Roxy Music hits #1 with Flesh + Blood

Roxy Music : Oh Yeah

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On May 23, 1980 Roxy Music released Flesh + Blood, another collection of stylish dance songs and trance-inducing grooves that give Ferry room to croon about a lost love as tears drip down his cheeks and drop-PLIP!-into his champagne glass.

At the start of the tour for the preceding album, Manifesto, drummer Paul Thompson broke his thumb in a motorcycle accident and,  just like that, he was out of the band. Only the trio of Ferry, Phil Manzanera and Andy Mackay remained. Here they are supplemented by session men for an album that would be Roxy's second to top the UK charts. ( Siren was the first.)

The chart success happened despite critics who found Flesh + Blood, and its two covers, a bit thin on substance.

"Flesh + Blood is such a shockingly bad Roxy Music record that it provokes a certain fascination," wrote Rolling Stone's Ken Tucker, who saved his most biting criticism for the singer:

 Perhaps he’s just being defensive, because if the rest of Roxy Music is as bored as they seem, Bryan Ferry sounds positively bound and gagged. The best he can do is add a little tension by muttering the lyrics through clenched teeth and a constricted throat. He seems to be trying to get his messages out to us without the other musicians hearing him.

From Smash Hits:

And from the Dean, who gave the album a grade of B:

Except maybe on "My Only Love"--imagine a song of that title written for (no, rejected by) Perry Como--this never sinks to their Liebschmerz-drenched nadir. But the secondhand funk is getting too easy to take. Much as I enjoy the languorous "Midnight Hour" and above-it-all "Eight Miles High," I always get suspicious when covers overwhelm originals.

"Over You" gives Roxy Music another UK Top 5 hit

 Roxy Music : Over You

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On May 19, 1980 Roxy Music's new single "Over You" made its UK chart debut at #18, on its way to peaking at UK#5. The song, from the forthcoming Flesh and Blood, emerged from a two man jam, according to guitarist Phil Manzanera:

In 1979, I had just built my first recording studio and I rang up Bryan and asked if he’d like to check it out. We decided to have a jam together, Bryan on bass and me on guitar with a rhythm box. Within five minutes we had written this track and it reached number three in the charts.

The song begins a bit like something by The Cars, with a bass and handclaps, but then becomes another of Ferry's songs of lost romance. Ferry admitted to Smash Hits that it was a favorite theme of his:

It's always a great theme, that, but I have written a lot of non-love songs compared with many people, so I don't feel guilty about it, as long as they're not too corny or banal.

Ever since I was a kid I listened to a lot of blues. If that's my role in life, to be a singer of sad songs, I don't really mind, because most of the things I write are emotional pieces of music that require emotional themes.