I don’t care for Roxy Music. Rockford likes them. I do like “More Than This,” though, mostly because of the Bill Murray connection.
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“Avalon,” released in 1982, was Roxy Music’s eighth studio album; it is generally regarded as the culmination of the smoother, more adult-oriented sound of the band’s later work. It was a commercial success, reaching number one in the UK and staying on the album charts for over a year; a single, “More Than This,” was also a Top 10 hit in Britain and other European countries. The same song was also a minor hit in the US, especially on the college radio circuit. Avalon is also notable as the band’s only platinum record in the US.
In 2003, the album was ranked number 307 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. It is one of four Roxy Music albums that made the list (“Siren,” “For Your Pleasure” and “Country Life” being the others).
The lush arrangements and synthesizer drenched sound of Avalon later found its way onto Bryan Ferry’s solo follow-up album “Boys and Girls” (1985).
“The Main Thing”, an album track from Avalon, was also used in a 2006 television advertisement for the Vauxhall Vectra, which was based around football and featured Pierluigi Collina. Pianos were added to the track in the advertisement version.
Continuing a Roxy Music tradition, Ferry’s girlfriend Lucy Helmore appeared on the cover wearing a medieval helmet and carrying a hawk. The image evoked King Arthur’s last journey to the mysterious land of Avalon.
In 2003, Virgin reissued “Avalon” on Hybrid-SACD with a new 5.1-channel surround sound remix by the original production team of Rhett Davies (the producer) and Bob Clearmountain (the mixing engineer). The original 1982 stereo mix is left intact and is the same for the CD layer and for the HD layer, allegedly being transferred from analogue master tapes to DSD and processed in DSD throughout the process. The surround part of the HD layer includes the full album in the original running order plus the bonus track “Always Unknowing”, whose original stereo mix is only available on CD on the 4-CD boxed set “The Thrill of It All.”
Except for “India,” the short instrumental piece whose original multitrack tape had been lost, all tracks in the surround mix were remixed from multitrack sources, as opposed to two-channel stereo mixes being ‘upmixed’ to 5.1 as in some DVD-Video releases. For “India,” the stereo mix is panned clockwise a few times as the piece is being played, which ends nicely in the rear right channel, from which the saxophone begins the next piece, “While My Heart Is Still Beating,” making up for “India” not being a fully-fledged surround recording. The surround mix has roughly the same running times as the ten tracks present in the stereo mix. The main difference is in the stereo image being 360-degrees wide, as opposed to a front image plus rear ambiance, and the levels at which various tracks from the multitrack are mixed into the multichannel mix. For instance, the guitar parts in “The Main Thing” and “Take a Chance with Me” are noticeably more prominent in the multichannel mix than in the stereo mix. Guitar, saxophone, synthesizer, and percussion parts are often placed in the rear part of the sound field, while lead vocals tend to stick to the front centre, as opposed to being mixed in dual-mono in front left and right like in the somewhat traditional 2.0 stereo mixing.
In the Sofia Coppola-directed classic film “Lost In Translation”, actor Bill Murray sings “More Than This” in a Tokyo bar. An audio version of this is included as a hidden track on the official movie soundtrack.
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