Leopard skin and sculptued quiffs dropped thirds lovesick blues and padded shoulders torch songs and tuxedos gaucho style and Garbo khaki dress and siren girls discobeat and. One could go on. This is the decade that began with America still sinking into the mire of the Vietnam conflict. More auspiciously in London Bryan Ferry was at work with co conspiritons Paul Thompson , Andy MacKay , Brian Eno and Graham Simpson. It was year 1971s and the name of the band was Roxy Music. Roxy Music´s rise to prominence was to be unconvetional and meteoric. Where other bands played endless gigs Roxy Music played a handful of private parties including a soiree in the Tate Gallery. The real break through came via Melody Maker in the December 12s issue. Bryan Ferry had sent a demo to assistant editor Richard Williams who enthused. One of the most exciting demo tapes ever to come my way. It carries enough innovatory excitement to suggest that Roxy Music may well be at the head of the field in the avant garde stakes. In January year 1072 Roxy Music appeared of John Peel´s sound of the seventies to great critical acclaim and in the same week a live show at the 100 club in Oxford street confirmed their star potential. A recording contract with Island Records swiftly followed and in March the band found themselves in the command studios in Piccadilly with ex king Crimson member Pete Sinfield as producer. Phil Manzanera had by now been added to the line up and within two weeks the first Roxy Music album was recorded. The tracks captured the mood of the decade perfectly. They did so with an almost baroque abandon. That´s it in the space of two tracks the music would shift ground from doo-wop pastiche to synthesiser moderne and the lyrics from Hollywood iconography to tortured obsession. And floating above it all supplying a kind of continuity was that voice a bizarre mixture of torch song balladeer cabart crooner and slick rock vocaliser. Was it laughing or crying. A heavenly ambiguity. The first five tracks on this compilation are just some of the highlights of this first album. Given the eponymous title Roxy Music the album was released in June and over the summer reached number 6 in the national charts aided by the first Roxy Music single Virgina Plain a heady driving hymn to the fashionalbe dolce vita which was not featured on the album. At the year´s end the success of the band was confirmed by the annual readers´s polls in the four chief music weeklies. Melody Maker , New Musical Express , Sounds and Disc all of whose readers voted Roxy Music best new band. Early in 73s another top 10 hit single was released Pyjamarama. Bryan Ferry had composed this song on guitar one of only two in his career and invented a playful neolog part Pyjama Game part cinerama as its title. The stage was set for Roxy Music´s second album For your pleasure recorded with Chris Thomas as producer. It was released in March and went straight to number 3 in the charts. The surprise was that following so fast on the heels of Roxy Music For your pleasure was so good possibly even better tan their first album. Do the strand was immediately indisputably a classic. And then there was everything else. Beauty queen the bogus man too much for one day. There was especially in every dream home a heartache perhaps the greatest redefinition of the spirit of early velvet underground fetishism and high living anxiety translated into lyrical menace and freakout denouement. A British tour was climaxed with two sell out concerts at the rainbow where the band were announced by Amanda Lear vamping on to the stage in a stunningly transparent costume. A successful summer European tour followed and For you pleasure charted in several countries establishing the band´s reputation beyond the confines of the UK. At a live tv show in Paris they broke attendance records when a thousand fans unable to get in broke down the studio doors. The real highpoint however was the winning of Le Grand Prix du Disque at the Golden Rose festival in Montreux. In July it was formally announced that Brian Eno had left the band for a solo career and Eddie Jobson was brought in for the recording of Stranded. The success of this album was critical and Bryan Ferry was quick to set out his vision for the record I couldn´t possibly tell you how the music is going to change except that the next album will be as different from For your pleasure as that was from the first album otherwise there´s no point in doing it. Chris Thomas returned to produce but perhaps the most talked about development was the band´s approach to the recording process and the unusual marriage of Ferry´s words and music. Rex Balfour described the process thus in his book The Bryan Ferry story year 1976. Bryan had developed a curious procedure when recording which from now on became matter of course. Having coposed the music he would demonstrate it to the band on the studio piano it was never written down then the whole backing track would be recorded together with a large number of extra instrumental features. Almost everything would then be complete a part from Bryan´s vocals. Eventually he would arrive at the studio after being up most of the night perfectiong the lyrics and would add them in one or two takes. Until that moment nobody had any idea of what the song they had been working on was about or even what the melody line might be. But it worked magically each track was transformed from a complex instrumental sequence into a brillianlty conceived whole voice and backing in splendid complemention. Chris Thomas was astonished and so was everyone else in the studio when Bryan Ferry came in and sang over a semmingly over long instrumental track the whole lyric of Mother of Pearl from begining to end. No one until that moment had heard or seen even a single line of the song. On its release in November 1973 stranded shot to the top of the British charts occupying the number one position for many weeks. It yielded the Street life singel and also introduced the first Roxy Music´s great European ballads Song for Europe as Bryan Ferry explained at the time a pun of course on the Eurovision song contest one of the more bizarre events on the calendar but also a gorgeous dramatisation of remembered love and haunted memory in of course a spectral Paris only to be encountered in the early films of Godard. This compliation is designed to capture the spirit of the early years of Roxy Music during which three albums and two independent singles were produced in less than two years. It was a fast moving period an incredible creative out pouring. It is also testament to a wider cultural ferment the opening up of a pandora´s bot of ideas styles and influences which were to change British rock music for ever.