Artist · chart history · #103 in alternative artist polls · #164 in indie & aaa artist polls
Roxy Music
Band London United Kingdom Formed 1971
Roxy Music formed in 1971 in London, United Kingdom. Roxy Music has 221 chart appearances on 93 radio countdowns from 25 stations on RockLists, spanning 1982–2026. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “Avalon”, which appears on 52 lists with a best position of #33. The station that charted Roxy Music most often is CD101 (Columbus, OH), with 64 appearances. The artist’s biggest year on year-end countdowns was 1982.
Roxy Music began in London with Bryan Ferry, singer, keyboard player and chief songwriter, and Graham Simpson on bass, and by the time they made their first album in early 1972 they had added Andy Mackay on saxophone and oboe, Phil Manzanera on guitar, Paul Thompson on drums and Brian Eno on synthesizer. That self-titled debut, with "Re-Make/Re-Model", sounded like nothing else in glam: art rock in a lamé jacket, crooning and bleeping and honking all at once, and dressed to kill, because the clothes and the look mattered as much as the music.
Simpson was gone by the middle of 1972, after which the bass chair never settled, and Eno made way for Eddie Jobson, on synthesizer, keyboards and violin, in mid-1973. For Your Pleasure and Stranded, with "Mother of Pearl", both came out that year, and Siren in 1975 had "Love Is the Drug", all strut and sly menace. Europe and Australia took to them from the first album, while America treated them for a decade as a cult band, and along the way they helped make glam smarter, left fingerprints on early English punk, sketched a blueprint for new wave and broke new ground with electronics.
They split in 1976, came back in 1978, and turned sleeker with every record: Manifesto in 1979 with "Dance Away" and "Angel Eyes", Flesh + Blood in 1980 with "Same Old Scene" and "Oh Yeah". Thompson was gone by then, and the band had narrowed to Ferry, Mackay and Manzanera plus hired hands. Avalon, in 1982, was the last studio album and the most seductive, a slow, satin-lined dream of a record, with "More Than This", "Avalon", "The Space Between" and "To Turn You On" drifting by like late-night headlights, and it went platinum in the US. They split again in 1983.
Ferry and Eno both went on to make their mark away from the band, Eno as one of the most important British producers of his time. Ferry, Mackay, Manzanera and Thompson reunited in 2001 and have toured together on and off since, most recently in 2022 for the 50th anniversary of that first album, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted them in 2019. On the countdowns, "Avalon", "More Than This" and "Love Is the Drug" still sound like the most elegant thing on the radio.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by Roxy Music on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Avalon | 52 | #33 | – | – | |
| 2 | More Than This | 48 | #12 | – | – | |
| 3 | Love is the Drug | 52 | #47 | – | – | |
| 4 | Dance Away | 14 | #207 | – | – | |
| 5 | Same Old Scene | 9 | #361 | – | – | |
| 6 | To Turn You On | 11 | #1389 | – | – | |
| 7 | Mother of Pearl | 4 | #564 | – | – | |
| 8 | jealous guy | 2 | #67 | – | – | |
| 9 | Oh Yeah | 3 | #262 | – | – | |
| 10 | The Space Between | 2 | #29 | – | 1982 | |
| 11 | If There Is Something | 2 | #1041 | – | – | |
| 12 | Do the Strand | 2 | #555 | – | – | |
| 13 | The Main thing | 3 | #104 | – | 1982 | |
| 14 | Virginia Plain | 1 | #370 | – | – | |
| 15 | Re-Make/Re-Model | 2 | #497 | – | – | |
| 16 | Angel Eyes | 1 | #264 | – | – | |
| 17 | Take a Chance With Me | 1 | #1084 | – | – | |
| 18 | Love Is A Drug | 1 | #574 | – | – | |
| 19 | In The Midnight Hour | 1 | #650 | – | – | |
| 20 | Over You | 1 | #1565 | – | – | |
| 21 | Thrill of It All | 1 | #1569 | – | – | |
| 22 | Let's Stick Together | 1 | #451 | – | – | |
| 23 | In Every Dream Home A Heartache | 1 | #2000 | – | – |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
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