Roxy Music 8: Flesh + Blood

While Roxy Music was back making albums, with the same core lineup, and including attractive women on their album covers, the band seemed to have given up trying to be any more unique than their combined styles. Sporting three credited drummers and three credited bass players, Flesh + Blood presented a band in danger of becoming the British Steely Dan.

Although Bryan Ferry seemed to have gotten the solo album bug out of his system, now he was foisting his nutty interpretations of songs that didn’t need to be covered onto Roxy albums. An incredibly tepid remake of “In The Midnight Hour” opens side one, but any listener not compelled to dismiss the rest of the program of that basis is rewarded by the much improved “Oh Yeah”, a sweet ditty about the power of music when one hears a certain song on the radio. And not just any song, mind you—this song he’s talking about is actually called “Oh Yeah”! Despite the “Heart Of Glass” percussion at the top, “Same Old Scene” is a terrific track, upping the drama considerably. “Flesh And Blood” has a wonderfully trashy guitar part, melding the old sound with the new very well. “My Only Love” follows in the same key, more of a mood than anything else.

“Over You” is one of the best songs the Cars never recorded, from the simple riff that drives the three chords to the instrumental break around the guitar solo; when the same break repeats it morphs back to Roxy again. Unfortunately, it fades right into another misguided cover, this time of “Eight Miles High”, which only fueled the “disco sucks” mentality of the time. (We’ve yet to discover any opinions on it from McGuinn, Clark, or Crosby.) The Joy Division-inspired intro to “Rain, Rain, Rain” bodes promise, but it soon turns to a cluttered reggae track; it would have been better served if combined with the similarly paced “No Strange Delight”, which comes immediately afterwards. “Running Wild” is possibly the slickest song here, to the point that without Bryan singing, it could be almost any band. Maybe that’s due to Paul Carrack on the keyboards.

Flesh + Blood wasn’t appreciated upon release; most reviewers lamented what they saw as a betrayal to their original ethos. But the guys wanted to sell records as well as express their creativity, and the covers are merely aberrations on an otherwise intriguing collection.

Roxy Music Flesh + Blood (1980)—3