Avalon (Roxy Music album)

Avalon
Studio album by Roxy Music
Released	June 1, 1982 (US Release) (LP) September 1983 (CD)
Recorded	1981–1982
Studio	Compass Point Studios, Nassau; The Power Station, Manhattan, New York
Genre	Sophisti-pop pop rock synthpop art pop
Length	37:31
Label	E.G. Records/Polydor
Producer	Rhett Davies and Roxy Music
Roxy Music chronology
Flesh + Blood (1980) Avalon (1982) The High Road (1983)
Singles from Avalon
"More Than This" Released: April 1982 "Avalon" Released: June 1982 "Take a Chance with Me" Released: September 1982

Avalon is the RIAA Platinum-certified eighth and final studio album by the English rock band Roxy Music. Released in May 1982, it was recorded in 1981–82 at Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas, and is generally regarded as the culmination of the smoother, more adult-oriented sound of the band's later work. It was the band's most successful studio album, reaching No. 1 in the UK (for 3 weeks) and staying on the album charts for over a year. Although it only climbed as high as No. 53, Avalon is notable for being the band's only million-selling record in the United States.

A single, "More Than This", preceded the album and was a Top 10 hit in Britain, Australia, and several European countries. The title track was released as the album's second single and also became a UK Top 20 hit. A third extract, "Take a Chance With Me", with a remixed version of album track "The Main Thing" on the b-side, reached the UK Top 30 and was Roxy Music's last UK hit single to date.

Cover artwork

Though perhaps less apparently than previous albums, Avalon continued the tradition for Roxy Music albums to feature images of women on the cover artwork. Bryan Ferry's girlfriend (and soon to be wife) Lucy Helmore appeared on the album cover (designed by Peter Saville^[1]) wearing a medieval helmet with a falcon perched on her gloved hand, evoking King Arthur's last journey to the mysterious land of Avalon.

Background and production

Bryan Ferry started working on the material for Avalon while staying at Crumlin Lodge on the west coast of Ireland. Ferry was there with his girlfriend, Lucy Helmore, who would become his wife in 1983. The album cover artwork featured the same lake that can be seen from the lodge.^[2] Phil Manzanera has said about the making of the record "By the time you get to Avalon, 90 per cent of it was being written in the studio. That album was a product of completely changing our working methods," adding "for the last three albums, quite frankly, there were a lot more drugs around as well, which was good and bad. It created a lot of paranoia and a lot of spaced-out stuff."^[3] Bryan Ferry said "I've often thought I should do an album where the songs are all bound together in the style of West Side Story, but it's always seemed like too much bother to work that way. So instead, I have these 10 poems, or short stories, that could, with a bit more work, be fashioned into a novel. Avalon is part of the King Arthur legend and is a very romantic thing, 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.”^[4]

Phil Manzanera has said of the title track, "Avalon", "When we were recording the third or fourth album in London we'd often be working in the same studio as Bob Marley, who'd be downstairs doing all of those famous albums. It just had to rub off somewhere."^[5] Rhett Davies recounted the story of how the song got made: "With the 'Avalon' song we had to recut the entire song right at the end of the album. We were actually mixing the album, and the version of the song that we'd done just wasn't working out, so as we were mixing we recut the entire song with a completely different groove. We finished it off the last weekend we were mixing. We put some percussion on and some drums on, and then on the Sunday, in the quiet studio time they used to let local bands come in to do demos, Bryan and I popped out for a coffee, and we heard a girl singing in the studio next door. It was a Haitian band that had come in to do some demos, and Bryan and I just looked at each other and went 'What a fantastic voice!' That turned out to be Yanick Etienne, who sang all the high stuff on 'Avalon'. She didn't speak a word of English. Her boyfriend, who was the band's manager, came in and translated. And then the next day we mixed it."^[6]

Critical reception

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[7]
Pitchfork Media	8.0/10[8]
Rolling Stone	[9]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[10]
Smash Hits	8/10[11]
The Village Voice	A−[12]

In 1989, the album was ranked No. 31 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "The 100 Greatest Albums of the 1980s". In 1993, Entertainment Weekly included the CD as No. 25 in their 100 Greatest CDs A Love-It-Or-Loathe-It Guide to the Essential Disc Library.^[13] In 2003, the album was ranked number 307 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Avalon is the highest entry of four Roxy Music albums that made the list (Siren, For Your Pleasure and Country Life being the others). In 2012, Slant Magazine listed the album at No. 45 on its list of "Best Albums of the 1980s".^[14] In the 1982 Pazz & Jop Critics Poll done by the Village Voice, Avalon was voted the 11th best album of 1982.^[15]

The album has consistently been praised by critics. Reviewing the album in Rolling Stone, Kurt Loder wrote "Avalon takes a long time to kick in, but it finally does, and it's a good one. Bryan Ferry stars as a remarkably expressive keyboard player and singer whose familiar mannerisms are subsumed in a rich, benevolent self-assurance. And reed man Andy Mackay shines in a series of cameos (his oboe meditation on Ferry's "Tara" is particularly lovely). Ten years after its debut, Roxy Music has mellowed: the occasional stark piano chords in "While My Heart Is Still Beating," for example, recall the stately mood of "A Song for Europe," but the sound is softer, dreamier and less determinedly dramatic now. Ferry's songwriting, however, has seldom seemed stronger."^[9]

Mark Coleman in The New Rolling Stone Album Guide gave the record 4 and half stars out of 5 and wrote; "this austere, beautiful set of songs represents a mature peak. The controlled chaotic edge of the early albums is completely gone, and cofounders Manzanera and Mackay provide only skeletal guitar and sax lines. Ferry fills in the details, creating layered synth landscapes around his tragic scenarios and melodic ruminations. Avalon's pervasive influence on the British pop scene of the '80s can't be overstated. Roxy Music's stature is even further enhanced by the absence of a latter-day comeback album. So far, anyway."^[16] Spin Alternative Record Guide rated Avalon nine out of ten: "1982's Avalon remains one of the all-time great makeout infernos, a synthesized version of Al Green's Call Me, Van Morrison's Moondance, and João Gilberto's Amoroso."^[17]

2003 surround-sound remix

In 2003, Virgin reissued Avalon on Hybrid Super Audio CD with a new 5.1-channel surround sound remix by the original production team of Rhett Davies (the producer) and Bob Clearmountain (the mixing engineer). The original 1982 stereo mix is left intact and is the same for the CD layer and for the HD layer, allegedly being transferred from analogue master tapes to DSD and processed in DSD throughout the process. The surround part of the HD layer includes the full album in the original running order plus the bonus track "Always Unknowing", whose original stereo mix is only available on CD on the 4-CD boxed set The Thrill of It All and in the 2012 Roxy Music Complete Recordings boxed set.

Except for "India", the short instrumental piece whose original multi-track tape had been lost, all tracks in the surround mix were remixed from multi-track sources, as opposed to two-channel stereo mixes being 'upmixed' to 5.1 as in some DVD-Video releases. For "India," the stereo mix is panned clockwise a few times as the track plays, which ends in the rear right channel, from which the saxophone begins the next piece, "While My Heart Is Still Beating," making up for "India" not being a fully-fledged surround recording. The surround mix has roughly the same running times as the ten tracks present in the stereo mix. The main difference is in the stereo image being 360-degrees wide, as opposed to a front image plus rear ambiance, and the levels at which various tracks from the multi-track are mixed into the multi-channel mix. For instance, the guitar parts in "The Main Thing" and "Take a Chance With Me" are noticeably more prominent in the multi-channel mix than in the stereo mix. Guitar, saxophone, synthesizer, and percussion parts are often placed in the rear part of the sound field, while lead vocals tend to stick to the front centre, as opposed to being mixed in dual-mono in front left and right like in the somewhat traditional 2.0 stereo mixing.

In an interview with Sound on Sound regarding the surround-sound remix of Avalon, Clearmountain stated: "This record probably means more to me than anything I've ever done. I've had more comments and compliments on this album by far than anything else I've ever done."^[18]

Track listing

All tracks written by Bryan Ferry, except where noted. 

Personnel

Roxy Music

• Bryan Ferry – lead vocals; keyboards; guitar synthesizer
• Andy Mackay – saxophones
• Phil Manzanera – lead guitar

Additional personnel

• Neil Hubbard – guitars
• Andy Newmark – drums (on tracks 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9)
• Rick Marotta – drums (on track 8)
• Alan Spenner – bass guitar (on tracks 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, and 10)
• Neil Jason – bass guitar (on tracks 2, 6, 7 & 9)
• Paul Carrack – piano (on track 8)
• Jimmy Maelen – percussion (on tracks 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 9)
• Kermit Moore – cello (on track 8)
• Fonzi Thornton – backing vocals (on tracks 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, and 9)
• Yanick Etienne – backing vocals (on track 3)

Production

• Rhett Davies – producer
• Roxy Music – producers
• Peter Revill – assistant producer
• Ian Little – assistant producer
• Benjamin Arbiter – assistant producer
• Barry Bongiovi – assistant producer
• Colin Good – assistant producer

Engineering

• Bob Clearmountain – engineer; mixer
• Michael Boddy – tape archivist

Singles

• "More Than This" / "India" (March 1982) (#6 UK, #6 AUS, #2 NOR, #6 SWI, #8 FRA, #17 SWE, #24 GER, #24 NED, #32 ITA)
• "Avalon" / "Always Unknowing" (June 1982) (#13 UK, #22 AUS)
• "Take a Chance With Me" / "The Main Thing (Remix)" (September 1982) (#26 UK)

Chart positions

References