Roxy Music

Roxy Music were an English rock band formed in 1970 by Bryan Ferry (lead vocals/keyboards/principal songwriter) and Graham Simpson (bass). By the time the band recorded their first album in early 1972, Ferry and Simpson were joined by Andy Mackay (saxophone/oboe), Phil Manzanera (guitar), Paul Thompson (drums) and Brian Eno (synthesizer). Simpson departed in mid-1972 – from which time the bassist position in the band went on to be unstable – while Eno was replaced by Eddie Jobson (synthesizer/keyboards/violin) in mid-1973. By 1980, the band was reduced to a core trio of Ferry, Mackay and Manzanera, augmented by various backing musicians.Beginning with their first album, Roxy Music became a successful act in Europe and Australia during the 1970s. The band pioneered more musically sophisticated elements of glam rock, significantly influencing early English punk music, and provided a model for many new wave acts while innovating elements of electronic composition. The group also conveyed their distinctive brand of visual and musical sophistication with their focus on glamorous fashions.Roxy Music split in 1976, reformed in 1978, and split again in 1983. Their final studio album was Avalon (1982), which was certified Platinum in the United States, where the band had spent their first ten years as a moderately successful cult band. In 2001, Ferry, Mackay, Manzanera and Thompson reunited for a concert tour and have toured together intermittently ever since, most recently in 2022 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their first album.Outside the band, Ferry and Eno have had influential solo careers. Ferry has frequently enlisted Roxy Music members as backing musicians during his solo career, and Eno became one of the most significant British record producers of the late 20th century. In 2019, Roxy Music were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.In November 1970, Bryan Ferry, who had just lost his job teaching ceramics at a girls' school for holding impromptu record-listening sessions, advertised for a keyboardist to collaborate with him and Graham Simpson, a bassist he knew from the Gas Board (a band he had formed whilst studying at Newcastle University) and with whom he collaborated on his first songs. Andy Mackay replied to Ferry's advertisement. Although primarily proficient on saxophone and oboe, Mackay also owned an EMS VCS 3 synthesizer.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.