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Rating: 
Summary: A major disappointment.
Review: A pretty good and comphrensive look at Roxy's career and the individual solo careers Ferry, Eno, Manzanera & Mackay. The conclusions of the author are, at times, questionable (although interesting conclusions just the same)and the book is littered with typos and factual errors. Nevertheless, the author has done a credible job in trying to put Roxy's place in music into perspective.The pix are a bit skimpy and the discography could be a little more complete, but other than that a fine book for the Roxyphile.
Rating: 
Summary: (One could want) More Than This
Review: Best about this book is the author's attempt at explaining the historical forces that created Roxy; worst is his stiflingly dense prose and penchant for obscure references. Consequently, I found myself alternately spellbound by the many insights and frustrated by language and references that shot miles over my head. If you're looking for an academic disquisition, this book's the ticket. If you want to dig into the personal lives of Roxy Music members, give it a miss.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing Study Misses The Mark
Review: Hopefully one day there will be a definitive book about Roxy Music, but this one isn't it. Author Paul Stump overburdens himself (and the reader) by dealing "extensively with the environment in which Roxy Music thrived", noting in the preface that he makes "no apologies for diversions into sex, dandyism (and) pornography". Before long the book begins to unravel into endless digressions which appear to have little or nothing to do with Roxy. At the same time, Stump seems incapable of making any point succinctly: "In the 1950's, however, when conventional art instruction (both in method and course content) began to wilt under the influence of continental and American modernism, the pedagogic tradition became inculcated with values that were diametrically opposed to bourgeois existence and to bourgeois means of conceptualizing the world." Sloppy editing also hurts when seemingly different drafts of the same paragraph appear within a few pages of each other, or when the author refers to the song "Over You" as a "surreally misplaced... Everly Brothers' pastiche" three separate times in as many pages. One wonders how trustworthy Stump can be when he comments on how good Phil Manzanera's guitar intro is on "To Turn You On" when the only guitarist listed as playing on the track is Neil Hubbard! Ultimately, it is too easy to see Stump's prejudices. For him, Roxy Music ceases to be creative in the proper way after Brian Eno leaves (two albums in), so Stump occupies our time with trite speculation on Bryan Ferry's sex life in the mid-70's. To the author's credit, he does a fine job on a long chapter detailing Eno's solo work and on a chapter devoted to Andy Mackay and Manzanera outside projects. But one has to ask: What kind of Roxy Music biography would devote 55 pages to the solo work of Eno, Mackay and Manzanera and only two pages to "Avalon", the band's best-selling final album? I guess some pleasures are meant to remain unknown.
Rating:
Summary: A major disappointment.
Review: I was hoping this book would be a well written and interesting account of the work and lives of the musicians in Roxy Music. Sadly,"Unknown Pleasures" suffers from its pretentious style and frequent excursions into topics that are only distantly related to the band. The academic style of the book makes it tedious to read. A sample quote: "As per colleague Ian Penman, Morley's obsession with assuming the character and style of a French post-structuralist fatuously fugs up otherwise pertinent observations about the commerical implications of pertinent observations of pop sincerity and emotional syntax in a log jam of textual obfuscation and misplaced allusion." The author was not granted interviews with any of the band members, so the quotes and information about the band are from previously published sources. "Unknown Pleasures" is a disappointment.
Rating:
Summary: Proxy Music
Review: Okay, it's true that having the bulk of a biography concerning people who are still alive be bolstered mainly by second-hand rather than first-hand accounts renders the final product more than a little suspect. And Stump does get a lot of his facts garbled up too much of the time. But I like this book in the end because it does what it set out to do, namely place Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry in a cultural context. Two cultural contexts, really---the culture of the early Seventies U.K., when glam rode high and punk wasn't even a spec on the horizon; and the cultural trappings of 30s and 40s Hollywood glamour that so entranced Mr. Ferry that both he and Roxy Music wore them proudly on their sleeves. Stump does a fairly credible job of examining and critiquing Roxy Music's history, and if there's a paucity of "sex-'n-drugs-'n-rock-'n-roll" tell-all gossip here, it's partly because, whatever else they were or weren't, they were pretty straightlaced yobbos offstage. It's more fun reading about the music then the gossip, anyway, and Stump looks at all of it thoroughly; you won't agree with everything here (maybe not even ANYTHING!), but it's still entertaining reading. My question; why a Joy Division album title for a book about Roxy Music?
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