Love Is the Drug

In early 1975, with their fifth album Siren coming together, Roxy Music were still seen in North America as an art-rock band. Andy Mackay had written the basic melody in London on a Wurlitzer electronic piano, with chords he said were inspired by English composers like Ralph Vaughan Williams. His version was slower and stately.

The band reshaped it in AIR Studio No. 1 with producer Chris Thomas. Bryan Ferry and drummer Paul Thompson pushed it toward a dance style, bassist Johnny Gustafson came up with the bass pattern and Thompson found the tight snare sound. Mackay spent hours tracking his sax riffs because Thomas kept asking for them again. Ferry wrote the lyrics at home in Holland Park, picturing a young man getting into his car and zooming into town to find action at a club. The opening lines came from a phrase used by a wardrobe worker named Christian: "T'ain't no big thing."

Released in September 1975, it reached number two in the UK and number 30 in the US, the band's highest-charting and only US Top 40 single. Roxy Music did not film a video but mimed it on television, with Ferry in an eyepatch because he had walked into a door the day before. Nile Rodgers later said the bassline influenced Chic's "Good Times".