Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.On May 28 1983, Roxy Music played the last gig of their Avalon world tour at Philadelphia\u2019s Tower Theater. The set had included the title song of their album of the same name, with its poignant and, apparently, prophetic lyric: \u201cNow the party\u2019s over. I\u2019m so tired.\u201d Earlier that day guitarist Phil Manzanera and saxophonist Andy Mackay had decided they were leaving Roxy \u2014 the usual tensions and artistic differences \u2014 and were booked on a flight back to the UK. They returned to their hotel, picked up their luggage and took the elevator to the lobby. When the door opened, there stood the band\u2019s singer, Bryan Ferry. Manzanera shook his hand and said: \u201cIt\u2019s been a great pressure working with you. Goodbye.\u201d They went their separate ways for the next 18 years.Ferry had started thinking about the record in 1981 while spending time at Crumlin Lodge, a picturesque dwelling in Connemara, owned by the family of his girlfriend and future wife, Lucy Helmore. The area\u2019s ethereal ambience fed into his ideas. \u201cAvalon\u201d was recorded over the last weekend as the album was undergoing its final mixing at New York\u2019s Power Station. To begin with, it was twice the tempo and called \u201cNew Scatter\u201d, a reference to Ferry\u2019s original scat vocals, but the singer decided at the eleventh hour that it would be better slower and came up with the lyrics on Saturday night.He and producer Rhett Davies went back into Power Station on Sunday, a quiet time when local bands did demos. While having a coffee the pair heard a woman singing in another studio. Ferry was taken with the Haitian Yanick \u00c9tienne\u2019s \u201chaunting\u201d voice, as he described it. \u00c9tienne was invited into the Roxy studio, played \u201cAvalon\u201d and asked to sing whatever she felt moved to sing.Her sublime, otherworldly vocalisation was the perfect finishing touch and so \u201cAvalon\u201d joined The Rolling Stones\u2019 \u201cGimme Shelter\u201d and Pink Floyd\u2019s \u201cThe Great Gig in the Sky\u201d as a great number elevated into something extraordinary by the contribution of a hired female vocalist. The song was smooth, seductive and sophisticated and Ferry\u2019s lyrics had a wistful end-of-an-era feel: \u201cYes, the picture\u2019s changing, every moment\/And your destination, you don\u2019t know it.\u201dThe video, shot over two days at Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire and directed by Howard Guard and Ridley Scott, reflected this elegiac quality. In the aftermath of a gathering in a stately home, Ferry \u2014 white dinner jacket, black bow tie \u2014 dances with a beautiful young woman in a pink silk ballgown. The woman, Guard tells the FT, is not real, but a symbol of immortality and transcending death: \u201cThe key to the whole film is towards the end \u2014 the veiled face in stone.\u201d The woman was played by model and actress Sophie Ward. \u201cThe band were all there and Bryan Ferry was charming and easy to work with,\u201d she recalls. \u201cThe hardest part was being asked to freestyle dance to the closing bars of the song. I was 17 and suddenly making up a long dance in front of a very famous band.\u201d A bird of prey also makes an appearance, a reference to the album cover which featured Lucy Helmore with a merlin falcon on her gloved hand. Manzanera drily observes in his memoir, Revoluci\u00f3n to Roxy, that he and Mackay had ended up \u201cwith rather less time on screen than the stunt-falcon\u201d.The original has never been bettered though. Almost two decades after their split, Roxy reformed for a tour in 2001. \u00c9tienne appeared at some of their shows, her performance captured on the Roxy Music: Live at the Apollo DVD. The band have toured and performed several times since, with \u201cAvalon\u201d almost always on the set list. It turns out the party wasn\u2019t quite over.Let us know your memories of \u2018Avalon\u2019 in the comments section belowThe paperback edition of \u2018The Life of a Song: The stories behind 100 of the world\u2019s best-loved songs\u2019, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by ChambersMusic credits: Virgin; Stab; BMG; BasicLUX; Editions Murray Head Music; Phenix Phonograph\/Universal; Deutsche Grammophon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.On May 28 1983, Roxy Music played the last gig of their Avalon world tour at Philadelphia\u2019s Tower Theater. The set had included the title song<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":208436,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-208435","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208435"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":208437,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208435\/revisions\/208437"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}