rising higher than #53 in the U.S., sold steadily and went Platinum. After touring in support of the record, Ferry dissolved Roxy Music to focus on a solo career³ that had been running concurrently with the band for a decade. Avalon was a fitting swan song, as successfully artistic as the band’s initial maximalist phase. While it’s often assumed that artists mellow with age, subtlety is perhaps the hardest thing to achieve in art — it’s asking people to see what maybe only you can see — and its pursuit is addicting. It’s easy to be loud. 

With “More Than This,” Roxy Music achieved what Bryan Ferry loved about songs and movies as he was growing up in a house with no indoor plumbing in the Northeast of England — style and sophistication in equal measure. Ferry’s love of the Great American Songbook was in how those tunes endured; like the photos of old Hollywood stars, there’s a sense of immortality. That’s what crowds filling movie palaces like The Roxy wanted: for the price of a ticket, a vision of a brighter life and the dream of it everlasting — glamor as an everyday salvation. 

24 Song Playlist

This starts out with “More Than This” and works back toward Roxy Music’s early albums and then around again to more recent solo Bryan Ferry. I love the early stuff as much as Avalon, just differently.

Yikes

I’d really like to apologize for the sentence structures in the second paragraph. A 76-word sentence is a writer saying “maybe today, Satan.”

Thank You

Thanks for coming along on this ride through 1982 and especially to Tim for offering some of his favorites from that year in the comments of the Yazoo piece. It’s been a challenge to not flit from one era to the next, and now it will be a challenge to go back to that original idea, of hearing a song from any time or genre or era and being struck by what it stirs — that idea that you’re hearing the best song ever, even if you know you’ll hear another that spurs the same feeling probably next week.

Speaking of next week, you won’t see me then, as I’ll be at the beach for the first time in a few years, which will be lovely and heavy at the same time. Which is also how I feel about “More Than This” and the whole Avalon album — lovely and heavy. They’ve always had an end-of summer feel to me, warm and alluring sound but with a touch of finality, like the whiff of approaching decay that comes with early autumn breezes.

Thanks for reading. I’m really touched that I’ve earned a place in your inbox.

1. David Bowie released his covers album, Pinups, the same year, and his record did considerably better than Ferry’s. The records are considerably different, however, with Bowie doing the songs from the sort of artists he would have had on his wall as a teen — pinups. Still, Ferry was pretty cheesed off about it.

2. Eno left (or rather was asked to leave) Roxy Music after the tour for their second album For Your Pleasure amid escalating tensions with Ferry. Eno is a star in his way, and bands can seldom manage more than one. The band hasn’t had a permanent bass player since 1972.

3. Ferry’s fifth solo album is titled The Bride Stripped Bare, taken from Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), which was reconstructed, with Duchamp’s guidance, by Richard Hamilton in 1965-66.