Roxy Music's eighth and final studio album is a lush, late-night masterpiece of restraint and atmosphere. It's the sound of a band that started as art-rock provocateurs ending as purveyors of impossibly elegant pop. If you only hear one Roxy record, make it this one.
There’s a moment on the title track when the saxophone enters—not a blast, but a slow, elegiac sigh—and you realize Roxy Music had been heading here the whole time. From the glitter and noise of their early seventies glam, through the art-funk detours, they arrived at this: an album that sounds like a silk shirt left on a chair in a room with the window open.
The credits say Andy Mackay plays sax, and he does, but the solo on “Avalon” was originally a guitar line from Phil Manzanera. Rhett Davies, the producer, told Mackay to try it on soprano sax, and the whole weight of the song shifted. That’s the story of this session: everything was tested, then pared back.
They recorded at Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas, a place famous for its humid, live room and its Neve console. The same studio that would later give the world Speaking in Tongues and Back to the Light. You can hear the weather in the grooves—the way the piano rings on “More Than This,” the ghost of reverb that hangs behind Bryan Ferry’s voice.
Bob Clearmountain mixed the album at the Power Station in New York. He brought the top end down, pushed the low end forward, and gave the whole thing the kind of sheen that only an analog console and a man with good ears can deliver. The result is an album that never sounds tired, even after forty years.
The band’s core trio—Ferry, Mackay, Manzanera—was augmented by a rhythm section of session killers: Andy Newmark on drums, Alan Spenner on bass, Neil Hubbard on guitar. These were the guys who played on Innervisions and Before the Dawn. They didn’t show off. They just sat in the pocket and breathed.
Ferry’s lyrics are a kind of elegant vagueness. “Now I know you’re gonna be there for me”—but are they? The ambiguity is the point. “The Main Thing” is about obsession, but it sounds like a dance floor where no one is moving. “India” is a wordless, modal drift that tells a story without a single line of text.
Critics at the time called it a retreat into luxury. They were right, but they missed the point. Avalon is music made by people who had seen the band cycle through every possible version of itself and decided the final one would be the quietest.
What is the meaning of 'Avalon' as a song title?
Bryan Ferry has said it refers to the mythical island of Avalon from Arthurian legend—a place of healing and passage. The song's lyrics are deliberately ambiguous, evoking a feeling of drifting toward something unreachable.
Is Avalon considered a concept album?
Not in the strict sense, but the record has a unified mood of romantic melancholy and atmosphere. Ferry and Davies sequenced the tracks to flow like a single, extended evening—from the opening brightness of 'More Than This' to the closing instrumental 'Tara'.
Who played the guitar solo on 'More Than This'?
Phil Manzanera plays the solo. It's one of his most restrained and elegant performances—a series of bent notes that never exceed the song's emotional temperature. He later said he played it on a Fender Stratocaster through a Roland JC-120 amplifier.
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