1982: Avalon, Roxy Music
By Vivian Manning-Schaffel
In King Arthur lore, Avalon is a destination that reveals an ultimate knowing, a spiritual end game, a literal nirvana. With Avalon, Roxy Music’s assemblage of swan songs, Bryan Ferry, the band’s leader, primary songwriter, piano player, and louche-crooner, realized his own imagined utopia, using enchanting melodies, layered, almost orchestral arrangements, and subtle, complex rhythmic textures to conjure his grand version of it out of the ether.
When Avalon was released, Ferry bestowed the NME with this simple descriptor of his thesis:
“When King Arthur dies, the queens ferry him off to Avalon, which is sort of an enchanted island. It’s the ultimate romantic fantasy place.”
Released in mid-1982, just before the devastating acceleration of the AIDS crisis and 10 years after their first namesake album, Avalon was a reckoning, a skyward cry for love and sincerity during the height of the days of wine and cocaine, when aspiration toward splendor was the goal du jour. Devout fans of Roxy Music's noisier, Eno-infused, eclectic earlier works (like For Your Pleasure) felt the much gentler sound of Avalon punctuated a transition from raucous noise to Muzak—this gradual mellowing out can be heard on the two albums prior, Manifesto and Flesh and Blood (Ferry would extend these chill explorations into his solo work). "I found my musical ambitions had evolved slightly and I became more interested in making more atmospheric music with sparser lyrics and a less aggressive beat," Ferry explains in that same interview. "We had in the earlier records done plenty of cruder upbeat stuff, and I suppose my tastes had become more sophisticated. This seemed to strike a chord with the Roxy audience, who after all had also grown up a bit and maybe wanted some music that reflected this." In other words, where For Your Pleasure sounds like a sweaty, sticky, glitter-streaked stumble out of a club in the wee hours, Avalon was Ferry’s aural equivalent of tux-clad fine dining, as layered and finely executed as a James Beard award-winning level tiramisu, evoking a near mythical sound that hovers far above anything tactile and mundane.
Though his upbringing was humble (he was born to working-class parents in Washington, County Durham in the UK), Ferry's well-understood aspiration, his predilection for art and music, was a porthole through which he was able to manifest a more refined reality — something he often touched upon in prior albums (see the title track to Manifesto, for example). Through his music, he openly identified as a striver and a seeker in search of art and a love that could move him more than anything he could conceivably purchase, create, or accomplish — a metaphorical chalice, hovering just out of reach.
Upon first listen, Avalon enchanted and inspired me in a way that I have yet to experience with any other album and I’ve been around for many hot minutes. As an aspiring artist myself, and the daughter of Middle Eastern immigrants who always fantasized about a more exalted life, Avalon was an engraved invitation through Ferry’s own porthole to a vantage point where a better life through art and music was not only visible, but possible. To strivers with creative predilections like me, Avalon was just the soundtrack we needed to dream our way out of our suburban bedrooms or dour desk jobs to a deluxe urban or resort fantasy, where we might one day, be able to realize a dream or two even remotely as beautiful as this piece of music.
A more refined reality was something I could only dream of. My father emigrated to America the old-fashioned way, through Ellis Island, settling in the working-class corner of an affluent suburb of Boston that bordered the working-class town a block away, where the houses were far more affordable due to their proximity to a smattering of shady office buildings. Before they built condos, our tiny house stood across the street from an abandoned lot smattered with abandoned trailers that, as we neighborhood kids would discover, were essentially jack-off weigh stations full of abandoned porn.
This was in stark contrast to the homes of my high school classmates, the children of Harvard-trained psychologists and attorneys, who lived in restored Victorian mansions on the other side of town with countless rooms full of heirloom furniture. Sure, we were fortunate enough to have a roof over our heads and food in our mouths, but when I became an impressionable teen, the juxtaposition between barely having enough and having it all was often challenging to reconcile.
I learned quickly that affluence equals acceptance. I wasn’t made to feel as if I fit in where I was born and by who I was born to, so I had no choice but to imagine a place where money didn’t matter, where its scarcity didn’t keep me from accomplishing anything. I wondered what life would be like if I weren’t made to feel like something ‘other’ all the time; if my parents didn’t have to swallow hearing ‘go back to where you came from’ every so often. I wondered what life would be like if I lived in the dream houses of the people that I babysat for, writing songs instead of working every day after school and caring for their children every single weekend to afford the albums and concert tickets I wanted—no, needed!—to immerse myself in the medium that made feel like an accepted human in the world. I wondered what it might feel like to be so cherished by another human being they’d be willing to walk with me through Central Park when I was feeling blue, as Ferry promises in “To Turn You On.”
Over decades, through the turbulent, romantic wasteland of my early to mid-20s, through eventually moving to New York in my late 20s to actually be where I felt most at home and grow as a writer, each song on Avalon became a prompt of wondering that grew more existential. Eventually, I was published and was fortunate enough to find and marry someone who literally did walk me through Central Park when I was feeling blue. At last, I wisened into the sense my own Avalon was within reach.
For Ferry, who would marry the late Lucy Helmore, his wife of over 20 years and figurehead holding the falcon on the Avalon album cover a month after the record's release, Avalon wasn't just a fantastically chic Viking funeral to the creative partnerships that sustained him over decades, but a salute to his own, personal, romantic salvation. Though the lead tracks, "More Than This," "Avalon," "Take a Chance With Me," and many others structurally fit within the confines of a single, each song in these lush, meticulous arrangements segues seamlessly into the next. Lyrically, he describes his own existential romantic journey with explorations of the agony and the ecstasy of finding ‘the one,’ discerning lust from love and all the space where the two entwine, each song a chapter of a fully formed redemption arc. Side A, if you will, opens with “More Than This,” the most popular song on the album. Ferry sings, over a lilting earworm of a melody, about the dawning that he is finally where, and with whom, he is meant to be. “The Space Between” is all about that murky grey area in relationships, when you feel a chasm but don’t know how it got there, what caused it, or how to bridge it. “Avalon,” one of the most ethereal tracks on the album, is an enchanting slow samba about spotting ‘the one’ across the room and what goes on in your mind before you actually speak with them. The late vocalist Yannick Etienne punctuates the ending with an elegantly iconic high note flex few vocalists have pulled off before or since. “India,” a brief instrumental, bleeds into the sparse, percussive melancholy of "While My Heart is Still Beating," where Ferry is shattered and jaded, contemplating the futility of love: "Where's it all leading/Words to spare/Lost in their meaning/Often."
Side B finds Ferry’s libido pulling him out of his funk as Phil Manzanera's guitar weaves in and out of the intricate rhythms of "The Main Thing," which belies its desirous thump, evoking a sophisticated horniness, a silent but voracious desire. Next, Manzanera’s masterful guitar riff drives the melancholic "Take a Chance With Me," which literally sound like tears, as Ferry begs forgiveness of his beloved. Using cymbals to ease into a winding, cheerful bassline, "To Turn You On” makes good on a promise of loyalty and devotion in an unabashed declaration of love—the kind I couldn’t ever imagine experiencing myself until I heard this song.
To this day, Avalon remains one of my prized possessions, a Pavlovian meditative device that brings me back to a sense of monastic peace every time I hear it. As the album concludes, "True to Life," the next to last track, shimmers with reverb, and layers upon layers upon layers of subtle orchestration, to depict a coming out of darkness and meaninglessness to finally realize and appreciate a sense of belonging with the person who feels most like home. Speaking of home, the final track, the instrumental "Tara" sticks the landing; to the strains of a plaintif Andy McKay horn solo, you bear witness to the band's Viking funeral. It is for these reasons and so many more beyond articulation that Avalon will blast at my own Viking funeral, McKay’s ethereal horn launching me off a dock on a placid water body at sunset, gliding toward my final resting place, just beyond the horizon. The song ends with an overdub of the lapping sounds as it fades. Every time I hear them I am at peace somewhere, above it all.