Sixty weeks on the British album chart, four of them at number one, three top twenty singles, and a critical reception somewhere between polite and pained. Flesh and Blood is the Roxy Music album that sold enormously and satisfied almost nobody who wrote about it — the record where a drummer’s departure, a brand new machine and a growing appetite for smoothness pushed the band decisively toward Avalon. It is also, in three or four places, better than its reputation suggests.

The short version

Flesh and Blood is the seventh Roxy Music album, released on 23 May 1980 on E.G. It was recorded across late 1979 and early 1980 at Basing Street Studios and at Gallery Studios, Phil Manzanera’s own place, then mixed at the Power Station in New York by Bob Clearmountain and mastered by Bob Ludwig. Rhett Davies produced it with the band and engineered it too. This is the first Roxy album made without founding drummer Paul Thompson, which left a core trio — Bryan Ferry on vocals and keyboards, Manzanera on guitar, Andy Mackay on saxophone and oboe — propped up by a rotating cast of session players. It went to number one in Britain, went platinum, and yielded Over You, Oh Yeah and Same Old Scene, all top twenty hits. It is also the first Roxy album to contain cover versions.

The trio and the drum machine

Thompson had grown out of step with where Ferry was steering the band, unenthusiastic about the direction the ballads were taking, and he went. That left three men and a decision: hire session drummers, or use the technology. They did both. Manzanera has been open about how much the Linn drum, then brand new, shaped this record — the band worked out of his studio, treated the equipment as instruments in their own right, and built the songs in an enormous control room where everyone could play at once. The writing method was the one they had used since Stranded: Manzanera and Mackay brought demos and chord ideas, Ferry brought fragments and melodies without words, and the pieces were assembled with hired bassists and drummers. Some of it was cut in New York, some in Manzanera’s Gallery. The result is the first Roxy Music record where the studio itself is arguably the fourth member, and the last one before they perfected that approach.

The sound

Sleek, warm, mid-paced and slightly weightless. Manifesto had angles and nerves; Flesh and Blood sands them off in favour of soul-inflected grooves, glossy keyboards and a rhythm section that glides rather than pushes. Mackay’s saxophone is the one element that still bites, and Manzanera keeps sneaking real dissonance into songs that otherwise want to be radio-friendly — his solo on Over You is the sound of the old band elbowing its way in. Ferry has settled fully into the tuxedoed romantic, singing about heartbreak with the same voice he once used for irony, and whether that lands depends entirely on how much you believe him. The production is immaculate. The energy is not always there. Call it the album where Roxy Music learned to hover.

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The songs

It opens, startlingly, with someone else’s song: Wilson Pickett’s In the Midnight Hour, Manzanera’s idea, picked originally because Kenny Everett wanted the band on his New Year’s Eve television show. Oh Yeah, subtitled On the Radio on the single, is a song about hearing a song on the radio and remembering someone — a small, perfect piece of pop melancholy that reached number five. Same Old Scene is the album’s hidden treasure and a genuine landmark: a taut, gleaming dance-rock track that half of British pop would spend the next five years copying. The title track vamps nicely. My Only Love builds to some of Manzanera’s most tasteful playing on the record. Over You opens side two and is the best thing here — Manzanera on guitar and bass, a hypnotic groove, Mackay’s soprano saxophone, and a chorus that Greil Marcus admitted made him swoon. Eight Miles High turns the Byrds into new wave with a disco pulse and a psychedelic guitar excursion, which sounds like a terrible idea and works. Rain Rain Rain smoulders, No Strange Delight is sparse and funky, and Running Wild closes with lush restraint.

Reception and legacy

Commercially it was their peak to date: number one for four weeks across two separate runs, sixty weeks on the chart, seventeen of them inside the top ten, and a platinum disc. Critically it was the moment the knives came out. Rolling Stone conceded the Pickett cover as the album’s one clear success and little else; others found the ballads mannered and the whole thing under-powered. The counter-argument has been building ever since, and it rests on Over You and Same Old Scene — two tracks that critics from Marcus to Rob Sheffield have singled out as among the finest things the band ever cut. The fairest description is the one Goldmine used: this is the transitional album. Manifesto is where Roxy restarted; Avalon is where they arrived; Flesh and Blood is the bridge, with one foot in the funk and one already in the twilight. The postscript is telling. Their next release was not an album at all but a standalone single, a cover of John Lennon’s Jealous Guy, and it gave Roxy Music the only number one single of their career.

The verdict

Not the place to start, and not the album anyone reaches for first — but it is a great deal better than its middling reputation. Buy it after the debut, For Your Pleasure, Country Life, Siren and Avalon, which is to say sixth, which is roughly where it belongs. Then play Same Old Scene twice and Over You three times and wonder why the reviews were so unkind. Everything here is beautifully made; some of it is merely beautiful. As with Avalon, do not arrive expecting progressive rock — this is art rock gone lounging, and it knows exactly what it is doing.

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