More Than This

Ferry wrote the Avalon songs on the west coast of Ireland. The album version runs 4:30 and the 7-inch 4:10, with different sound effects and guitar processing on the single. It was produced by Rhett Davies and the band, with Ferry on vocals and keyboards, Manzanera on lead guitar, Mackay on saxophone, Neil Hubbard on guitar, Alan Spenner on bass, Andy Newmark on drums, Jimmy Maelen on percussion and Fonzi Thornton on backing vocals. The B-side was India. The single's cover used Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Veronica Veronese. It reached number 6 in the UK, number 2 in Norway and 6 in Ireland, Australia and Switzerland, and went Gold in the UK.

Ferry's vocal finishes 1:45 before the song does, leaving a synthesizer-led instrumental ending. Songfacts reads the lyric as being about the end of a relationship. Ferry told the Mail on Sunday in 2009 that some of the dark melancholy of the album came from the Irish coast where he wrote it. In 2022 Vulture described the song as introspective, using very few words but getting them in the right order. Ferry told the same writer that making videos was never his favorite thing.

Afterlife

The video opens with Ferry singing beneath a neon cross, then cuts to him in a movie theater watching the band on a fire-lit stage. The upload in the hypersongs web is the official 1982 music video on the RoxyMusicVEVO channel.

10,000 Maniacs covered it in 1997 with Mary Ramsey singing lead, reaching number 25 on the US Hot 100. Emmie's version reached number 5 in the UK in 1999. Bill Murray sang it in a karaoke scene in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003), and the performance appears as a hidden track on the soundtrack. Coppola said Murray's line before the song was an ad-lib. Pitchfork's Tom Ewing wrote in 2012 that on this song the entropic gloss is a feint that lets heartbreaking loneliness in close. At the 2022 Glasgow show Ferry did not attempt the swooping falsetto, and the Guardian noted the audience was out of their seats anyway. PopMatters credited the film with introducing Roxy Music to a new American generation, and Pitchfork called the song a high point of the early-1980s New Romantic moment.