Do the Strand

The track announces itself with an almost theatrical confidence — a stabbing brass figure, Bryan Ferry's glacially suave vocal entering like someone descending a staircase they've rehearsed, and a rhythm section that has absorbed funk and disco without surrendering any of its art-school cool. There's a relentless forward drive to the production, Phil Manzanera's guitar darting between riff and texture while Eno's synthesizer treatments give the whole thing an alien shimmer underneath. The song is less a conventional narrative than a manifesto for a new kind of decadence, urging the listener to embrace a movement that Roxy Music themselves were in the process of inventing — something glamorous and knowing, high art wearing the costume of pop. Ferry's vocal delivery is one of rock's great artifacts: simultaneously passionate and ironic, a voice that seems to be in quotation marks even when it's being sincere, which paradoxically makes it more affecting. For All Animals was Roxy Music's debut album, and this opening track announced a completely original sensibility to the British rock scene of 1972 — post-modern before that word had popular currency, glamorous before glam had fully cohered. Play it when you need something that makes self-consciousness feel like a virtue, music for getting dressed in the dark to go somewhere you've decided matters.