Above, Brian Ferry’s then-girlfriend, transsexual model/pop star Amanda Lear poses for the second Roxy Music album cover with a panther.

Short documentary film about the making of those iconic and sexy Roxy Music album covers. This was made for a recent event honoring Bryan Ferry in France.
 

 
Via Exile on Moan Street

 
Stevie Riks is a British comedian who does remarkable impressions/parodies of pop stars that are affectionate, smart and often brutally funny. His take on Bryan Ferry is so good it’s scary.

In this video, Riks does Ferry doing nursery rhymes while Freddie Mercury adds a bit of color.

 
Riks as Ray Davies is some brilliant silliness. He really nails the subtleties of Ray’s voice and that is no easy task. This had me laughing to the point of tears. Maybe it’s the face.

 
Stevie has almost 400 videos uploaded to his Youtube channel. It’s all him doing his impressions and they run the gamut from the ridiculous to the sublime. A few cut to the bone. Check them out here. He does a killer Lemmy.
 
Riks does Lemmy after the jump…

 
His name is Stevie Riks. He’s a comedian from England and he’s very funny. This impression of Bryan Ferry doing a medley of the theme from The Beverly Hillbillies, Benny Hill’s ‘Ernie’, ‘Pop Musik’, The Wurzels’ ‘I Am A Cider Drinker’ and ‘Two Little Boys’ by Rolf Harris is absolutely inspired.

Riks has a Youtube channel where he does spot on impressions of dozens of rock and rollers and some of them are gutbustingly funny. Check em out here.
 

 
Roxy Music performing Virginia Plain and Love is The Drug on the last edition of British television’s Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, which aired on July 16. Bryan Ferry, Andy Mackay, Phil Manzanera, and Paul Thompson all sound terrific. But, where’s Eno? 

Roxy is touring Europe, but no US dates are currently scheduled.

Bryan Ferry/Jonathan Ross, separated at birth.

 
Model, painter, disco diva and the absolute fiercest of the pioneering transsexuals (along with Candy Darling), Amanda Learwas born Alain Tap in Saigon, 1939. Or it could have been Paris. Or Hong Kong. The year might have been 1941, 1945 or as she now claims 1948. There is much competing information about her parents, none of it conclusive. In general, not much is known for sure about the early life of Amanda Lear and she would like to keep it that way. She claims to have been educated in Switzerland and she eventually made her way to Paris in 1959, taking the stage name Peki d’Oslo, performing as a stripper at the notorious drag bar, Le Carrousel.
 
The story goes that the gangly, yet exotic Eurasian beauty Peki had a nose job and sex change in Casablanca paid for by Salvador Dali, who frequented Le Carrousel, in 1963. Amanda, as she is now known, then makes her way to London to become a part of the swinging Chelsea set where she is rumored to have had a relationship with Rolling Stone, Brian Jones. She models for Yves St. Laurent and Paco Rabanne and is a constant muse for the Divine Dali, but her career is held back by rumors that she was born a man.
 

 
Roxy Music front man Bryan Ferry sees Lear on the runway during an Ossie Clarke fashion show and invites her to be the model for Roxy’s For Your Pleasure album cover walking a black panther on a leash. They had a fling and that image has become iconic. Lear also has a yearlong affair with David Bowie who sings Sorrow to her in his 1980 Floor Show (broadcast here on the Midnight Special in 1974). Bowie helped Lear launch her musical career and by the late 70s she had become a best selling disco singer and television personality in Europe with hits like Queen of Chinatown and I Am a Photograph. She collaborated with Eurodisco duo La Bionda (who Tara is nuts about and has posted here about them)

 
Her autobiography, My Life With Dali came out in 1985 and it begins when she would have been approximately 24 or 25 years of age. No mention is made of her life before arriving in London in 1965. When Dali biographer Ian Gibson confronted her on camera about the gender of her birth, Lear angrily—and not at all convincingly—stonewalled him. She has always vehemently denied that she was a transsexual despite it being a well-established fact. She even posed nude for Playboy and sunbathed naked on beaches to dispel the rumors. All this really proved was that she had a kickin’ bod!
 
Amanda Lear still looks amazing and continues to perform She has a thriving side career as a painter.

 
Modeling in the 60s with Patti Boyd Harrison and Karianne Muller (later a Roxy Music cover girl herself):

 
Bonus: Another incredible performance of Queen of Chinatown