Faber & Faber

Re-make/Re-model: Michael Bracewell

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Synopsis:

Re-make/Re-model is the fascinating and largely unknown story of the individuals and circumstances that would lead over a period of almost twenty years to the formation of Roxy Music - a group in which art, fashion and music would combine to create in the words of its inventor, Bryan Ferry, ‘above all, a state of mind’.

Written with the assistance, for the first time, of all of those involved, including Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, Andy Mackay and Phil Manzanera; the fashion designer Antony Price, the founding guru of pop art, and Bryan Ferry’s tutor, Richard Hamilton, and many more, Re-make/Re-model is also the account of how pop art, the avant garde underground of the 1960s, and the heady slipstream of London in the 1960s was transformed into the fashion cults of revivalism, nostalgia and pop futurism in the early 1970s.

Roxy Music would achieve almost immediate success as a pop group which was a meticulously montaged selection of styles. Theatrical, arch, thrilling, clever, their debut album, released in 1972, would be hailed by critics as one of the best ever released. As important, the record would offer the blueprint for a modern revolt into style.

The story which has never been told is that of the interweaving networks of friendships, influences and ideas out of which Roxy Music emerged. This would be a world in which the ideas within fine art and the avant garde would be determinedly applied to the making of mainstream popular culture; a story in which, through the recollections and insights of the participants, we travel from the austerity years of Britain in the 1950s, through the liberations and revolutions offered to a new generation by art schools and pop culture, to pursue the notion, retrospectively summarised by Brian Eno, that, ‘pop music is not about making music in any traditional sense of the word. It is about creating new, imaginary worlds, and inviting people to join them.’

From student digs and provincial nightclubs, to emerald-green eye shadow and fake leopard skin, Re-make/Re-model is the history of an era and the biography of an extraordinary idea.

Tags:

Categorised as:

Non-fiction

Sub-categories:

Popular Culture; Popular Music

Genres & Themes:

Art; Design; Fashion; Pop Music; Roxy Music