Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure

Released - March 1973

Producer - Chris Thomas; John Anthony & Roxy Music

Selected Personnel - Bryan Ferry (Vocals/Piano/Mellotron/Harmonica); Brian Eno (Synthesiser/Backing Vocals); Andy Mackay (Oboe/Saxophone/Organ); Phil Manzanera (Guitar); John Porter (Bass); Paul Thompson (Drums)

Standout Track - In Every Dream Home A Heartache

In the wake of the success of their non-album single "Virginia Plain" in 1972 (a song nowhere near as good as most of the material on their debut album Roxy Music, but which did have the significant achievement of redirecting more public attention towards that classic record), Roxy Music suddenly found themselves at the forefront of the UK glam rock scene, and this in itself posed a dilemma for the band. Glam rock was, at its heart, a fairly straightforward genre, one that revelled in pomp and excess and glitzy theatricality but that had largely simple, straightforward, easily danceable rock music at its core. Bowie was gradually finding ways to inject further intelligence and broader musical diversity into the essence of glam rock, but it wouldn't be until later in the decade that he really proved himself as a musical auteur of truly staggering imagination. On Roxy Music, the band had been able to really inject their personality into the music and create a record of as much kitsch, quirky colour and eccentricity as they wanted. Faced with the prospect of becoming major stars, there was the question of whether to tone down some of their avant-garde artistic ambitions and try to make more straightforward rock music or not.

Of course, by the late 70s (after a brief hiatus for frontman Bryan Ferry to focus on a solo career), they would more or less have completely committed to the path of being an unabashed pop group (and a great one at that), but for a few more years they continued trying to tread the fine line between making simple rock tunes that would appeal to the masses while also indulging their imaginations to create something to appeal to the artistically minded. It's easy to say that this was a simple duality embodied by Ferry and fey music wizard Brian Eno, and perhaps a little reductive to do so. Nonetheless, on the band's second album the tensions between the two would come to the point where Eno had to leave Roxy Music behind him and forge on alone. But the band didn't immediately abandon all their artistic leanings and continued making unusual, challenging albums without him before 1979's Manifesto truly announced them as purveyors of slick, disco-inflected pop music. So the "Ferry the popstar versus Eno the artist" model is not entirely accurate, but it's an interesting dynamic that renders a lot of the material on For Your Pleasure all the more fascinating.

As a self-styled "non-musician," Eno's role within the band was largely in applying various sonic treatments and effects to the other musicians' performances in order to create that otherworldly ambience that had rendered their debut album so colourful and strange. Whereas that album had provided a number of extended opportunities for him to flex these muscles, on For Your Pleasure the band shifted ever so slightly to being a more focused showcase for Ferry's songwriting, and the opportunities for Eno to experiment were far more limited. The extended outro of the brilliant "In Every Dream Home A Heartache" allowed for plenty of looping and phasing, as did the lengthy jam of "The Bogus Man," while "Editions Of You" grants him a deliriously weird and discordant VCS3 synth solo, but in general this was very much an album where Ferry tried to wrest control from Eno.

And, judging purely from the material here, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's easy to wonder what kind of music Roxy Music would have gone on to create if it had continued being an equal collaboration between Ferry the songwriter and Eno the sonic experimenter, but the truth is that the songs Ferry delivers here are of genuinely astounding quality, and don't necessarily need layers of bizarre synth treatments to render them interesting. Ultimately, it was a split that enabled the two artists to excel at the things they wanted to excel at, and this great album is a great final salute to the brilliance of what they were able to achieve when they really clicked together.

Tonally, it treads a line between the kitsch, cartoony sense of fun that dominated most of Roxy Music, while also delving further into some of the moody, ominous sense of unease and disquiet that they had only briefly flirted with on "Chance Meeting." The classic opener "Do The Strand," one of the iconic Roxy Music anthems, is very much in the former mould, with its driving insistent rhythms and Ferry's fun-loving croon. The chiming of Ferry's piano anchors it, but it's brought to life by Phil Manzanera's wailing guitar and Andy Mackay's squawking sax. "Editions Of You" is very much in the same vein, but cuts a little looser, providing broader canvases for breakneck solos from Manzanera and Eno. The genuinely lovely "Beauty Queen" is a slower, more ballad-like exploration of the same kind of upbeat, colourful tone, and one of the most simple and enjoyable songs Ferry wrote, with its sultry, instantly memorable melody. Towards the end it picks up pace with a roaring guitar solo from Manzanera. But most of the rest of the album is of a darker and moodier tone. (One particular anecdote that articulates the Ferry-Eno rivalry well tells of a gig at which Ferry was desperately trying to sing "Beauty Queen" unaccompanied at the keyboards but the crowd kept bellowing for Eno to do something, so he quietly left the stage to let Ferry have their attention. It had the opposite effect, provoking them to bellow even louder for his return).

"Strictly Confidential" feels a little like an inferior revisit of "Chance Meeting," with its simple, disquieting melody over the discordant, distorted cry of guitar and the low hum of sax. "In Every Dream Home A Heartache," meanwhile, is perhaps the finest thing Roxy Music ever did. It's a song I encountered years before I actually knew what it was, thanks to it playing in the background once while visiting my friend Jack (he of the "getting Joz into prog" fame). The classic moment where Ferry mumbles "I blew up your body...but you blew my mind" before the band kicks into an explosive instrumental outro stuck out as particularly mind-blowing, and I stupidly forgot to ask who the song was by. A couple of years later, when I'd got round to listening to Roxy Music via totally different avenues, I was richly rewarded to rediscover the song I'd first been struck by long before and had buried somewhere in my mind. The majority of the song is an ominous, almost tuneless ode to an inflatable sex doll over a buzzing, humming, shifting keyboard part. On the aforementioned lyric (still perhaps one of the coolest moments in music history), Manzanera's incendiary guitar part transforms the song into one of the most transcendent, brilliantly unnerving things in any band's discography.

The greatness of the album's first half means the second half has a lot to live up to, and it has to be said that it doesn't quite manage it. "The Bogus Man" is a slow but insistent jam built on a simple bass riff from John Porter, over which Ferry contributes his trademark croon, and Mackay squawks and squeals away on sax and woodwinds, while Eno is able to have some fun playing with the sound of Manzanera's guitar and his own synths. But it's a little too long to really hold attention for its full length. "Grey Lagoons" is just a rather forgettable and standard Roxy Music number, and the closing title track is again a bit too drawn-out to be a classic. But the music housed on the first half of For Your Pleasure is of such astounding brilliance that it even manages to just about eclipse their sensational debut, and perhaps secures itself as the band's finest work.

The album was similarly enthusiastically received by the critics and the fans at the time, and consolidated Roxy Music's position at the forefront of the art rock scene at the time, but, as has been mentioned, it was inevitable that the band would not continue in the same vein. Both Eno and Ferry have looked back on their split as an amicable affair, and have continued to sporadically collaborate with each other since, but it was clear that the two were moving in different directions musically. By the 80s, Ferry would still be with Roxy Music but would be making slick sophistipop music, while Eno would be sculpting ambient soundscapes. So it was that the two went their separate ways. As said, Roxy Music didn't suddenly transform into an opportunity for Ferry to write unabashed pop music and continued for a few years in making bold and exciting and colourful art rock. For my money, their followup later in 1973, entitled Stranded, is one of their weaker records and struggles to find any really great tunes or do anything particularly different to what they'd done before. But 1974's Country Life, while not exactly ground-breaking, would see them feeling confident and exciting once again and delivering a record that really envigorates and energises the listener, while Stranded just feels fairly drab. Eno, meanwhile, first set about really indulging all those sonic experiments he longed to try and do more with by making the proto-ambient soundscapes of (No Pussyfooting) with Robert Fripp, before embarking on a solo career in 1974 that would see him making rock music so unusual and self-consciously experimental that it made Roxy Music look positively pedestrian.

For Your Pleasure is by no means the last time Roxy Music did something truly great, but it does perhaps represent them at their true creative and artistic peak.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Bryan Ferry.

1. Do The Strand

2. Beauty Queen

3. Strictly Confidential

4. Editions Of You

5. In Every Dream Home A Heartache

6. The Bogus Man

7. Grey Lagoons

8. For Your Pleasure