Roxy Music’s “Love Is the Drug” has been placed on a new ranking of the best classic rock one-hit wonders, 51 years after the single was released on September 26, 1975. The label fits on only one side of the Atlantic. In the US the song climbed no higher than No. 30 on the US singles chart, in early 1976, and it is still the band’s only American Top 40 single. In Britain it went to No. 2 and was one entry in a long run of hits.
That gap is the real story behind the list. Here is how the band’s British singles record stacks up, using the peaks in its own chart history:
- 1972, “Virginia Plain”: No. 4 in the UK, from the band’s first single.
- 1975, “Love Is the Drug”: No. 2 in the UK, No. 3 in Canada, No. 8 on the Dutch Top 40, No. 18 in Australia and No. 30 in the US.
- 1979, “Dance Away” and “Angel Eyes”: No. 2 and No. 4 in the UK.
- 1980, “Oh Yeah” and “Over You”: both No. 5 in the UK.
- 1981, “Jealous Guy”: No. 1 in the UK for two weeks in March.
Count those up and the American “one-hit wonder” is a group with at least seven UK top-five singles, one of them a No. 1. In the US the same band spent its first decade as a cult act. Saxophonist Andy Mackay put it bluntly: “North America had been hard for us. We were seen there as an art-rock band.”
A bass part found in a D minor jam
The track started with Mackay, who wrote a set of slow, rather stately chords on a Wurlitzer electric piano in London early in 1975. In the studio, Bryan Ferry and drummer Paul Thompson pushed it toward the dance floor, and producer Chris Thomas made the players redo parts until they were tight. Mackay remembered that Ferry then sang “an almost complete vocal line” late one night in AIR Studio No. 1.
The riff belonged to John Gustafson, a Liverpool bassist who came up through the Big Three and the Merseybeats and played on three Roxy Music studio albums between 1973 and 1975 without ever being made a full member. His account is plain. Ferry was “banging away on D minor” on a Fender keyboard, the drums came in, and Gustafson waited a few minutes before playing something a little off the band’s rhythm that, in his words, “jolted them out of it” into a funkier groove. Ferry later said the record “wouldn’t have been anything without the bass playing.”
Ferry built the rest around a night out. The opening line, “T’ain’t no big thing,” came from a Trinidadian friend named Christian who worked on the band’s wardrobe. The footsteps on gravel that open the record were inspired by Ferry’s own driveway, with the slammed car door and the engine pulled from sound-effects recordings and overdubbed. Nile Rodgers has credited the bass riff as a major influence on Chic’s “Good Times”.
What came after the hit
Siren was Gustafson’s last studio album with the group. Roxy Music toured it into 1976 and then disbanded; the live album Viva! followed that August, and Gustafson moved on to the Ian Gillan Band. Ferry, Mackay, Thompson and guitarist Phil Manzanera regrouped in 1978 to make Manifesto, and by 1980 the band was down to a core trio of Ferry, Mackay and Manzanera. Flesh + Blood topped the UK albums chart, and Avalon (1982) was certified Platinum in the US. They split in 1983, reunited in 2001, entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019 and toured the UK and North America for their 50th anniversary in 2022. Gustafson died in 2014, aged 72.
The clip on the band’s channel
The upload on the band’s official VEVO channel is titled “Official Music Video,” which overstates things: Roxy Music never filmed a music video for this song. What the band did make was a mimed television performance in 1975, and the YouTube clip shows exactly that, with Ferry singing in a black eyepatch. He later explained that the patch covered a dressing on an eye injured the day before the taping. “It wasn’t a piratical fashion thing, as many people thought,” he said.
As a record of the band at its peak, the clip earns its roughly 19 million views. It catches the moment Roxy Music’s art-school polish met a dance beat, and the eyepatch gives Ferry an accidental swagger that suits the lyric. The weaknesses are mostly in the packaging. At 2 minutes 40 seconds it runs well short of the 4:11 album version, so the long groove that made the song a club record is cut down. The description prints the full lyric and promotes a reissue of a different album, For Your Pleasure, but never says which program the footage came from or when it aired. Viewers who know the song from Martin Scorsese’s Casino or from Sex Education get no context at all.
The club side of the song finally got its own format last year. The band’s first-ever 12-inch vinyl release of “Love Is the Drug,” with Greg Wilson’s extended edit, Todd Terje’s “Disco Dub” and the original B-side “Sultanesque,” was set for December 12, 2025, half a century after the 7-inch single.
Further reading
Image: Matthew Becker, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons
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