The resulting album is uneven although beloved by many, and a massive-selling hit to boot. Personally,I'm not a huge fan of this album, it is one of my least favourites, and I'm going to be very short about this one. Released in October 1973, it was a UK Number 1 for 5 weeks, as Aladdin Sane had been, and rode the crest of the wave of Bowie's enormous UK popularity at the time. The album's highlight is, of course, his cover of The Merseys', 'Sorrow', the only time when he vastly improves the original.
Bowie was again aping those around him, and this time it seemed to be Bryan Ferry. Although he never explicitly admitted to impersonating Ferry's richer, mannered croon, it was obvious to Scott and Ronson that this was the intention, and it was one thing they didn't altogether welcome with open arms. The album's only single release, "Sorrow",justifiably became one of his biggest hits,reaching Number 3 in Britain, and staying in the charts for 15 weeks, well into 1974.
Perhaps more inspiring than the music was the startling cover - Bowie,naked again and next to him the personification of mid 60s cosmopolitan chic,Twiggy. Both look more like wind-up dolls than beings made of human flesh. The overall effect was that of a startling piece of artifice : the human condition reduced to simulacra .
If Bowie was still essentially an excellent pop craftsman, then it was Roxy Music who were the avatars of change.Thematically, if not musically, there were similarities between Bowie and Roxy Music. The blast of ice nonemotion would have its disciples later in the decade (such as Gary Numan) and Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nail's graphic, cruel psycho-porn has its origins in the Ferry/Bowie artifice. Bowie and Roxy were both serious and contrived, pop and rock, jokey yet serious. Both Bowie and Ferry saw stage performance as drama and milked theatricality for all it was worth. Ferry made it an absolute prerequisite that his band looked good.
Like Bowie, Ferry and Roxy Music delighted in the artificial.
Bryan Ferry recalls: "Our music was not so much designed for the charts as for thinking audience. We didn't see ourselves as part of a glam-rock movement at all ... We were conscious of Marc Bolan and Bowie but we thought we were very much doing our own thing. "
Roxy Music and Eno were actually the other side of the same coin. Bowie took from high art (such as steal from Baudelaire, or a namecheck for Jean Genet) and used it in pop ; Ferry and Eno took from un-artistic popular culture and turned it into art-pop. Whatever the spin, it made it for a thrilling musical experience.
many critics were initially highly sceptical of them and they criticised them for almost exactly the same reasons they did Bowie. However, Roxy Music had the last laugh, of course, and eventually found themselves at Number 1 in the UK album charts late in 1973 with their third album, Stranded.
Roxy were the only serious rivals to Bowie in the period 1972 to 1975. Although the media hype was centred on Bowie's rivalry with Bolan, in actuality it was Roxy Music who were Bowie's direct competitors. A huge number of Roxy Music fans were Bowie fans too. It's no surprise that in 1975 and 1976, when punk was breaking, many of the leading lights would declare for Bowie and Ferry, while trashing Rod and Elton.
Bowie and Roxy kept a deliberate, watchful distance in the glam-rock era. Roxy Music played with Bowie at the Croydon Greyhound in June 1972. "He was on a roll at the time and we were just emerging. I think he asked for us to join him on tour. It was a very good audience for both turns", says Ferry.
If with Roxy's first record we can see the beginnings of a definite rupture with the past,then conceptually,Ziggy Stardust is more important. The writer Jon savage called "Ziggy Stardust" the first post-modern pop record.
