Favorite 70's One-Hit Wonders #3 - "Love is the Drug"

Tweet

I've had some pretty heavy hitter's show up in my Favorite 70's One-Hit Wonders series thus far. A couple of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame acts, and even an Academy Award- winner have made the cut. Some bands, however, have to settle for merely being highly influential. Such is the case with Roxy Music, and their hit "Love is the Drug," #3 in the series. Fronted by smooth, suave vocalist Bryan Ferry, Roxy Music formed in London in 1971. And while they never quite attained the heights of many of their followers, the band was a critic's darling, and the sophisticated Roxy sound permeated through much of the modern rock/alternative music that you heard on the radio in the 1980's. Just give their 1975 hit "Love is the Drug" a listen. You can practically hear Duran Duran about to come bursting out of the song, while Grace Jones famously covered the tune. And Grace had exquisite taste when it came to covers. "Love is the Drug" was the first single from Roxy Music's classic 1975 album Siren (with Jerry Hall as cover model!) The song peaked at #30 on the Billboard Hot 100, and while Roxy hit that chart two other times, "Love is the Drug" was the band's only venture into the Top 40. If you dug the 80's New Romantic movement, you can thank Proxy Music for a lot of that sound. (I'm using the rules from Wayne Jancik's book The Billboard Book of One-Hit Wonders: An act can only have appeared on the Top 40 of the Hot 100 once. Any sub-charts don't count, and neither do countries other than the States.)