Manifesto
	Produced by Roxy Music
	Released on March 1979
	UK CHART POSITION #7 . . . US CHART POSITION #23
	Find it at GEMM
SD 38-114 cover [high resolution scan]

F irst, to the munificent prog gods who gave us a Roxy Redux: danke schon, babies. Now for the inevitable grumbling. This isn’t exactly the way I remembered it. I mean, yes, it was all headed down a very very oh so slightly disco path with Siren, and alles vas under grupenfuhrer Ferry since the Ides of No When, but “Dance Away?” The new Roxy Music sounded something like the old Roxy music split in half: strange on the East Side, seductive on the West Side. (The album is broken into an East and West side, which suggests the band was broken into two camps, and maybe they were.) The opening “Manifesto” starts out as a weird instrumental and then gets an expertly flat and sour reading from Ferry. As it turns out, the title track is more of a red herring than a red rally. The egalitarian opener, in fact, shows that musical communism doesn’t work. Under a charismatic leader from the West like Ferry, well, Manifesto is a different story. Tracks like “Spin Me Round,” “Ain’t That So” and “Dance Away” are a sigh of things to come on Avalon; romantic confections wrapped in gossamer dreams. More problematic are the Eastern blocks, which haunt the record like bogus meniatures. Of these, “Trash” is the tastiest, the kin of such kinetic keepers (the spooge of such spoogey spoogers) as “Pyjamarama” and “Street Life.” The dark musings were missing on their next album, Flesh + Blood, so Manifesto shouldn’t be seen as a complete sell-out. Rather, it’s a partially successful attempt to finally fuse the two sides of Bryan Ferry (art rocker/romantic) on a single trip ticket.

TRACK LISTING

1. MANIFESTO    (Bryan Ferry/Phil Manzanera)    5:30
2. TRASH    (Bryan Ferry/Phil Manzanera)    2:13
3. ANGEL EYES    (Bryan Ferry/Andy Mackay)    3:32
4. STILL FALLS THE RAIN    (Bryan Ferry/Phil Manzanera)    4:11
5. STRONGER THROUGH THE YEARS    (Bryan Ferry)    6:13
6. AIN'T THAT SO    (Bryan Ferry)    5:39
7. MY LITTLE GIRL    (Bryan Ferry/Phil Manzanera)    3:18
8. DANCE AWAY    (Bryan Ferry)    3:45
9. CRY, CRY, CRY    (Bryan Ferry)    2:54
10. SPIN ME ROUND    (Bryan Ferry)    5:12

CREDITS

PAUL CARRACK --
BRYAN FERRY --
ANDREW MACKAY --
PHIL MANZANERA --
ALAN SPENNER --
PAUL THOMPSON --
GARY TIBBS --
Phill Brown -- engineer
Rhett Davies -- engineer
Jimmy Douglass -- engineer
Randy Mason -- engineer
Bryan Ferry, Antony Price, Neil Kirk, Sally Feldman & Cream -- cover

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