For Your Pleasure

"...How to follow the best debut album of the 70s?

With an album of stronger songs and better production (of course). At this stage, Roxy could do no wrong...There is menace, madness and sadness on this record but also nostalgia, humour, and pastoral sweetness. It is:

• English aristocrasy through a rock and roll prism
• Browning meets the Beats
• the poetry of Byron and the
• glamour of James Dean

If you want any album from the glam era, buy this one, it's even better than Ziggy..." Amazon.co.uk reviewer John Pownall

Although all the Roxy Music albums of the 1970s were triumphs, perhaps the most glorious was 1973's exotic For Your Pleasure. Yes, it's most definitely, an album of style over substance but ooh la la, how stylish can one single album be?

Against the background of an eternal city nightscape, covergirl/boy(?) Amanda Lear is seen walking a barely visible, snarling, black panther while chauffeur Bryan Ferry grinningly awaits her return in his limo... 

Roxy Music's For Your Pleasure two-sided album sleeve

Remastered in 1999, For Your Pleasure still sounds futuristic and timeless, opening with the tongue-in-chic footstomper, Do The Strand...

"... There's a new sensation
A fabulous creation
A dance-able solution
To teenage revolution
Do the Strand..."

...and then, as if to reinforce that bizarre societal conceit, Ferry warbles:

"...Rhododendron
Is a nice flower
Evergreen and
Lasts forever
But it can't beat Strand power

The Sphinx and Mona Lisa
Lolita and Guernica
Did the...
...Strand..."

        Do The Strand

OK, it doesn't mean much, it's not going to stop world famine but Do The Strand is such fun, so camp without being gay, it's almost like Cole Porter being channeled into the glitz of the European Seventies via all-hormonal Fifties rock'n'roll. And is The Strand really a dance, or is it something else that teenagers like to do? 

The next two tracks, the wistful Beauty Queen...

"...Deep in the night
Plying very strange cargo
Our soul-ships pass by
Solo trips to the stars
In the sky
Gliding so f-a-r
That the eye cannot follow
Where do they go?
We'll never know..."

      Beauty Queen

...and the spooky wonderings about imminent death in Strictly Confidential...

"...Haunting me always are the voices Tell us are you ready now?
Sometimes I wonder if they're real We're ready to receive you now
Or is it my own imagination? Have you anything more to say?
Guilt is a wound that's hard to heal..."

                         Strictly Confidential

...are both easy to overlook as fillers without hooks but immersion in their words make both songs powerful musical paintings. That being said, their low-key modesty helps build up expectation for Editions Of You, arguably Roxy Music's best-ever rock'n'roll song...

"...Well I'm here looking through an old picture frame
Just waiting for the perfect view
I hope something special will step in to my life
Another fine edition of you
A pin-up done in shades of blue..."

Oh, but Editions Of You is so much more than just rock'n'roll in which boy's lost girl. Ferry spins you into a world that is quintissentially English, possibly gay...

"...Sometimes you find a yearning for the quiet life
The country air and all its joys
But badgers couldn't compensate at twice the price
For just another night with the boys oh yeah
And boys will be boys will be b-o-y o-y o-y-s..."

                    Editions Of You

...while the band revs you through a monster riff with Phil Manzanera on guitar & Andy Mackay on sax really letting rip on their brief, exciting solos. Editions Of You remains one of Roxy's best-loved tracks and why not? Everything works perfectly.

It's at this point that For Your Pleasure slams the foot on the brakes of songs and suddenly becomes a mostly moody, instrumental masterpiece, punctuated by lyrics, much like the Pink Floyd did with Dark Side Of The Moon, released just one week earlier.

Ferry draws you into this world slowly through the astonishing In Every Dream Home A Heartache, still the only song by a major artist about falling in love with a rubber doll...

"...I bought you mail order
My plain wrapper baby
Your skin is like vinyl
The perfect companion
You float my new pool
De-luxe and delightful
Inflatable doll
My role is to serve you..."

In Every Dream Home A Heartache

In Every Dream Home A Heartache builds and builds slowly through the verses (there is no chorus) and powerful atmospherics, surprisingly to a genuinely funny punchline. It's obsessive, weird and deliciously perverse and certainly remains one of my favorite-ever album tracks.

Flipping over the album, side 2 starts with The Bogus Man. At over 9 minutes, it's a repetitive dirge (in a good way) about an anthropomorphosed paranoia...

"...The bogus man is at your heels
Now clutching at your coat
You must be quick
Now hurry up
He's scratching a-t 
Your t-h-r-o-a-t..."

        The Bogus Man

There's a brief return to songs with Grey Lagoons, more just a riff, really... and once more, both pretty and meaningless lyrics...

"...Broken partings making strange goodbyes
Hopeless cases with fake alibis
Even hoping we'll be there to share
With you
Blue suns and grey lagoons..."

            Grey Lagoons

However, just as Beauty Queen & Strictly Confidential pace the first side, so, too, does Grey Lagoons do so for the second side. It's got a weird, galloping beat, kooky backing vocals and then, out of nowhere, killer guitar, sax and harmonica solos. It may not mean much as a song, it may not even be memorable but it really sets up the title (and final) song.

Like The Bogus Man, the track, For Your Pleasure, is primarily instrumental with lyrics that are mostly suggestive rather than literal...

"...For your pleasure
In our present state
Part-false part-true
Like anything
We present ourselves..."

   For Your Pleasure

Meanwhile, drummer Paul Thompson pumps out a slow tribal beat, Phil Manzanera adds some tasteful treated guitar and Eno (or Ferry) create a simple keyboard wall that keeps building to somehow eventually suggest Eternity. The song fades over several minutes into the void as Ferry warbles quietly, as if he's a soul drifting into the ether. The effect is strange, slightly disturbing and utterly mesmerising.               

Roxy Music: For Your Pleasure

"...This is one of my favorite albums. Silly campiness is blended with dark, disturbing subject matter, creating some perfectly cold and chilling music...Overall, the songs are very energetic, and although I'm not a fan of slow songs, the slower tunes are so full of energy and interesting instrumentals that I enjoy them better than the faster tracks. A perfectly creepy ending! Amazon reviewer Tim Hornak

"...This album has lost none of its charm, impact or class in the last 35 odd years. It is still morbid, sleazy, rocky, weird bad-dancing music of the highest order, and people my age (i.e., they're more comfortable in pubs than clubs and own yellow M&S jumpers rather than red S&M bodysuits) should listen to this again and remember when they were alive..." Amazon.co.uk reviewer Dobester

I can't recommend For Your Pleasure more. It's my favorite Roxy Music album and apart from 70s recording techniques and limitations, still light years ahead of virtually anything released since. 

For Your Pleasure: the T-shirt  

Roxy Music fans of the time may also want to check out the DVD, LIVE, which contains performances from two German TV shows, Beat Club & Musik Laden, recorded (with Brian Eno) around the time that For Your Pleasure was released.

N.B.: As a bonus, there are some T. Rex tracks, too.

LIVE: featuring Roxy Music

For more info, see:

• wikipedia For Your Pleasure
• a curio! Xwsftassel has posted a video with the music from Pyjamarama, Roxy Music's single created specially to promote For Your Pleasure. Unfortunately Youtube member Barry Stock reports (and I concur) "...Your turntable is running wee fast, enough to raise this tune's pitch one semitone..."