Over You

Album: Flesh + Blood (1980)
Charted: 5 80
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Songfacts®:

  • "Over You" was the first single taken from British rock band Roxy Music's seventh studio album, Flesh + Blood. It's an incredibly dreamy, bittersweet piece of Buddy Holly-esque pop music that sees frontman Bryan Ferry attempting to move on from a lover that left him. Despite his repeated efforts to convince himself he's over his ex, Ferry keeps finding his thoughts being pulled back to them:

    Oh, baby
    This is nowhere
    Wish I was somewhere
    Over you
  • This song was the first composition Roxy Music wrote and recorded at Gallery Studios in Surrey, a recording studio built by guitarist Phil Manzanera. The recording studio is based in an 18th-century coach house once owned by Charles James Fox, who famously served as the original British foreign secretary in 1782.

    "I had just built my first recording studio there but was waiting for the mixing desk to arrive," Manzanera recalled to The Mail on Sunday on June 28, 2009. "I rang up Bryan and asked him if he would like to check it out. He came over and there was a bass and a guitar in the control room. We were excited by the proposition of having our own studio and we decided to have a jam together, Bryan on bass and me on guitar with a rhythm box. Within five minutes we had written this track and we did a modest demo."
  • American music critic Dave Marsh ranked this song at #511 in his 1999 guide The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made. To quote Marsh: "Ferry's singing succumbs to the seductions of the beat and actually shows some life, so that even though the lyrics are actually quite as predictable as they want to be, their juxtaposition with heavily romantic piano chords, synth riffs, and Andy Mackay's soprano sax solo lends them a lush romanticism, as if the love song overlay were genuinely felt by all concerned." Fun fact: Marsh ranked "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" by Marvin Gaye at #1.
  • "Over You" plays during a nightclub scene in the 1992 film The Big Man. Directed by David Leland, the film stars Liam Neeson as a miner turned bare-knuckle fighter. Ennio Morricone, the iconic Italian composer famous for his work on films like A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), wrote the original score to The Big Man, which was released under the title Crossing the Line in the US.
  • The Canadian band Sloan included a cover of "Over You" on the deluxe edition of their JUNO Award-winning 1996 album One Chord to Another. The Robyn Hitchcock-fronted British band The Soft Boys also covered it on the bonus edition of their second album Underwater Moonlight. While commercially unsuccessful upon its release in 1980, Underwater Moonlight is now regarded as one of the most influential and critically acclaimed albums in the psychedelic genre.
  • This song reached #5 in the UK. It spent nine weeks on the chart, seven of which were in the Top 20. "Over You" was also the third and final Roxy Music single to chart in the US, after "Love Is the Drug" in 1975 and "Dance Away" in 1979. It reached #80 on the Billboard Hot 100.
  • Flesh + Blood charted at #1 in the UK on June 28, 1980, and returned to the top spot eight weeks later. It also reached #35 in the US, making it Roxy Music's second-highest-charting album in the States after Manifesto (1979). British art director Peter Saville, who famously designed the radio waves on the front of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures in 1979, conceptualized the album cover for Flesh + Blood. Photographed by Neil Kirk, it depicts three models wielding javelins, although the third model is only visible on the back cover.

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