On May 28 1983, Roxy Music played the last gig of their Avalon world tour at Philadelphia’s Tower Theater. The set had included the title song of their album of the same name, with its poignant and, apparently, prophetic lyric: “Now the party’s over. I’m so tired.” Earlier that day guitarist Phil Manzanera and saxophonist Andy Mackay had decided they were leaving Roxy — the usual tensions and artistic differences — and were booked on a flight back to the UK. They returned to their hotel, picked up their luggage and took the elevator to the lobby. When the door opened, there stood the band’s singer, Bryan Ferry. Manzanera shook his hand and said: “It’s been a great pressure working with you. Goodbye.” They went their separate ways for the next 18 years.
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With “great pressure” comes great polish, it would seem. The lush, languid, velvety sound that the band had been developing, in stark contrast to their earlier spikier avant-garde stylings, had been perfected on the 1982 album, Roxy’s eighth, and reached its apogee on the title track, “Avalon”.
Ferry had started thinking about the record in 1981 while spending time at Crumlin Lodge, a picturesque dwelling in Connemara, owned by the family of his girlfriend and future wife, Lucy Helmore. The area’s ethereal ambience fed into his ideas. “Avalon” was recorded over the last weekend as the album was undergoing its final mixing at New York’s Power Station. To begin with, it was twice the tempo and called “New Scatter”, a reference to Ferry’s original scat vocals, but the singer decided at the eleventh hour that it would be better slower and came up with the lyrics on Saturday night.
He and producer Rhett Davies went back into Power Station on Sunday, a quiet time when local bands did demos. While having a coffee the pair heard a woman singing in another studio. Ferry was taken with the Haitian Yanick Étienne’s “haunting” voice, as he described it. Étienne was invited into the Roxy studio, played “Avalon” and asked to sing whatever she felt moved to sing.
Her sublime, otherworldly vocalisation was the perfect finishing touch and so “Avalon” joined The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” and Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” as a great number elevated into something extraordinary by the contribution of a hired female vocalist. The song was smooth, seductive and sophisticated and Ferry’s lyrics had a wistful end-of-an-era feel: “Yes, the picture’s changing, every moment/And your destination, you don’t know it.”
The video, shot over two days at Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire and directed by Howard Guard and Ridley Scott, reflected this elegiac quality. In the aftermath of a gathering in a stately home, Ferry — white dinner jacket, black bow tie — dances with a beautiful young woman in a pink silk ballgown. The woman, Guard tells the FT, is not real, but a symbol of immortality and transcending death: “The key to the whole film is towards the end — the veiled face in stone.”
The woman was played by model and actress Sophie Ward. “The band were all there and Bryan Ferry was charming and easy to work with,” she recalls. “The hardest part was being asked to freestyle dance to the closing bars of the song. I was 17 and suddenly making up a long dance in front of a very famous band.” A bird of prey also makes an appearance, a reference to the album cover which featured Lucy Helmore with a merlin falcon on her gloved hand. Manzanera drily observes in his memoir, Revolución to Roxy, that he and Mackay had ended up “with rather less time on screen than the stunt-falcon”.
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Perhaps because the song is so synonymous with late-period Roxy, cover versions are relatively few. Actor Ian McShane essays a fairly faithful attempt on his 1992 album From Both Sides Now, released at the height of the popularity of his television series Lovejoy. Nineties dance music darlings M People produced a techno version which appeared on 1997’s Fresco. Romanian electronica outfit Sunday People took a song already chilled out to the point of absolute zero and attempted to remove even more of the heat from it on the 2005 covers compilation Roxy Re-Modeled. There are versions on Murray Head’s 2012 album My Back Pages, Peter Frampton’s 2021 LP, Frampton Forgets the Words, and revor Horn’s 2023 offering, Echoes: Ancient and Modern.
The original has never been bettered though. Almost two decades after their split, Roxy reformed for a tour in 2001. Étienne appeared at some of their shows, her performance captured on the Roxy Music: Live at the Apollo DVD. The band have toured and performed several times since, with “Avalon” almost always on the set list. It turns out the party wasn’t quite over.
Let us know your memories of ‘Avalon’ in the comments section below
The paperback edition of ‘The Life of a Song: The stories behind 100 of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Chambers
Music credits: Virgin; Stab; BMG; BasicLUX; Editions Murray Head Music; Phenix Phonograph/Universal; Deutsche Grammophon
