‘Both Ends Burning’: Roxy Music’s Second ‘Siren’ Name

Roxy Music classic 1975 signified a extra dance-oriented incarnation of the musical sophisticates than that of earlier years. However not solely did they maintain all of their inventiveness and elegance, however because the yr ended they’d simply loved their highest-ranking UK single so far and their fifth High 10 album in a row.

The album was Siren, from which that first single was the brilliantly incisive “Love Is The Drug,” a intelligent envisioning of the soon-to-explode discotheque tradition. Written by Bryan Ferry and Andy Mackay, it reached No.2 within the UK, crushed to the highest solely by David Bowie’s reissue of “Space Oddity,” and helped to gas a No.4 debut for the album.

Then on December 27, the second and closing single from Siren took its chart bow. “Both Ends Burning” is a much less celebrated Ferry composition however was cutting-edge in its personal manner, with synthesizer element by Eddie Jobson, Mackay’s ever-urgent saxophones and Ferry’s impassioned lead.

The only entered the UK chart at No.40, and though it didn’t turn out to be certainly one of Roxy’s greater hits, went on to spend two weeks at No.25. The B-side was a dwell model of “For Your Pleasure,” recorded just a few weeks earlier on the group’s Empire Pool, Wembley present.

Siren was the third Roxy Music album in a row to profit from the bass enjoying of John Gustafson, a vastly skilled participant who had been with such Sixties beat-era teams because the Large Three and the Merseybeats. He additionally toured extensively with Roxy within the mid-Seventies. “I can usually find something in any band that will carry me through musically,” Gustafson later informed Mojo, “however Roxy was puzzling initially as no person gave the impression to be directing it.

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“Bryan would have little more than a chord sequence. It was often a complete shambles at first but it would always seem to work. Something would take shape. I would usually stick with the first thing I came up with to anchor it. All Bryan would say was, ‘Make it sound black.’”