Flesh & Blood

What's remarkable about Roxy Music's final three albums is how each one builds on its predecessor. FLESH & BLOOD was the middle of this triptych (which ended with AVALON, the group's peak achievement). Where its predecessor, MANIFESTO, still had ties to the band's pre-hiatus first era, FLESH & BLOOD heads ever further into the lush romanticism that singer Bryan Ferry was to explore fully as a solo artist in the '80s. Where an earlier Roxy Music may have embraced an element of camp in a cover of "In The Midnight Hour, here Ferry nods to the camp factor only fleetingly.
Reduced to a trio of Ferry, guitarist Phil Manzanera, and saxophonist Andy MacKay, Roxy Music brought in a range of session players as needed. This, in effect, freed the band to follow the songs wherever they needed to go, which was straight into gorgeously produced romantic landscapes. The song's rich melodies cast Ferry as a matinee-idol leading man, a role he adapted to so successfully that songs like "My Only Love" sound like part of his own solo career.|