Songfacts®:

• The lounge rocker starts with lead singer Bryan Ferry dying inside when he passes by his ex "dressed to kill" walking "hand-in-hand with another guy." It morphs into a sad disco number as the singer dances away his heartache.
• Following an almost four-year recording hiatus, Roxy Music reunited in 1978 to lay down Manifesto. In the interim, Ferry had released three solo albums: Let's Stick Together (1976), In Your Mind (1977), and The Bride Stripped Bare (1978). Manifesto was a sumptuously produced continuation of Ferry's crooner solo career. This disco-tinged song, released as its second single, was the album's biggest hit.
• Released on April 13, 1979, "Dance Away" reached #2 in the UK, spending three weeks as runner-up to Blondie's chart-topper "Sunday Girl." It spent 14 weeks on the charts, the longest UK chart residency of any Roxy Music song, and was the ninth best-selling single in the UK in 1979.
• In the US, "Dance Away" was Roxy Music's second-most-successful single behind the #30-peaking "Love Is The Drug," reaching #44 on the Billboard Hot 100.
• Bryan Ferry originally wrote "Dance Away" for his In Your Mind solo album, but it didn't make the final track listing. He tried it again for The Bride Stripped Bare, but again it didn't work out. "I could never get hit right," he recalled to Uncut magazine. "I felt it was too much of a pop song. Then I played it to my friend in New York, Earl McGrath, who said you should give it to Bob Clearmountain to mix. Bob made it a hit."
• It's been suggested Ferry wrote the song after his public humiliation at the hands of Jerry Hall and Mick Jagger. The Roxy Music frontman first met the American model after she appeared on the album cover for Siren (1975). They began a two-year relationship that ended when Hall left him for Jagger in late 1977.
• At 3:48, the single version was a re-recorded shorter edit and mix compared to the original 4:20 album rendition. After "Dance Away" became a hit, the second pressings of Manifesto substituted the longer original version with its single remix. Alongside the album and single edit, a dance remix was also released in Canada on 12-inch, a format becoming popular in the disco scene in 1979. Ferry also included an instrumental jazz version on his 2018 album Bitter-Sweet.
• The video for this song takes place in an unidentified auditorium and begins with Ferry singing alone in the dark, empty seating area. Once the chorus kicks in, the camera cuts to the rest of the band performing on stage. Finally, the clip concludes with Ferry walking across Barclay Road in London with his coat casually thrown over his shoulder.
  
  The video was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the American filmmaker perhaps best known for directing the 1970 Beatles documentary Let It Be, the footage for which was reworked by Peter Jackson into The Beatles: Get Back in 2021.
• Manifesto was Roxy Music's sixth album and their first in four years. It climbed to #7 in the UK. It was also the band's highest-charting record in the US, reaching #23, with Billboard hailing it as "possibly the best Roxy Music album ever." Despite its success in the UK and the US, Ferry isn't the biggest fan Manifesto. He told The Guardian on April 28, 2022: "Maybe the Manifesto album isn't as strong as the others. Obviously, it's got 'Dance Away,' but there are tracks - 'Trash,' 'My Little Girl,' 'Cry, Cry, Cry' - that I wouldn't listen to now."