50 Years Ago: Roxy Music Enjoy a Bit of Country Life

The British art rockers’ pivot point is their best and most notorious album.

Fifty years ago, Roxy Music released their fourth album. I’m not sure how many fans think of it as their best — the old-school art rockers fight for the first two albums, mostly because Brian Eno is on them. A lot of my fellow Gen Xers like Avalon best, either because it’s the first one we heard (raises hand) or because of that scene in Lost In Translation where Bill Murray sings “More Than This” in a Tokyo karaoke bar as if it’s the saddest song ever written. And honestly, it seems like most of the diehard Roxy Music fans love either this album’s predecessor or follow-up, 1973’s Stranded and 1975’s Siren, best of all. But for me, Country Life is the best Roxy Music album, or at least it’s the one I will always come back to first.

The sleeve

I guess it’s inevitable that you have to talk about the album cover first. I knew this sleeve, one of the most notorious of the 1970s, years before I ever heard a note of Roxy Music. I first saw it in a book of album cover art that I checked out of Longmont, Colorado’s downtown public library for the first time when I was probably nine years old. The image of two women, both wearing what seemed like an enormous amount of makeup and…