Bryan Ferry and Phil Manzanera before the band recorded its first album (early Peel Sessions for the UK's BBC Radio 1 feature O'List's playing). Roxy Music's first hit "Virginia Plain" made the UK top 5 in 1972, and was followed up with several hit singles and albums, with Ferry as their lead vocalist and instrumentalist (he taught himself the piano in his mid-twenties) and Eno contributing synthesiser backing. After their second album, Brian Eno left Roxy Music, leaving Ferry its undisputed leader. Ferry started a parallel solo career in 1973, initially performing cover versions of old standards on albums such as "These
Marxist Group (UK) Marxist Group (UK) The Marxist Group was an early Trotskyist group in the United Kingdom. Its origins lay in the Communist League, one of the first Trotskyist groups in the country. Trotsky advised the group to enter the Independent Labour Party (ILP), which had just disaffiliated from the Labour Party. He believed that the group should work for a "Bolshevik transformation of the party". The majority of the Communist League argued against joining the ILP in favour of maintaining an open party, but allowed thirty of its members led by Denzil Dean Harber to form a secretive "Bolshevik-Leninist Fraction" in