This Siren pulled me in
One of my favorite pastimes back in the day was to spend an hour or two wandering around a record store randomly studying album covers and reading the song titles and credits. As a result, I knew a bit about some artists even though I’d never heard a note on any of their albums.
I had known of Roxy Music for several years. Those album covers were so fascinating — not in a young man’s centerfold-ogling kind of way. But they always made me wonder what the heck could be on those discs inside those odd covers with the offbeat high-fashion models.
I never heard any of Roxy’s music on the radio. I knew from reading those credits all the time that Eno was in the band, and I knew that Eno was kind of famous for weird electronic shit that did not interest me in the slightest. So I resisted taking the plunge.
But one day in summer 1976, I walked into a record store near Southwest Missouri State University to while away an hour or so. I had been hearing “Love is the Drug” on the radio a bit. It was a fine song, gave me a little taste of what Roxy Music sounded like. So when I mindlessly picked up a copy of Siren, from the previous year, I saw on the back cover that Eno wasn’t on this one and “Love is the Drug” was the lead track. So I had a bit of an idea of what I might hear. I studied that cover for a couple of minutes, and then I also grabbed a copy of Bryan Ferry’s Let’s Stick Together, released earlier in 1976. And without any further thought, I walked to the register to pay for both of them.
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I got in tune with Siren immediately. I loved that thing on first listen. The Ferry album was good, more interesting than spine-tingling. Let’s Stick Together, it turns out, was Ferry’s third solo release of cover songs. I liked it, found it interesting if not spine-tingling. But for this shopping trip, Siren was the prize.
Siren was a great album when I first listened to it. I now consider it among their best. There are three or four exceptional tracks on this one and not a weak one in the bunch. I learned later, diving into the rest of their catalog, that each of the first four Roxy albums had at least one stinker of a track that I could live without. But that’s not the case with Siren. It’s a bit less adventurous — no new ground is covered here. But Siren is what I consider Roxy Music’s last hurrah before Ferry went off to focus on his solo career. Ferry did reform the group a couple years later, but then it was more the Bryan Ferry Band than it was Roxy Music.
The big hit: Roxy was quite popular across the pond throughout their career. But “Love is the Drug” was their only Top 40 hit in the U.S., reaching №30 in September 1975. None of their albums sold particularly well here. I think most U.S. music fans were like me — they knew those album covers but didn’t have much idea what the music was all about.
That cover: The cover photograph helped kick-start the modeling career of Jerry Hall, who was Ferry’s girlfriend at the time. She left Ferry a couple years later for Mick Jagger. Jagger and Hall had four children together before she left him for Rupert Murdoch, whom she married in 2016.
Originally published at https://www.geezerology.com.
