ROXY MUSIC - AVALON @ 40

 

Released in May of 1982, the eighth and final studio album by Roxy Music, Avalon, is marking its 40th anniversary this month. As a capstone to the groups prestigious career, it would offer up perhaps the most perfect example of their sophistication and creativity, at least as far as their post Eno period is concerned. As well as being arguably the greatest artistic achievement of the latter half of their career, the album was also their most commercially successful. It perched on the number one slot in the UK for three weeks and remained in the charts for for over a year. While it only peaked at 53 on the US Billboard charts, it proved to be a “sleeper” hit and continually ramped up sales until it was eventually certified platinum, their only album to do so in the US. Its success was buoyed by the four hit singles which were released from the album.

The album continued the romantic themes common to their last few releases and Brian Ferry has said that he had wanted to interconnect the songs into a kind of narrative, though the finished product would require a bit of stretching to reach that end as Ferry admits he just didn’t have the patience to stitch it all together properly. The concept of Avalon is an Arthurian legend of the afterlife where the Queens ferry King Arthur off to an enchanted island after his death.

The title song features a guest vocal appearance from Yanick Étienne, who Ferry and Rhett Davies stumbled on while doing some last minute re-cutting on the album on a Sunday when the studio would make itself available during the quiet times to young artists to record demos. When Brian and Rhett popped out for a coffee, they heard Yanick singing in the studio next door and were immediately taken with her. She spoke no English, so her manager had to translate, but she was recruited to sing the high parts in the song, which helped to finish the song off after going through a complete rebuild when the first version proved unsatisfactory.

Roxy Music, overall, has become one of an elite number of rock groups who have had an incredibly profound influence on the generations which followed them. Groups like Japan and Duran Duran built their careers on the foundations laid by Roxy Music, both musically and stylistically in terms of their looks and attitudes. Avalon offers up the quintessential expression of their oeuvre with a set of songs that each display their own self contained perfection. There’s no filler on this record and it has retained its presence and power throughout the decades it has had to establish its status as a pop music classic.