The Thrill of It All: the story of Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music.

THE THRILL OF IT ALL: THE STORY OF BRYAN FERRY AND ROXY MUSIC

BY DAVID BUCKLEY

CHICAGO: CHICAGO REVIEW PRESS. 382 PAGES. $18.

Roxy Music's early work was a startling jumble of gender-bending fashion, flashy theatricality, pop balladry, and avant-garde art. Though lumped into the '70s glam rock pantheon, Roxy Music's singularly weird aesthetic, and the flat, imperfect warble of dapper singer Bryan Ferry, resist easy classification. In his thorough if ultimately tepid biography of the band, David Buckley offers the standard narratives. He traces Ferry's unlikely path from working-class coal miner's son to Newcastle art school student to suave sophisticate, and tells the story of the creative and social friction between Ferry and keyboardist Brian Eno, which led to Eno's untimely departure from the group two years after its formation in 1971.

Buckley is effusive in his praise of Ferry and the band in the early '70s, so much so that he mars otherwise well researched passages with ill-considered assertions, like "nowadays, pop is entertainment; in the seventies, it was culture." Buckley is so mired in his--and the band's--rosily nostalgic past that he lacks critical distance. On one of Roxy's best songs, he writes: "An astonishing piece of pop art, 'In Every Dream Home A Heartache' is the sort of grand dramatic gesture that pop music has now largely forgotten how to make." In the first half of the book, which documents this early history, one gets the unsettling feeling that for Buckley the '70s were the pinnacle of artistic achievement in pop music and nothing in the following three decades could possibly compare.

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In Roxy Music's case, the '70s certainly marked the peak of their powers as a trailblazing group. As the decade progressed, the off-kilter artiness that marked early Roxy slowly gave way to an increasingly smoothed-over, Ferry-driven template. It's only in the second half of the book, covering the years 1978 to 2004, that Buckley dares to make incisive critical comments about the band, and on Ferry's often limp, nebulous solo career in the '80s and '90s.

The Thrill of It All makes extensive use of quotes culled from articles about Roxy Music in the British music press. Though Buckley has a good eye for pulling witty and trenchant observations from celebrated critics such as Jon Savage, this technique only serves to underscore the relative plainness of Buckley's own writing. As a history, the book is perfectly competent--but readers seeking an account as original and thought-provoking as the band itself should look elsewhere. An upcoming biography by Frieze writer Michael Bracewell, titled Roxyism, looks promising.