When Andy Mackay took Roxy Music tracks on a new journey

Andy Mackay’s 3 Psalms, released in 2018, was the Roxy Music ’ sax and oboe player’s first solo outing in 20 years – and he’d started developing it in the 90s. Ahead of its launch concert he looked back on his career with Prog and explained how he was taking the opportunity to revisit some of Roxy’s catalogue in an orchestral environment.

“I was brought up a Methodist, so we sang a lot of hymns and went to chapel twice every Sunday when I was growing up in London,” Andy Mackay tells Prog during a break in rehearsals for his 3 Psalms concert at the capital’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. “We sang the hymns as they do in Welsh choirs – with lots of enthusiasm.” He continues: “Methodism was the Anglican or the British equivalent of gospel music, really. I’m sure that was an influence on me.”

3 Psalms , his new album, reflects this lifelong approach, and includes a kaleidoscopic swirl of stylistic traits including church music, electronica, classical, jazz and a subtle rock undertow. Utilising a string orchestra and choir – who also join him at the live show – the album very much reflects his love of classical music, which dates back to his teenage years in the early 60s, learning oboe and being a  devotee of the Proms concerts at the Royal Albert Hall.

“I still want to see this music in the context of rock’n’roll,” Mackay says. “I’m a rock musician. I’m not actually a classical composer. They have a much more rigorous and disciplined approach to music than I do. I just write and play the music that feels right to me and it reflects my varied musical background. But I still feel that this is a rock album.”

The album’s genesis dates back to the mid-90s and it’s been a personal challenge for Mackay. “I was terribly excited – I’d got the new music software, Cubase, working on a second-generation Mac with a 1GB hard drive. It was considered quite miraculous at the time!” Mackay remembers. “I got excited about the idea of samples and loops and so on. I wanted to work with a human voice, so I wanted something speech-based. I’ve never been comfortable writing lyrics. I can’t quite get the balance and simplicity without it sounding a bit banal.

”So I thought I’d use someone else’s words, and it ended up with the Psalms. Initially, it was Psalm 130 , ‘ Out of the depths ’, which appealed to me because it seemed like a movement from despair to hope. Which, in the mid-90s, seemed right. My personal life had been had been quite difficult at that time, and writing the music around Psalm 130 was a good way to focus.

“Then I added the other two to make a symphonic set-up, so it has three movements. There’s a reflective, slightly doomier Psalm to start with, then Psalm 90, which is really about human mortality: ‘ The days of our years are threescore years and 10 ,’ and ‘ You are dust and to dust you will return ’ – all of that stuff.” (Mackay came face to face with his mortality in 2017, when he was diagnosed with cancer and went through a successful operation.)

The addition of Psalm 150 – ‘ Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet, praise him with the harp and lyre ’ – which he says is basically about feeling part of a bigger universe, gave the piece a satisfying shape, while a running time of around 40 minutes felt right to him.

Outside of Bryan Ferry ’s career, when it comes to Roxy Music members, Phil Manzanera ’s solo work tends to garner the most attention; 1975’s Diamond Head and his band Quiet Sun’s sole LP Mainstream – recorded at the same time – as well as prog  supergroup 801’s 1976 release 801 Live , are been rightly revered.

Mackay’s solo output, by comparison, has been largely and unfairly overlooked. His commissions for television included the theme music and songs for Rock Follies , and the soundtrack netted him a No.1 hit album. But his solo records have never yielded the attention they deserve. 1974’s In Search Of Eddie Riff was a glittering, glitzy and deliberately kitsch celebration in the style of a fictional 50s instrumental idol, and contained some fun rock’n’roll settings of Schubert and Wagner.

Also lurking amongst the brash riffs, warbling organ and twangy guitar there was the enigmatic Proust-referencing Time Regained , in which a chorus of overlapping tape-looped saxes connected with Terry Riley’s time-lag generator and Brian Eno ’s Discreet Music .

Mackay’s next solo album, 1978’s Resolving Contradictions , offered a pan-cultural observation on life in China, inspired by his visit there. Alongside grand themes, orchestral strings and incipient funk-tinged grooves, his saxes and oboes described fiery lines in taut arrangements that reconciled notions of Western rock and Eastern sensibilities.

While Mackay and Manzanera’s 1980s joint project, Explorers , veered towards the more mainstream songwriting avenues, the sax player's desire to bring wildly contrasting elements together was central to perhaps his most overlooked undertaking, Andy Mackay And The Metaphors. The 2008 six-tracker London! Paris! New York! Rome! was an exquisite post-rock travelogue of tunes from the American songbook such as Three Coins In The Fountain and New York, New York , and a stunning, spacious resetting of The Kinks ’ classic, Waterloo Sunset .

Shimmering waves of processed guitar, ethereal oboe, trickling piano and the tolling chimes of Big Ben create an ambient-style sound portrait of the city and the song’s two star-crossed lovers that is both touching and revelatory. It's a project for which Mackay still harbours a great deal of affection.

“I was really enjoying it – but I’d intended to make that more of a live thing,” he explains. ”But then, for various reasons, we couldn’t quite get it working due to logistical problems. I always seem to choose difficult instrumentations to work with.

“We had a concert harp player, Julia Thornton, who was with Roxy in 2001. So we were carrying a harp around as well as Paul Thompson ’s drums, and we had an experimental keyboard and synthesiser player. It ended up being more complicated because we were spread about: Bristol, East Anglia, Newcastle and so on. So for various reasons I couldn’t take it as far as I wanted.”

Also included on the record is a darker arrangement of Roxy Music’s Love Is The Drug . That song, which hit the top five in singles charts on both sides of the Atlantic, is being revisited as part of his Queen Elizabeth Hall concert, along with other Roxy works.

He reports: “I sketched out some of the ideas; but largely it’s down to Lucy Wilkins, who played violin in Roxy Music, and another old colleague of mine, Ray Russell, who worked with me on Rock Follies . They’ve come up with some arrangements which are much more unusual than most rock-meets-classic collaborations.

“Quite often people will just play keyboard parts on strings, but we’ve done things that can only be done with real strings, like playing with the back of the bow bouncing on the strings, playing without any vibrato and playing harmonics and very strong attack or very quietly. There’s a whole range of sounds that you can get, and when there's a 16-piece string orchestra doing that, you get a big lift that you really can’t reproduce on anything else."

The idea of revisiting Roxy came fairly late in the day. “Because Phil was going to be guesting at the 3 Psalms concert, I decided to use the choir and orchestra and work on Roxy Music songs,” Mackay explains.

“I think this is a great way of digging out some of the ways we worked in the middle period. Quite a lot of the songs we’re doing are the ones that I co-wrote. One of them is a version of A Song For Europe .”

The fact that the piece is being performed at a time when Britain’s political antipathy towards the European Union is not lost on Mackay. Playing the tune now has an unmistakable melancholy resonance with the current situation, he says. "You think, ‘Well, where are we going with Europe?’ It looks like it’s going to be a tragedy whatever happens. So there’s a slightly tragic quality about it.”