Do the Strand

Roxy Music's "Do the Strand" is glam-art-rock at its most gleefully decadent, a manifesto disguised as a dance craze. Bryan Ferry's vocal is pure arched-eyebrow camp—a theatrical croon dripping with ironic sophistication, inviting you to a fictional dance that sweeps aside the tango, the waltz, every tired old step. The band is electric: Andy Mackay's honking saxophone, Phil Manzanera's slashing guitar, and the manic forward momentum of a track that never stops to breathe. Lyrically it's a barrage of high-low juxtapositions, name-dropping Lolita and the Mona Lisa and Sphinx in the same breath as a nightclub craze, the whole thing a wink at art, fashion, and the absurd seriousness of taste. Recorded in the early seventies, it helped define a wing of glam that was cerebral and stylish rather than merely loud—Roxy as the art-school sophisticates of the scene. The energy is irresistible, all nervous propulsion and Ferry's clipped, mannered phrasing. It's music for dressing up, for the knowing party, for anyone who treats style as substance and means it. Decades on, it still sounds like the future arriving fashionably late and overdressed—a brilliant, witty, faintly ridiculous classic that influenced everyone from punk to new wave, the sound of pop art learning to swing.