If any band personified the decadence of the '70s, it was Roxy Music. Singer Bryan Ferry epitomized the dissolute lounge lizard made handsome by a glib tongue and good fashion sense. The band's torch-song pop, poised on the periphery of disco and New Wave, chronicled the underbelly of the good life: the hazy letdown after the end of the party, the end implicit in the beginning of every love affair.

Even now, at nearly 60, Ferry still cuts the figure of a lady's man. One senses that during the current Roxy Music reunion tour he will continue to drown his world weariness in fine wine and beautiful young women.

Ferry, guitarist Phil Manzanera and sax player Andy McKay are on the road for the first time since the band's last proper album in 1982. And though their current "Best of Roxy Music" collection has yet to be released in Japan, the band's influence on much of New Wave, disco and pop should guarantee them a rapturous reception at each of their three dates in Tokyo.

Strangely enough, Roxy Music was also Brian Eno's first successful musical venture. The tension between Eno's tendency toward the off-kilter and Ferry's pop aesthetic produced brilliant moments of eccentric glam rock. On cuts like "Virginia Plain" and "Do the Strand," from their first albums in the early '70s, Ferry's voice chortles in its high-pitched, almost crooning style over Manzanera's growly guitar and Eno's barrage of avant-garde electronics.

Eno's departure in 1973 left the group with a sparer, but no less influential sound. "Country Life," their fourth album, was as famous for its cover -- two lingerie-clad Valkyries in a precoital pose -- as for its songs. By the time "Avalon" was released in 1982, the rough edges had been smoothed into a triumph of elegiac, bittersweet synth-pop. Manzanera's guitar glistens; Ferry's lyrics drip worldly despair. Alienation was never expressed so beautifully.