In the early Sixties , there were only two universities in England that offered a degree in fine art. The more distinguished department was in Newcastle , where the pop artist Richard Hamilton ran a course; the other was at Reading;and between them , says Michael Bracewell,they were largely responsible for Roxy Music.

From Newcastle, Bryan Ferry absorbed the imagery that would later contribute to his plans for a band. From Reading, where one of Hamilton’s acolytes went to teach, the Tyneside crooner acquired some of his key personnel and contacts.
Hats off to Ferry. From these hothouses of muddled pretension, he grew an act that in 1971 emerged fully formed and startlingly original. Similarly, after the departure of Brian Eno (keyboards and electronica), he turned Roxy into an outfit that, if nothing else, was damned slick. But then, Eno went to art college, not university, so his background was even further out than Ferry’s.
Indeed, the most memorable passages in this book describe the idiocies perpetrated in the name of an art education by a clique of now-faded trendies.
One day in 1964, when Eno and his fellow students turned up at Ipswich Civic College, they saw a notice telling them to assemble in its Victorian quadrangle – where the exits were suddenly locked. The teachers appeared with chairs on the flat roofs and sat observing their charges, their only communication being a quote from Lenin, delivered through a megaphone. (’Four hours being stared at by these people,’ says Eno. ‘It was so interesting.’) On another occasion, the students demanded to watch their tutors paint, while hurling criticism at them.
Studying music and English at Reading was Andy Mackay (saxophone). He met Eno when the college boy visited to ‘perform’ a long-delay echo piece, recording sound on one tape machine to replay on another. The tape ran out of the hall, round its aluminium chairs and back again, so there was a five-minute wait for any sound to repeat. Such was art in the Sixties – and apparently, not even much on drugs.
But back to Ferry. Whatever the others brought along, it was his party.
The son of a pit pony-handler, Ferry was always ambitious and driven. At school, he had a paper round as well as a Saturday job (happily, at a tailor’s). Aged 12, he was dressing in a white trench coat to attend soul gigs; and in his teens, he became obsessed by cycling, mainly because of its ‘uniform’.
While Eno was arguing with his department about its requirement that he actually produce some paintings on the painting course, Ferry had already staged his own exhibition – and fronted three bands, playing rock ‘n’ roll covers in working men’s clubs.
By the time the others arrived in London, Ferry had written the first album’s lyrics, met the stylists and got in with the in-crowd of that camp era. He ran the auditions for the remaining band members. He befriended Antony Price, his rapport with the young fashion designer being immediate and lasting. Brought up on the Yorkshire moors, Price said he acquired his flair for pattern cutting ‘by learning how to make dry-stone walls’.
Such human touches keep you going when you tire of this book’s turgid prose – but considering its length, they are all too rare.
Bracewell seems squeamish about real life, gliding over potential gossip with a lame ‘wine, women and song’. He also appears incapable of an emotional response to music – or of pith.
Ferry says: ‘I changed my name to Roxy Music.’
Bracewell writes: ‘Roxy Music’s identification with a particular notion of style and exclusivity [was] so alchemically potent that it would perform an act of transubstantiation on the group’s creator – in effect turning Ferry the artist into both the subject of his art, and an artwork in his own right.’
Happiest in the realm of ideas, amid the babble, Bracewell is occasionally interesting – on how, say, big V&A shows filter into the public consciousness as style. And as a corrective to his unquestioning and prolix admiration for British Pop-ism, there is the unintended comedy of his academic aspirations.
Take the deadly earnest references to Rock Follies, the ITV drama series; or to the sinister Marxist ‘Martin Jake’, instead of Jacques. Still richer seams run through the slabs of unmediated quotation from preening pensioners who, with their bit parts in Roxy’s history, imagine they have transformed popular culture. One of their favourite words is ‘important’.
Self-important, more like. The book stutters to an abrupt halt with the launch of Roxy’s first album.