You’d be hard-pressed to find someone more appropriate to rhapsodize about British glam godfathers/avant rockers Roxy Music than novelist, cultural commentator, and inveterate dandy Michael Bracewell. Evidently Brian Eno, Bryan Ferry, and the rest agreed; Bracewell’s may be the definitive record on what and who it takes to make a band this utterly alien and cool. (Try a YouTube search for Roxy Music, and soak in the sublime weirdness.) Re-make/Re-model (see review, p. 119) is also a critical history of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when high art and low art got dolled up together in platform boots and glitter, stormed the charts, and rewrote rock’s rule book. It’s brilliant that you ended the book at the point that I’d normally start reading a band bio, with Roxy Music beginning their career. What made you decide to structure it that way? Researching a newspaper piece for the 25th anniversary of the release of the first album by Roxy Music, I realized that here was a cast of characters who seemed drawn from some epic naturalistic novel about British subcultures between the late 1950s and the early days of the 1970s. So when I began to research and write what became Re-make/Re-model, with the incredibly generous cooperation of nearly everyone involved in the group’s formation, I felt sure that the real story lay in the questions, “How did all of these people get in a room together?” and “In what way were Roxy Music, originally, the house band of a particularly modern clique and the creative sensibility of that clique? “What is it that made the time period covered so fertile for cross-pollination in the arts, fashion, and pop culture? As Roxy stylist and fashion designer Antony Price remarked to me, “This was a time concerned with spotting things clever”—and I honestly think that this is the key to the allure and achievements of this particular milieu: the notion that you could take ideas from the “high” cultural world of fine art or the avant garde and apply them directly to the creation of “popular” (as in mass-audience) culture. Why do you think Roxy Music is still a cult favorite in America instead of, say, similar to a David Bowie or a Lou Reed? Bryan Ferry is easily as compelling and influential a character with, arguably, fewer musical gaffes. Bryan Ferry has told me that the very aspects of American culture that he loves so much are also the qualities that prevented Roxy Music from having anything other than a localized success in the United States. By this he meant that his love as an art student and a pop music fan of all the American source material of pop art—Hollywood, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and soul music, Studebaker cars, the Empire State Building—represented a pure, unfiltered, and uncomplicated populism that Roxy were a long way from owning. Roxy were thrilling but in a way that championed a kind of artifice that American audiences of the time for the most part just wouldn’t see the point of. Brian Eno feels that Roxy existed, originally, “in opposition to the sincerity of the blues”—and this would also be a problem for many U.S. (and British!) music fans. The characters who surrounded early Roxy Music seem even more fantastically colorful and roguish than Andy Warhol’s Factory set. The word that all the peers of the Roxy circle came up with was aesthetes. But I think this was meant, at the time, as a term that mingled cool—and one must never underestimate the influence of Mod on all the Roxy circle—with a particular kind of cleverness. In terms of their day-to-day hedonism, however, I think the Roxy circle were far more art-school bohemian and entirely lacking the perilous and brilliant drug-sodden volatility of much of the Warhol Factory circle.