Singer Bryan Ferry was the last to arrive on stage on Wednesday, sauntering out like the gentleman of leisure and l’amour you’d imagine him to be, as the audience at the Kia Forum in Inglewood cheered.
But Ferry hasn’t been particularly hard to see in the Los Angeles area in recent years, having played the Greek Theatre, the Hollywood Bowl, and the Microsoft Theatre in the past six years alone.
Not so for three of Ferry’s oldest friends and colleagues who joined him for this first reunion of Roxy Music in two decades to play a brief 50th Anniversary tour of North America this fall.
Guitarist Phil Manzanera, saxophonist Andy Mackay, and drummer Paul Thompson were the true treats for fans at the Forum, and they and Ferry, and a backing band of nine other musicians and singers, delivered a concert that thrilled not just for the fantastic performances but for the rarity of a Roxy Music performance at all.
Roxy Music was never a huge commercial success in the United States. All eight of their studio albums cracked the Top 10 in the United Kingdom, three of them reaching No. 1, but the highest any of them placed in the States was 1979’s “Manifesto” at No. 23. But there are different ways to measure a band like Roxy Music’s success.
It might be measured by the influence they’ve had on other bands, from New Wave acts such as Duran Duran and ABC to the arty Britpop of Blur to modern indie acts such as Arcade Fire and St. Vincent.
Annie Clark who performs as St. Vincent, we’ll note here, is as much of a musical descendant of Roxy Music as you’ll find today, which made her a perfect choice to open these shows. Her set Wednesday – on her birthday – was a terrific gift to fans who got there early enough to catch it.
Or just look at the passion of the fans that filled most of the Forum, the hardcore Roxy fans, many who looked an age to have been there all along, singing and dancing to songs that still mean something special all these years later.
The show, which slotted 18 songs into an hour and 40 minutes, opened with “Re-Make/Re-Model,” the first track on the self-titled first album the band released in 1972, a rollicking, cacophonous romp through its protagonist’s indecisive search for a woman who caught his eye. You can still hear the offbeat influence of original keyboardist Brian Eno in the song, though Eno, who left Roxy Music after its second album, has not toured with the band since.
“Out Of The Blue” and “The Bogus Man” followed. The first featured a slow, sultry soprano sax solo from Mackay, the second, a bouncy yet ominous vibe neatly complemented by the use of claustrophobic clips from classic films such as Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” and Orson Welles’ “The Lady From Shanghai.”
About the show’s visuals: There’s an elegant simplicity in scale, as Roxy Music demonstrated through the use of four wide horizontal rows of video screens to create a massive wall of images blurred or clear, distorted or abstract throughout the concert.
Other early show highlights included “Ladytron,” which opened with another Mackay sax solo as a vast galaxy of stars swirled on the screens, and “While My Heart Is Still Beating,” which ended with Mackay and Manzanera, who dazzled all night long, trading solos as the song raced to its finish.
The enduring appeal of Roxy Music to older fans and new generations can partly be chalked up to how timeless much of their best-loved work remains. At the Forum, the lovely romanticism of “Oh Yeah,” the arty rock of “If There Is Something,” the plain old weirdness of “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” felt as fresh as if some young art-rock act wrote them yesterday.
Roxy’s final studio album, 1982’s “Avalon,” probably remains its best-known in the United States, a factor of its lush songs of love and loss as well as the concurrent rise of MTV. You could put this album on the turntable, pour yourself a drink, and experience a mood back in the day.
Naturally then, its tracks – six of the 18 in the set – were among the best received in the show, with “More Than This” and the title track “Avalon” played back to back to the adoration of fans.
“Love Is The Drug,” with its dance rhythms and on-the-prowl feel, closed out the main set on a high before an exit-free encore – really, why don’t more bands just thank the audience, introduce the band, and then play the encore? – opened with “Editions of You.”
While Roxy Music has closed some of its early shows on this tour with the band’s cover of the John Lennon song “Jealous Guy,” here they closed with “Do The Strand,” a song that reaches back to 1973’s “For Your Pleasure,” the band’s second album, and another of the strangely contemporary songs in Roxy’s catalog.
A much better choice than “Jealous Guy,” if you ask me and the Englishwoman behind me who said she’d seen Roxy Music 30 times over the years. Lucky her, she got to 31 on Wednesday. Lucky all of us there, we got the chance to see them in L.A. one more time.
