Roxy Music: Manifesto - 1979

"Perhaps greater familiarity with 'Manifesto' will reveal hidden magic" - Max Bell - NME

For many people, this is Roxy Music's worst album, many finding it introspective and possibly, at times, a bit more like a Bryan Ferry solo album. In some respects I agree, but there are also good points to be found on this album and some surprisingly retrospective and also contemporary sounds floating around. 

It is an album that quite successfully merges Roxy's past with its future and perhaps deserves a bit more warmth than it has garnered over subsequent years. It is in characteristics like this that it loses its Bryan Ferry solo album qualities and becomes very much a Roxy Music album, albeit one for 1979. When Roxy Music reconvened after a four-year hiatus, it still must be stressed that Roxy Music "Phase Two" were a radically different beast to the avant-garde art-rock experimentalists of 1972 and 1973. The emphasis was far more on a polished, adult-oriented rock sound. Certainly tracks like Ain't That So and Still Falls The Rain can be viewed as fitting that particular bill. 

At the outset of the album, however, things are quite markedly different... 

The opener, Manifesto, is impossible to categorise, a mysterious slow burner that is all the better for it. Starting with a brooding bass line and plenty of Eno-like deep synthesiser noises, it sounds like it is 1972 again and tracks like Ladytron for a few minutes. Indeed it is two minutes and thirty seconds before Ferry sings telling us all what he stands for, in his manifesto. Manifesto ends, abruptly, with some very 1972-style feedback noises before launching into the very 1973 frantic, Andy Mackay-driven upbeat groove of Trash. Mackay's parping saxophone sounds just as it did on For Your Pleasure as the beat gets more frantic, with some madcap synthesiser runs, a breathless Ferry vocal and more than a hint of cool, post-punk industrial murk to it. More than any track on the album, this brief little beauty links 1972-73 with 1979 perfectly. 

Angel Eyes was, in its single release format, a smooth piece of typically late seventies-early eighties Roxy-Ferry disco-radio rock fare but here, in its album version, it is a dense, grungy and edgy workout that, although retaining the same basic rhythm and lyrics, is almost like a different creation. Post-punk was starting to make its presence felt and there are definitely hints of it here in tracks like Trash (even more so in the non-album 'b' side version). In many ways, this was an album very suited to the zeitgeist. Punk's anger was fading and arty post punkers were having their moments in the sun. Many of those people were actually quite amenable to this album at the time and it was not considered old hat. I have to admit I was/am of the same mind. It is always worth a listen, even now. 

Still Falls The Rain sees the first sign of the lush, smooth, polished sound that Ferry would come to market for many a year in his subsequent solo career, but, despite that, Mackay's saxophone is still shrill and vaguely discordant in true early seventies fashion. Paul Thompson's drumming is muscular and staccato, while Gary Tibbs' bass is rumbling and chunky. The "woo-woo" backing vocals sound as if they could have come from David Bowie's Diamond Dogs leading into Young Americans 1974-75 period. It still could have come from a few years earlier.  

Stronger Through The Years is another stark and bassy but mysteriously intriguing number that possibly could have fitted on to Country Life or, more probably, Siren, with its mid-song Sentimental Fool echoes. Despite its length, I never tire of its laid-back vibe. 

If any of the songs on here exemplify Roxy Music Phase Two, it is the sumptuous quasi-dance rhythmic grooves of Ain't That So, a track that easily gets confused with Bryan Ferry solo ones, such as Can't Let Go. Ferry's vocals are now less quirky, less early Roxy and more 'lounge lizard', a style he had been using since 1976 on his solo work and, to a certain extent on some of Roxy's Siren. The song is an entrancing, seductive shimmy through Paris (or anywhere glamorous and European) late at night, for me, and would have suited the later Avalon album well. 

The laid-back evocative Euro feel is present again on the beguiling, effortless tones found on My Little Girl, a track that sees Mackay's saxophone getting more melodic, but still retaining that trademark 1975 sound. It is a bit of an overlooked song that demands a bit more of your attention. 

Then we get the album's really big hit single, Dance Away, which is also presented here in a format noticeably different to the one used on the radio. Like Angel Eyes, the song is murkier and considerably darker here but the contrast is not quite as great with its single version as it is on the earlier track. It sounds simplistic to say, but this version is much less radio friendly, less syncopated.

Cry, Cry, Cry is a lively, new wavey shuffler of a track that has definite echoes of The Velvet Underground's Rock And Roll in its vocal, at least in places. Its sound is a contemporary one, showing that Roxy were certainly not yesterday's men. Spin Me Round is a slow burner of a number that ends the album with Ferry in typically melancholy mode. Once more it is an undervalued song that gets into your system eventually. Ferry's vocal is heartbreakingly emotional on it. 

So there you go, the album certainly not chock full of the wine bar sound that many have dismissed it as being, it is, as far as I'm concerned a 1979 album that could fit in to any time slot. I guess it goes down as Roxy's post punk-new wave album and, thinking about, I guess it was. It still sounds great today, though. I urge you to rediscover its understated, hard to get charms. 

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The non-album 'b' side was Trash 2. This version of Trash was the 'b' side to the original, punky version. This one is considerably different - full of melodious, deep bass lines, post-punk synthesisers and a cool, bassy dance floor sound to it. I prefer it to the 'a' side.