Gig 003 Roxy Music / The Sadistic Mika Band

Roxy Music / The Sadistic Mika Band
London Wembley Empire Pool
Friday 17 October 1975

I went to this gig (I called them gigs by this time) with Nick, who I didn’t know too well but we were in the same year at school. He’d been into Roxy Music right from the start and never lapsed. I hope he still hasn’t. Roxy had burst into the public arena in three years earlier with Virginia Plain, a strange and brilliant record which featuring three chords and some ancient rock’n’roll riffage but sounded like it had dropped in from another planet. They had chart success but were still cool and mysterious, like Bowie an avant-garde act working in the mainstream.

Though I couldn’t afford to buy many records, by 1975 my musical taste had expanded to include all sorts of weirdness. My friends and I would make tapes for each other, we listened to John Peel and Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman’s Saturday Rock Show, and on my parents’ radio I had discovered a shaky signal for Radio Caroline which played a lot of prog rock in the evenings. At school there was a Progressive Music Club, essentially a room with a record player where we could listen to prog during lunch break; not many girls attended. I remember discussing Henry Cow in the 5^th form. Older boys on the school bus carried albums by Tangerine Dream and Faust. My friend Rob and I loved Dr Feelgood; not everyone was convinced.

Things were becoming a bit tribal by now and there was another sect at school who were almost exclusively into American soul music, purchased on import via mail order, the more obscure the better: Blackbyrds, Johnny Guitar Watson, Luther Vandross; not chart stuff, and not Northern Soul which was a different scene again, and certainly not rock. Bowie, by this time doing his plastic soul thang, and Roxy were pretty much the only non-soul acts they would accept. I liked a lot of soul music but the more smooth modern stuff wasn’t my thing, and while I could cope with some prog rock I didn’t really do metal. I thought Roxy Music were terrific, particularly the first three albums: arty, clever but not sneery like Zappa, intelligent, a little pretentious but what’s the problem? Any fool can wear their heart on their sleeve, and in any case love songs like Beauty Queen and Just Like You are genuinely affecting, even if the sentiment itself is affected. I loved the way their songs didn’t have choruses; sometimes the hook was a guitar figure by Phil Manzanera (Street Life), sometimes the same chord sequence ran all the way through a top 10 song (Pyjamarama), sometimes Bryan Ferry sang in French (Song for Europe) or referenced Picasso’s Guernica (Do the Strand). Like Bowie, Roxy offered a window on other forms of artistic expression: film noir, 1950s sci-fi, pop art, musique concrète. (If I’m honest musique concrète wasn’t a big thing in my life at age 15.) Ferry took stick in the rock press for his outfits but I always thought he looked great, those malodorous hippies with their ridiculous white-boy afros and their appalling Afghan coats were just jealous guys. The miner’s son from County Durham was reaching for the stars. Another thing about Roxy, girls liked them.

So this was exciting. A big London gig, albeit in the vast barn where they held the Horse of the Year Show, in the nondescript suburb of Wembley. The audience looked fabulous. I read later that the likes of Siouxsie Sioux, Billy Idol and other punk luminaries found common ground at this gig. These people could have been extras in Cabaret or The Great Gatsby: there were various versions of Ferry’s look and extraordinary interpretations of the vamps who appeared on Roxy’s album covers, all feather boas, lip gloss and pencil skirts. There was a lad in plus-fours! My baggies and 3-star acrylic jumper didn’t look so cool. Once inside, however, the thrill of it all dissipated. The venue was and is a charmless, draughty khazi, we were near the back and not much above floor level, and when the Sadistic Mika Band started we quickly realised that the sound was awful, muddy and boomy and a little painful. I’d seen the SMB on the Old Grey Whistle Test and liked them, they had some nice funky grooves and subtle tunes which could have worked well in a club but were completely lost here. Ostensibly sophisticated or not, the audience weren’t having it so it was an uphill struggle from the start and I felt a bit sorry for them. The main event wasn’t much better, Ferry a distant stick figure reproduced on giant screens either side of the stage, looking immaculate in GI khakis. I might as well have been watching TV. Roxy were a cracking live band struggling against a dire sound in a soulless hangar, even their crowd-pleasers a bit too nuanced to work in this environment. It was just a little disappointing, as for the most part was their most recent album Siren, the avant-garde edge gradually giving way to more conventional tunes. What the hell, my awe at early Roxy Music remains undiminished. You learn to live with disappointment.