Roxy Music - Virginia Plain

 Lest we forget, I'm supposed to be gradually compiling short essays on pop records here towards a book that will never be finished. I'm easily distracted. It's working title changed from 'A Perfect Day of Pop Radio to 'Playlist' because its contents are a playlist of radio shows from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. and now the file is called' Wake Up, Maggie'. I had better add something further to it before it loses all momentum. 'Virginia Plain' is the first track on The Rock Show'.

Anybody inclined to follow Pop Music Theory in horse racing- and I suspect there aren't many - would have been rewarded with 'Legend of Xanadu at 12/1 yesterday and Riders on the Storm at 16/1 today. Maybe somebody noticed because then Jean Genie was a well-backed favourite- and finished second.

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Roxy Music are currently touring their 50th Anniversary show. Most of them are. To many of us it's not completely Roxy Music without Brian Eno. A number of acts have caused some consternation with their first appearances on Top of the Pops. Boy George and Culture Club made us wonder a bit more deeply about gender as well as what we thought might be Polish national costume, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown seemed to have been conjured from some deranged underworld, my father was concerned how Hawkwind knew they were playing Silver Machine right and perhaps most disturbing of all were the likes of Clive Dunn, Neil Reed, Terry Wogan and Lena Martell. What we had been used to were debonair heartthrobs like Engelbert Humperdinck, girls next door like Sandie Shaw and harmless groups of likely lads like Herman's Hermits.

Roxy Music came in with the wave of less denim-clad, more made-up artists like David Bowie and T. Rex and yet still made us wonder what we were looking at, like ground-breaking art is supposed to. They mixed the lounge lizardry of Bryan Ferry with some sparkle and the sophistication that Nile Rodgers was later to use for Chic with Eno, who was clearly from outer space, overseeing some electronic apparatus and a song that seemed to spend most of its time on the same note, not have a chorus and not mention its title until the last words, which Up the Junction by Squeeze was due to do in what seemed like another age then but was really only seven years later. But whereas Squeeze referred back to 1960’s socially aware commentary on working class Britain, Virginia Plain referenced the set of outré hangers-on in the Andy Warhol set.

They were clever and very good at what they did. It's hard to imagine now why anybody would find fault with it but at the time it was no doubt far too arty for those who could understand Slade but not T. Rex or for who an exhibition of machismo for machismo's sake was all that counted. Virginia Plain remains musically adventurous as the first incarnation of Roxy Music were before Eno took himself off into even artier adventures and Bryan developed his louche stylings towards a more mainstream career and some high maintenance girlfriends.