Francis Lee, the barrel-chested footballer who banged in goals for Bolton Wanderers and Manchester City, was my first idol. Billy Wilder, Johnny Mercer and Philip Larkin rank among the heroes of my maturity, though nobody will ever displace Chekhov and Schubert at the head of the table. But the vicar’s son who went up to public school in 1972, hoping to find a pop group he could call his own, stumbled upon the man who lit up his adolescence 40 years ago this month: Bryan Ferry.
On the first day of November that year, during the half-term break, I walked into Rare Records in Manchester and handed over £1.75 for the first LP by Roxy Music. I hadn’t heard a note, yet it seemed the right thing to do. The group had just made the top ten with ‘Virginia Plain’, a song of eye-popping originality, and I had grown tired of the endless wailing of guitars and ‘prog rock’ the older boys enjoyed at school. It was a grim year, 1972, until Ferry came along and changed pop music for good.
That he changed it is not in doubt. Although David Bowie had released Ziggy Stardust that summer, he was working within the conventions of what was known. Bowie may have looked odd with his crimson barnet but he had been around a while, and bagged a couple of hits. Roxy came from nowhere, and sounded like nobody else. I was all ears for this extraordinary sound — and eyes, too. Others were less certain. Back at school my study-holder peeped inside the LP’s cover, where members of the band were pictured pouting in exotic costumes, and declared: ‘Look at this, everybody. Henderson’s bought a record by a bunch of homos!’
Occupying the territory where ostentatious cleverness gives way to self-mockery, this pick-up collection of art students looked nothing like Yes or Led Zeppelin.
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