Roxy Music were the very definition of Art School. A more visual band it would hard to imagine, from those infamous cheesecake sleeves to their 50s future-retro stage stylings. Art and rock, rock as Art. Their work in general (and the eponymous debut and For Your Pleasure in particular) exists outside of time, of fashion. Their best songs, as Paul Stump points out, even buck Pop Law by being essentially chorusless. All of which is by way of saying Roxy Music still look and sound fantastic. Which does rather make the paucity of photographs in this, the first serious study of the band, troubling: a handful of insipid stills, badly reproduced. Bands these days - boy bands, Metal bands, even bloody Oasis - get the Technicolor treatment.

Journalist Stump (The Wire, Guardian, New Statesman) is a fan, but this is not hagiography. He's opinionated - almost comically so - in his spiritedly earnest defence of slick-haired Bryan Ferry's limp solo career and Roxy's sickly AOR Flesh + Blood demise. More curious is the extensive yet slyly knocking chapter dedicated to professed professorial non-musician Brian Eno's (bald) heady solo years. ('Here Come The Warm Jets' and 'Taking Tiger Mountain' vs. 'Taxi' or 'Bête Noire'? Don't make me laugh.) Many of the early pages are given over to the war of Bryan and Brian, with the prosaic suggestion that much of Ferry's anger was directed at the ostensibly fey Eno's way with women. 'Eno was always an anti-star who became a star', says producer Pete Sinfield, 'whereas Bryan Ferry wanted to be a star.'

Still, opinion is what makes a book like this, and although Unknown Pleasures (curious title) is not as argumentative as, say, Ben Thompson's recent and delightfully baiting Seven Years of Plenty, it's seldom sparing. One Ferry solo record 'sounds like shagging music, and someone's faking it'; elsewhere, 'intended sumptuousness is as tacky and tawdry as mass-produced tiramisu.' Stump's unprovoked sniping at Eno-produced Mancunian popsters James, though, just seems unwarranted and rather mean of spirit.