- More Than This
- The Space Between
- Avalon
- India
- While My Heart Is Still Beating
- The Main Thing
- Take A Chance With Me
- To Turn You On
- True To Life
- Tara
The Last Mirage
With Avalon (1982), Roxy Music didn’t just end an era - they distilled it into vapor. What began a decade earlier as an art-rock experiment in decadence and danger here resolves into something ethereal, poised, and heartbreakingly human. The edge has softened, the glitter has settled, and what remains is a glowing afterimage - the sound of a dream slowly dissolving into light.
Bryan Ferry, ever the immaculate observer of love’s theater, sounds here less like the leading man and more like its ghost. His voice drifts through a haze of silk and echo, half in reverie, half in resignation. The music around him - polished, restrained, exquisite - feels sculpted from air. Each texture shimmers with quiet precision: a sigh of guitar, a ripple of synth, a breath of saxophone. This is not the intriguing Roxy of Virginia Plain or Do the Strand; this is Roxy as memory, as mood, as myth.
There’s an elegance here that borders on transcendence. Avalon is often described as smooth, but its smoothness is deceptive - beneath the gloss lies ache, an awareness of passing time. It’s the sound of sophistication confronting its own fragility. The album’s world is one of candlelit rooms and distant shores, where every gesture is measured and every silence heavy with meaning.
Phil Manzanera’s guitar and Andy Mackay’s sax are no longer flamboyant flourishes but fragments of feeling, woven into Ferry’s languid melancholy. Together, they create music that seems to exist outside of time, like the reflection of a sunset on still water - beautiful precisely because it’s fading.
Avalon stands as both culmination and conclusion - Roxy Music’s final transformation from art-rock provocateurs into architects of atmosphere. It is not an album of arrival, but of acceptance; not a climax, but an exhalation. Ferry’s romanticism, once decadent and dangerous, becomes here almost spiritual.
In Avalon, Roxy Music transcended fashion to capture something elemental - the quiet glamour of longing, the grace of letting go. It remains one of the rare albums where perfection sounds not cold, but profoundly human - a mirage that lingers long after it disappears.
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My personal view:
Even smoother and dreamier than the previous album, with loads of synthesizer, this was the band's most commercial and indeed most successful studio album. On one hand I think it's a shame that one of the few highly experimental rock groups that still made the charts turned into this in just over ten years. On the other hand, it has to be said that the album is still an awesome listening experience four decades on. Noteworthy tracks are Avalon, More Than This, While My Heart Is Still Beating, To Turn You On, and especially Take A Chance With Me, which is one of the best songs of their whole career.