Country Life is the fourth album by the English rock bandRoxy Music, released in 1974 and reaching No. 3 in the UK charts. It also made No. 37 in the United States, their first record to crack the Top 40 there. The album is considered by many critics to be among the band's most sophisticated and consistent. Jim Miller in his review for Rolling Stone wrote "Stranded and Country Life together mark the zenith of contemporary British art rock." Band leader Bryan Ferry took the album's title from the British rural lifestyle magazine Country Life. In 2003, the album was ranked number 387 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. It was one of four Roxy Music albums that made the list.
Style and themes
The opening track, "The Thrill of It All", was an up-tempo rocker that further developed the style of songs like "Virginia Plain" and "Do the Strand" ; it included a quote from Dorothy Parker's poem "Resume": "You might as well live". Eddie Jobson's violin dominated the heavily-flanged production of "Out of the Blue", which became a live favourite. Esoteric musical influences were betrayed by the German oom-pah band passages in "Bitter-Sweet", the Elizabethan flavour of "Triptych" and the lighthearted, boogie-blues, Southern rock edge to "If It Takes All Night". ”Three And Nine” was likened to the whimsical fare of Ray Davies, with Ferry looking back nostalgically to a time of watching the moving pictures in cinemas in his youth, for the pre-decimalization price of 3 shillings and ninepence. "Casanova" was singled out for praise by a number of critics as a more cynical and hard-rocking number than the usual Roxy Music fare. Like the earlier "In Every Dream Home a Heartache", it was seen as a critique of the hollowness of the contemporary jet set, and contained further instances of Bryan Ferry's idiosyncratic word association. A re-recorded version, more mellow than the original, appeared on Ferry's 1976 solo album Let's Stick Together. The final track, "Prairie Rose", was an ode to Texas and is sometimes mistakenly thought as a reference to Jerry Hall. However, Ferry would not meet Hall until 1975. Country Life included Roxy Music's fourth hit single, "All I Want Is You" b/w "Your Application's Failed", which reached No. 12 in the UK charts. An edited version of "The Thrill of It All", with the same B-side, was released in the United States. The album was released on Atco Records, a division of Atlantic Records.
Cover art
Shot by Eric Boman, the cover features two scantily-clad models, Constanze Karoli and Eveline Grunwald. Bryan Ferry met them in Portugal and persuaded them to do the photo shoot as well as to help him with the words to the song "Bitter-Sweet". Although not credited for appearing on the cover, they are credited on the lyric sheet for their German translation work. The cover image was controversial in some countries such as the United States, Spain, and the Netherlands, where it was censored for release. As a result, early releases in the US were packaged in opaque shrink wrap; a later American LP release of Country Life featured a different cover shot. Instead of Karoli and Grunwald posed in front of some trees, the reissue used a photo from the album's back cover that featured only the trees. Author Michael Ochs has described the result as the "most complete cover-up in rock history".
Track listing
All songs written by Bryan Ferry except where noted.
Note: On the 1999 CD reissue of Country Life, Paul Thompson is credited for playing guitar and Phil Manzanera is credited for playing drums, when in fact it's the opposite.
