Roxy Music's Avalon (33 1/3, 155)

Having designed Roxy Music as an haute-couture, bespoke suit hand-stitched of soft-punk, glam, and progressive music, Bryan Ferry soon lost himself in his own image. He made Roxy Music ever dreamier, softer, and mellower—reaching back to the very British and sadly beautiful Avalon of Arthurian and non-Arthurian chivalric romances. Dadaist (Punk) noise exited; ambience and Deep House entered. Ferry uncomfortably parted ways with Brian Eno, electric violinist Eddie Jobson, percussionist Paul Thompson, foreswearing the broken-sounding synthesizers played by kitchen utensils, the leopard-print attire, the cross-dressing, and the maquillage of previous albums.
Avalon embraces the simulacrum of innocence and experience to produce an easy nostalgia for that which never actually existed, whether the realm of 1940s film noir repartee or an ’80s drug-induced high with no hangover. This book explores Roxy Music’s final album to understand Ferry’s evolution as an artist and an icon. It examines American and European modernist influences on his music and aesthetics along with his commercial entanglements, cultural appropriations, self-consciousness chic, and debonair misogyny.