Much Communication in a Motion

When I was in high school, I would sometimes sleep with the radio on. This had a tendency to turn some of my dreams into musicals, and it was nice to gradually wake up (which is the only way I would ever wake up) in the morning with some warm and entertaining music.

At the time there was a station from Hammond, Louisiana, that played some more forward-thinking types of music, which in those days meant they were the first station in the area to play the Human League's "Don't You Want Me," and that's what I would have on most of the time. One morning, I distinctly remember awakening to the moody, delicate strains of Roxy Music's "Avalon," and feeling like I had left Louisiana for a far more sophisticated life than what was there. In reality, I was, at that moment, quite possibly doing the most sophisticated thing of any resident of Covington, Louisiana.

"Avalon" was the title track and second single off the eighth and final studio album from Roxy Music (who were initially called simply Roxy until it was discovered that there was already an American band with that name), although they have apparently been working on the dreaded reunion album for quite some time now. Like all their other singles save one, it failed to chart in the U.S., although, as I say, it got a bit of airplay in Hammond.

Here's Bryan Ferry, looking nothing at all like the son of a man who tended pit ponies - the small horses used in coal mining - with what was left of Roxy Music in 1982: