The Plain truth

I WENT off Roxy Music in a major way round about the time that Bryan Ferry started wearing gaucho pants. You have to draw the line somewhere, and right around there is as good a place as any, if you ask me.

Thinking about it, it didn't take very long at all for Ferry to become a fashion plate, shaped like an ironing board, with supermodels liberally draped all over him; but initially, the wonderful thing about Roxy Music was that they looked and sounded like retro-futuristic space insects.

I was 11 years old when their debut single Virginia Plain was released, and something about it scared the hell out of me in that way where you can't get enough of being scared. In the intervening years, it has never lost its power to enthrall and captivate: its looming, alien confidence still seems like the invention of an entirely new language, springing fully-formed straight out of nowhere.

Intriguingly, I couldn't make out a word of it at first, distracted as I was by Ferry's unique diction, Brian Eno's buzzing tone generators, Andy Mackay's chirruping oboe line - oboe?! - and the fact that on their Top Of The Pops appearance, the entire band were tottering around on stilt-sized stack heels and moth-eaten glitter and leopardskin tat which made them all look like quarter-finalists in a poorly organised regional Ming The Merciless lookalike competition.

As I mentioned earlier, its novelty value remains undiminished to this day - the song doesn't even have a chorus, apart from anything else - but what impresses one most of all from this remove is just how lean and tough it sounds, see-sawing away between F# major and C# major on the unshakeable bedrock of Paul Thompson's stoical, to-the-point drums.

They set the bar incredibly high for themselves with this debut single: it is to their credit that they matched its brilliance on a number of occasions over the next couple of years, even if they could never quite top it.