Bryan Ferry – MANIFESTO portable island for kitchen – History Tab
Given the four-year hiatus since Siren , expectation ran high for the release of Manifesto in the early spring of 1979. Roxy Music had amassed one of the most impressive back catalogues of recordings in the history of pop and rock music, including cocktail hour chanson, classic love songs, retro-futurist rock and roll, Pop art collage and dazzling, café concerti portable island for kitchen elegies for the beautiful and damned. The common denominator of these many adventures portable island for kitchen into the stylistic and emotional capacities of pop music was their unwavering sense of timeless portable island for kitchen modernity. How might Manifesto continue that lineage?
The portable island for kitchen answer to this question could be heard in the album s opening title track: a gradually building overture, sombre yet tense, in which the development of the lyric a fatalistic portable island for kitchen call to arms seemed in one sense to describe both the defiance and the loneliness of the avant-garde. Co-written portable island for kitchen with Phil Manzanera, and portentous and hard hitting, Manifesto was a track that seemed to strain its dramatic potential to breaking point brilliantly giving way to the thrilling guitar run and high impact dance beat that opened portable island for kitchen the following track – Trash . This was one of those conflations of musical opposites out of which Roxy Music had defined their peerless combination of breathtaking elegance and sheer energy as though Kurt Weill or Noel Coward had formed a musical alliance with Otis Redding and Jimi Hendrix.
Tellingly, on the original vinyl release of the album, the first side was titled East Side and the second, West Side ; and Manifesto established an overall musical atmosphere that was as dark and quickly pulsed as a New York nightclub yet as romantic and beguiling as a Parisian boulevard. It was an album that seemed to re-route the richly American energy of disco and dance music through a filter of European melancholy and baroque opulence. Like all Roxy Music records, the album had a particular, unifying intensity brilliantly rendered in visual terms by the declamatory portable island for kitchen yet inscrutable artwork on its cover.
Conceived once again by Ferry, and co-created with Antony Price whose super- futuristic portable island for kitchen King s Road boutique, Plaza, was name-checked on Trash the album artwork depicted a Studio 54 type party: a riotous gathering of the beautiful people, exuberant, extravagant and breathlessly portable island for kitchen aloof the very high society, in fact, that one might have imagined peopling the romantic world defined by Roxy Music. And yet the party-goers were all played by mannequins: lifeless but synthetically beautiful showroom dummies, the art historical ancestry of whom ran back through Pop art to the ironical-fetishistic eroticism of surrealism.
What seemed at first glance to be a happiness explosion turned out to be a highly ambivalent and artistically poised statement about one of Bryan Ferry s favorite artistic themes: the seductive beauty of artifice and the emotional void at the heart of the high life. Andy Warhol and F. Scott Fitzgerald might well have been the patron saints of Manifesto s heady mix of luxury and cold detachment. (Fans would discover that even the typeface used on the album s cover had been created by Ferry from that used by avant-garde artist and self-professed modernist rebel, Wyndham Lewis, for his shocking pink coloured journal of 1913, BLAST .)
Vitally, the album extended and enhanced the notion of dance music, delivering portable island for kitchen both Angel Eyes and Dance Away which would subsequently be released in re-mixed versions and become classics within portable island for kitchen the currency of dance music. Spin Me Round , Still Falls The Rain , and My Little Girl created the precise balance of classic pop love song; while Ain t That So can be heard as a musical premonition of the highly filmic atmospheres that Ferry would work to perfection on his solo recordings of the 1980s, such as Boys and Girls and Bete Noir .
As Roxy Music and For Your Pleasure had defined the possibilities of pop music and pop styling at the beginning of the 1970s, so Manifesto , in a somewhat novelistic manner, seemed to describe the mood at the decade s end. It is a record that seems to catch a shift in the zeitgeist, from street to catwalk and back again the romance of high gloss and high fashion played out as a slow fade, from brilliant artifice to cold break of day.
I am for a life around the corner That takes you by surprise That comes, leaves, all you need And more besides I am for a life and time by numbers Blast in fast ‘n’ low Add ‘em up, account portable island for kitchen for luck You never know I am into friendship and plain sailing Through frenzied ports o’ call
I am for the man who drives the hammer To rock you till the grave His power drill Shocks a million miles away I am for the revolution’s coming I don’t know where she’s been For those who dare because it’s there I know – I’ve seen
Given the four-year hiatus since Siren , expectation ran high for the release of Manifesto in the early spring of 1979. Roxy Music had amassed one of the most impressive back catalogues of recordings in the history of pop and rock music, including cocktail hour chanson, classic love songs, retro-futurist rock and roll, Pop art collage and dazzling, café concerti portable island for kitchen elegies for the beautiful and damned. The common denominator of these many adventures portable island for kitchen into the stylistic and emotional capacities of pop music was their unwavering sense of timeless portable island for kitchen modernity. How might Manifesto continue that lineage?
The portable island for kitchen answer to this question could be heard in the album s opening title track: a gradually building overture, sombre yet tense, in which the development of the lyric a fatalistic portable island for kitchen call to arms seemed in one sense to describe both the defiance and the loneliness of the avant-garde. Co-written portable island for kitchen with Phil Manzanera, and portentous and hard hitting, Manifesto was a track that seemed to strain its dramatic potential to breaking point brilliantly giving way to the thrilling guitar run and high impact dance beat that opened portable island for kitchen the following track – Trash . This was one of those conflations of musical opposites out of which Roxy Music had defined their peerless combination of breathtaking elegance and sheer energy as though Kurt Weill or Noel Coward had formed a musical alliance with Otis Redding and Jimi Hendrix.
Tellingly, on the original vinyl release of the album, the first side was titled East Side and the second, West Side ; and Manifesto established an overall musical atmosphere that was as dark and quickly pulsed as a New York nightclub yet as romantic and beguiling as a Parisian boulevard. It was an album that seemed to re-route the richly American energy of disco and dance music through a filter of European melancholy and baroque opulence. Like all Roxy Music records, the album had a particular, unifying intensity brilliantly rendered in visual terms by the declamatory portable island for kitchen yet inscrutable artwork on its cover.
Conceived once again by Ferry, and co-created with Antony Price whose super- futuristic portable island for kitchen King s Road boutique, Plaza, was name-checked on Trash the album artwork depicted a Studio 54 type party: a riotous gathering of the beautiful people, exuberant, extravagant and breathlessly portable island for kitchen aloof the very high society, in fact, that one might have imagined peopling the romantic world defined by Roxy Music. And yet the party-goers were all played by mannequins: lifeless but synthetically beautiful showroom dummies, the art historical ancestry of whom ran back through Pop art to the ironical-fetishistic eroticism of surrealism.
What seemed at first glance to be a happiness explosion turned out to be a highly ambivalent and artistically poised statement about one of Bryan Ferry s favorite artistic themes: the seductive beauty of artifice and the emotional void at the heart of the high life. Andy Warhol and F. Scott Fitzgerald might well have been the patron saints of Manifesto s heady mix of luxury and cold detachment. (Fans would discover that even the typeface used on the album s cover had been created by Ferry from that used by avant-garde artist and self-professed modernist rebel, Wyndham Lewis, for his shocking pink coloured journal of 1913, BLAST .)
Vitally, the album extended and enhanced the notion of dance music, delivering portable island for kitchen both Angel Eyes and Dance Away which would subsequently be released in re-mixed versions and become classics within portable island for kitchen the currency of dance music. Spin Me Round , Still Falls The Rain , and My Little Girl created the precise balance of classic pop love song; while Ain t That So can be heard as a musical premonition of the highly filmic atmospheres that Ferry would work to perfection on his solo recordings of the 1980s, such as Boys and Girls and Bete Noir .
As Roxy Music and For Your Pleasure had defined the possibilities of pop music and pop styling at the beginning of the 1970s, so Manifesto , in a somewhat novelistic manner, seemed to describe the mood at the decade s end. It is a record that seems to catch a shift in the zeitgeist, from street to catwalk and back again the romance of high gloss and high fashion played out as a slow fade, from brilliant artifice to cold break of day.
I am for a life around the corner That takes you by surprise That comes, leaves, all you need And more besides I am for a life and time by numbers Blast in fast ‘n’ low Add ‘em up, account portable island for kitchen for luck You never know I am into friendship and plain sailing Through frenzied ports o’ call
I am for the man who drives the hammer To rock you till the grave His power drill Shocks a million miles away I am for the revolution’s coming I don’t know where she’s been For those who dare because it’s there I know – I’ve seen
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