There are great pop records that connect you to the real world and others that create their own worlds.

Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure is the perfect example of the latter — a richly cinematic oddball and a dangerously romantic (or is it romantically dangerous???) work that was masterminded by a coal miner’s son who grew up in a shining light of the industrial revolution that had turned into a blighted industrial wasteland.

After Christmas one year my mum came back from the U.K. and handed me a British pressing of For Your Pleasure as a belated present. I get the same thrill every time I listen to it. Even decades after release there is still nothing like it out there.

Art

Before forming The Clash, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon met at art school. Jones said he went there because his favorite acts, from The Beatles to Roxy Music, had an art school connection. He jokes that he went there to form a band but got a great art education by accident while Simonon has been a successful painter for almost as long as he’s been a musician. Bryan Ferry originally performed in bands for fun but had planned to be an artist. Going to art school would have a profound effect on him and his approach to music.

Bryan Ferry was the designer on the Roxy Music sleeves. His most famous cover image, for Country Life, was thought of on the spot when he was camping in Portugal and ran into two striking German women. Ferry wanted Roxy sleeves to look and feel like special luxury products. Instead of music packages he remembered the beautiful boxes of chocolate his family would share during Christmas. Those chocolate boxes spoke of sophistication and glamour that was light years away from Newcastle, a city that is a mix of dizzying, baroque opulence and gritty urban squalor. If you’ve never seen these boxes they were really something special.

Selling Roxy Music like luxery boxes of chocolate:

Ferry’s dark and dangerous design work with For Your Pleasure hit it out of the park but also caused friction with him and the other Roxy members. Ferry alone, and not the entire band, was featured as a chauffeur on the back sleeve.

The sleek blackness, the fetish-y style — futuristic and film noir at the same time —  For Your Pleasure looks (and sounds) like a product closer to the late ’70s or ’80s rather than the denim and boot clad 1973 rock scene it was released in.

There is a side story to the cover model here, whom Ferry dated for a while. Amanda Lear came to London from France and was a mainstay of the Swinging 1960s & ’70s rock world. Besides Ferry, she had dated Brian Jones, Keith Moon, and David Bowie. She is the subject of The Stones’ “Miss Amanda Jones.” Rumors have persisted for decades that Lear was transgendered which may explain why she has been photographed completely nude so often — see, folks, nothing to hide here. Lear may have started out as a groupie but she is kind of a Grace Jones figure in Continental Europe where she went from selling millions of Disco records to being a long running TV presenter and personality. You can find out more here in this article written after she lost her husband of 20 years in a house fire that also consumed the many paintings her friend Salvador Dali had given her.

Here is Amanda Lear with Ferry, Brian Jones, a couple of unknowns, and Keith Moon:

Brilliant cover — I’d rank it up there with Roxy Music’s Country Life, The High Road, and Manifesto.

The Back Story

Most classic rockers, from Bruce Springsteen to Paul Weller had no choice in what they did — it was music or the scrap heap. Roxy Music was different — they were even older than their peers when they came on the scene in 1972. Ferry and Roxy drummer Paul Thompson were both commoners from Newcastle but the singer had consciously lost his working class Geordie accent back in high school. The brilliant guitarist Phil Manzanera was a British diplomat’s son raised throughout Latin America though he met lifelong friends and collaborators David Gilmour and Robert Wyatt as a teenager after moving back to the U.K. The classically trained Andy MacKay has to be rock’s only full time oboe player and he brought his art school pal Brian Eno into the band. Like George Martin, Brian Eno only seems regal — he was a postman’s son with a Belgian mum (Manzanera’s own mother was Colombian). Featured on bass for this Roxy album is Ferry’s old friend John Porter who The Smiths would choose as their record producer because of his presence on this masterpiece.

Bryan Ferry’s operating vision for Roxy Music was that they were a 1950s lounge band playing on Mars (guessing that Alex Turner may have been taken some notes). The same influences that went into Bryan Ferry’s design work went into his songwriting — decades of pop culture entertainment are combined and distilled into something new, beautiful, and strange. Ferry wrote the songs on the first couple of albums by himself and then showed them to his incredible band to flesh them out. Roxy collaborated together to come up with all their brilliant sounds — running their instruments through Eno’s synths was a favorite past time. Later there would be more co-writes and collaborations.

There was nothing like Roxy Music’s 1972 debut. It bristled with energy and wild originality even as it connected to thousands of influences (and, its no coincidence that Roxy Music and David Bowie were the original Velvet Underground fans). That album essentially captured Roxy’s live show (with a couple of exceptions) — and, in a nice twist for revolutionary free-thinkers, instead of being neglected by the masses they were a British hit right out of the gate (with Bowie name checking them as his favorite band).

For Your Pleasure

Released quick on that debut’s heels, For Your Pleasure would expand upon their success by using the studio a whole lot more. Ferry’s funny/freaky Casanova Frankenstein persona would be even more delineated here. On the debut the protagonists of the songs are essentially drawn from romantic archetypes — Wuthering Heights, Casablanca, Noel Coward, Marlena Dietrich. Here, Ferry plays twisted cabaret barkers, possibly deluded obsessives, and blank-eyed witnesses to villainy.

The opening cut, “Do The Strand” is full of so much kinetic, pre-punk energy that you don’t even have to notice the wordplay in the lyrics but you should — they are pure Cole Porter. The next track on the set, a romantic sendoff to a future star, contains the line that could stand in for the entire Roxy Music ethos —  “One thing we share is an ideal of beauty.” This ballad, “Beauty Queen,” and the next, “Strictly Confidential,” are still bracingly original. They may come off to some as externally campy and ironic but are completely heartfelt and sincere on the inside. Come to think of it — that was always the secret to Roxy’s success.

At this point in their career Roxy Music followed in The Beatles footsteps and didn’t release album cuts as singles. Too bad because, like “Do The Strand,” “Editions of You” is a natural for a single. It somehow captures the 1960s garage rock spirit while jumping over the ’60s completely and going for a pre-new wave style that still sounds ahead of the curve (Ferry plays most of the keyboards on the album but I think the Go-Go joint organ solo may be played by Andy MacKay).

Side A closes with the social isolation epic “In Every Dream Home a Heartache.” Ferry’s Casanova Frankenstein persona has never been so well delineated as here, turning modern comforts into a mausoleum of despair. Saying this song is about a blow-up doll is missing the point — its like saying “Ode To Billy Joe” is about abortion. Just as “Beauty Queen” is genuinely romantic even as it cribs from “fake” old melodramas, “Dream Home” starts off as Hammer horror but soon reveals itself to be a warped satire on groovy consumerism and a troubling look at the how modern life is making us more and more alone. Replace the song’s mind-exploding doll with a robot or a hologram and you have a witty, but frighteningly bleak, episode of Black Mirror. As a song, it builds and builds in tension until it breaks — and when it breaks it is utter madness. Goth rock?? Created here.

 

I don’t see how you can get any better than Side A of For Your Pleasure.

Flip the record over and you get “The Bogus Man,” another epic, riding over 9 minutes of bad serial killer vibes. I get wrapped up in the song’s birth-of-post-punk sound but, again, it is also a showcase for Ferry’s writing — the song’s victims are not described at all yet still come off as more real and human than the elusive title character, who is all existential forward motion and no introspection. The song is also noted for unknowingly turning millions on to the German band Can — though like American funk being repurposed for dark British post-punk the chiaroscuro scenes of “The Bogus Man” point the way more toward Public Image’s Metal Box than original issue kraut rock did.

“Grey Lagoons” is a fantastic cut with a priceless Ferry melody and more of those early Roxy swooning backing vocals. It is also a little out of place on this album — it careens into a rollicking 1950s R&B freakazoid stomper that comes complete with Ferry proving there is such a thing as a punk rock harmonica solo and Manzanera playing futuristic Flash Gordon rockabilly guitar as expertly as Chris Spedding. That all makes it a much better fit for their debut album instead of For Your Pleasure. Still, I need to have this song in my life. A better fit for this album would have been their smashing stand-alone single “Pyjamarama.”

The album ends with the stately, dignified, and almost funeral title track.  Its a majestic closer with an extended Brian Eno engineered fade out that loops and echoes into eternity. Eno points to the studio work he did on this track (it starts about 3 minutes in) as his major, almost only, contribution to Roxy Music (this is an exaggeration — he is being overly modest to make a point). He would return to the idea, handled even more successfully, on his Discreet Music solo set.

Even before Brian Eno went solo critics erroneously believed that he was the creative force behind the band. This remains puzzling to Eno who has always said Ferry was Roxy Music’s main idea man. Part of these misconceptions probably come from the fact that, in concert, Ferry came off as confident and powerful but his Ronald Coleman meets Boris Karloff stage persona melted away the minute he stepped off it. The real Ferry could be shy, ill at ease, and tongue tied.  Gee, I wonder why he invented a whole world to live in?

I have to admit that, visually at least, I prefer my Brian Eno to come zen bald, in a comfy sweater, with a bemused, slightly professorial air. Eno looked like a complete freak onstage with Roxy Music. His bird-man outfits and stringy, rapidly thinning long hair made him resemble Riff Raff from Rocky Horror, The Vulture from the old Spider-Man comics and the kind of guy who asks shivering, pit-dwelling women to put the lotion back in the basket. Of course, in the world of 1970s rock this all made Eno Roxy’s breakout sex symbol!! Eno was also well spoken, supremely comfortable in his own skin without being cocky, and loved discussing things in-depth with the music press.

Soon after For Your Pleasure Ferry kicked Eno out of the band due to misdirected anger at these critical misconceptions more than any actual problems between the two of them. Ironically, Eno has stated that his favorite Roxy Music album is the one after this one, Stranded, partly because he could be dazzled by it while wondering how the band came up with so many amazing sounds. A quick listen to that album’s peerless “Mother Of Pearl” — truly the ne plus ultra of Roxy Music songs — puts away any doubts that Roxy Music would have any problems making the music of tomorrow without Brian Eno.

For his part, Bryan Ferry always names For Your Pleasure as his favorite of all the albums he’s ever recorded. He has never stopped performing “Dream Home,” “Do The Strand,” and “The Bogus Man” live, even during the Luxury Years, and after decades of neglect he is finally performing wonders such as “Beauty Queen” in concert.

For Your Pleasure was an immediate chart and critical hit in the U.K. but it was met with utter confusion in the U.S. (though the band was surprised at how big they were in Detroit and Cleveland). If you have any doubt that this is an album completely outside of the 1973 rock world just read the (good-hearted) Rolling Stone review of For Your Pleasure. It says some nice things but leads off with noting that it is “remarkably inaccessible.” But, like The Velvet Underground, the right people were listening in. If David Bowie was Fan #1, then Siouxsie was Fan #2. Who else but Roxy Music could be the connecting point between the art-rock loving John Lydon and his more bloke-ish Sex Pistol bandmates? Bands like Duran Duran and Japan made entire careers out of late period Roxy Music while Nile Rodgers name checks them as the inspiration behind Chic. Roxy Music may have launched Glam rock but they were never hemmed in or defined by it. They basically defined the more timeless art-rock movement (making their American followers closer to Television and Talking Heads rather than the Ramones or The Dead Boys).

Because of this, Roxy Music, like Bowie, was able to weather the coming of punk, new wave, post-punk, synth-pop, the New Pop, whatever, better than their classic rock peers because they basically coined and pre-dated all of those later movements. This didn’t do Roxy Music any favors in the  kill-yourself-to-be-authentic Gangsta rap and Grunge mad 1990s but its still hard to imagine Blur and Pulp ever existing without Roxy Music. Fashions change — and change back — so its nice to see Roxy Music is being feted once again in the 21st Century. Ironically, Bryan Ferry doesn’t get enough credit as a sonic innovator (and, with Avalon, he would commence crafting songs out of improvised ambient haze) while Brian Eno quickly proved himself to be a quality songwriter with his initial set of priceless solo albums. Eno also worked often with the ever underrated Phil Manzanara, someone who deserves to have some solo albums be written up here.

Regardless of what it influenced and came after it, For Your Pleasure stands tall as one of the greatest albums of all time.

— Nick Dedina