Spin Me Round

Terribly underrated set of lyrics. Maybe I’m reading too much into them or completely missing the point but here it goes. It may be an elegant and unobtrusive ballad but, giving the text a bit of thought, it’s actually a rather unsettling song.

The lyrics open with the Ferry cliché, the lone spectator to the aftermath of a party (impossible not to think about Avalon when hearing “now the ballroom’s empty”). It’s the next bit when it starts getting interesting: “everybody I’ve known has been and gone. With the music over here am I, a shadow hanging on”. Our narrator is caught in a strange limbo, without sense or purpose now that the show is over (did I mention this is the closing track of the “Manifesto” album?). Immortal but merely “a shadow hanging on” waiting to be brought to life again whenever the song is played. And here comes the chorus and its plea: “Spin me round”. It works as a double entendre. It could be “take me out for another dance to keep the party going” as well as “play this record again to keep me going”.

The bridge towards the end has Ferry’s voice referring to itself as a “netherworld dancing toy”, subject to the listener’s whims (“does it matter to me who turns the key?”). If that wasn’t sinister enough, the last few lines are the cherry on top: the recording shows some self awareness of its plight (“I don’t understand why the dream has ended yet I can’t wake up”), being not quite dead, not quite alive. A piece of soul trapped in a piece of plastic. It’s straight up “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” territory. Spin Me Round is just a fantastic little sci-fi horror story and I love that.

Spin Me Round ends with the chorus being repeated over and over, slowly fading away until all we can hear is a music box playing until it halts, needing someone to wind it again.

Roxy Music went through a lot of changes in the 70s, and by 1979, when Spin Me Round was written, there was a kind of emotional exhaustion to the songwriting (hence the reference to Avalon, repeated successful ideas). The music is much sparser than the early albums, and there are not so many instrumental lines playing off each other. Just plaintive sadness in every sound. Ferry might have been wishing for a time gone by. When songs were on turntables, spinning, when life was a glamorous whirl. Jerry Hall had left Ferry. He may have been expressing a longing for a pinnacle that has been reached and could not be recreated, even with spinning...