1973 studio album by Roxy Music

For Your Pleasure is the second studio album by the English rock band Roxy Music, released on 23 March 1973 by Island Records. It was their last to feature synthesiser and sound specialist Brian Eno. The album expanded on the experimental nature of their self-titled debut, featuring more elaborate production and experiments with phasing and tape loops.

The album proved to be even more commercially successful than their debut, peaking at number 4 in the UK Album Charts, eventually being certified gold by the BPI. It also yielded one single released outside of the UK, "Do the Strand". The album received positive reviews from critics, and is today regarded as Roxy Music`s best album, and one of the greatest glam rock albums of all time.

Background

Bryan Ferry had studied at Newcastle University under prominent pop art painter and theorist, Richard Hamilton. Hamilton saw a painting, "not as a canvas, but a mood board, an array of inspirations and goals that could as easily clash as blend together", which were adapted by Ferry on For Your Pleasure, taking him from "the past and into what still feels like the future".[3] Hamilton`s work "Just what is it that makes today`s homes so different, so appealing?" got its mark on "In Every Dream Home a Heartache", a song about illusions, "glimpses of modern sophistication", and horrors behind them.[3]

In the wake of the Four Your Pleasure sessions, Roxy Music sharpened their technique while touring their debut album. They lost some of the "freewheeling wildness", and in return gained a "tighter, warmer and less experimental sound", the qualities especially yearned by Ferry.[4]

Bryan Ferry wrote the "good portion" of the album within a two week writing spree during the 1973 winter,[5] while "Grey Lagoons" and "For Your Pleasure" had already been conceived during the recording sessions in 1971, stockpiled for their debut album, and later developed for the release of their second album.[6] Ferry was focused on writing a "kind of follow-up" to the band`s debut album.[5]

Production

Roxy Music recorded For Your Pleasure in February 1973, at London`s Air Studios in Oxford Circus. Bassist Rik Kenton left the band shortly before the sessions. John Porter agreed to play bass temporarily, working on the album and the subsequent tour, but turned down an offer to join permanently. On the album gatefold, he is credited as a "Guest artiste".[7] At first the band wanted to be the sole producers, but the label convinced them otherwise. Ultimately, Roxy Music produced the album themselves with the aid of Chris Thomas, while John Middleton and John Punter worked on the engineering side. Thomas recalled that Roxy Music, after their first album, contacted John Cale to produce them and let him choose the recording studio. Cale chose Air Studios, but "the thing with John blew out", and Ferry asked for help with production from Thomas, whom Ferry met while visiting the Air Studios.[8]

The group spent more studio time on this album than on their debut, combining song material by Ferry with more elaborate production treatments. For example, the song "In Every Dream Home a Heartache" (Ferry`s sinister ode to a blow-up doll) fades out in its closing section, only to fade in again with all the instruments subjected to a pronounced phasing treatment. The title track fades out in an elaborate blend of tape loop effects.[9]

Thomas, commenting on the recording of "In Every Dream Home a Heartache", said the band "didn`t know what the lyric was going to be" before putting the song on tape. The band performed a backing track "as the sort of soundtrack, and then the idea was for this sort of psychedelic bit to happen at the end, but Bryan didn`t tell them why."[10] Ferry told the Melody Maker that initially the lyrics were twice as long, but they resembled a "recitation rather than a song", and he had to cut them in half.[11]

Artwork

The cover photo, taken by Karl Stoecker, featured Bryan Ferry`s girlfriend at the time, model Amanda Lear, who was also the confidante, protégée and closest friend of the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí.[12] Lear was depicted posing in a skintight leather dress leading a black panther on a leash.[13] The full sleeve art features a smiling Ferry dressed like a chauffeur and waits next to a limo, parked on the left side from Lear.[3]

The image has been described as "as famous as the album itself".[14] Pitchfork put the feeling captured by the sleeve art as "an enthralling, modern image of desirability, danger, sexual satisfaction, and luxe living. Like a lot of rock, the cover offers adolescents a misleading fantasy of what adult life is like."[3] Brian Eno disliked the choice for the album`s cover art, feeling it was glamorous and pretentious, and "too stereotyped", preferring a "nice unpretentious unglamorous picture of the band, wearing false beards and denims and standing around a tree, with "Support Ecology" on the back of the sleeve.[15]

Original pressings of the album featured a gatefold sleeve picturing the five band members posing with guitars.[15]

Music and lyrics

For Your Pleasure succeeded at "melding of American R&B and avant-garde European traditions".[3]

"Do the Strand" and "Editions of You" are both based around rhythms in the tradition of the band`s first single "Virginia Plain".[citation needed] Music biographer David Buckley described "Do the Strand" as "probably Roxy Music`s most performed song live".[5] On "Beauty Queen" Ferry was "drawn to the anxious, feminine side of R&B", where he sings about parting ways with a woman who has "swimming pool eyes, but it sounds more like he`s pitching woo". Ferry promises she will be fine without him, carefully catering her with purple prose using his theatrical and campy baritone, the tone which paradoxically often implies Ferry`s sincerity.[3] Ferry said at the time that the song has a "distinct northern working men`s club feel to it".[16] "Editions of You" lyrics reminisce on "the beauty of pining for someone long gone". The song features "1950s R&B sax invocations" and "pitch-bending synthesizer solo" with tweaked frequency control creating, what Brian Eno later "approvingly termed, quite unpalatable noises".[3]

"The Bogus Man", an eerie song about a sexual stalker, is played within a metronome rhythm and recognised as "a musical design" for trance music years before the genre`s conception. It builds up into a long, minimalist beat with instrument mutating overtime within "some mysterious cycle". Eno liked the repetition saying "repetition is a form of change",[17] and remarked that the "The Bogus Man" displayed similarities with contemporary material by the krautrock group Can, seen by Eno as "open-ended, improvisatory, and not just thoroughly-rehearsed".[18] Additionally, Eno loved the song`s duality, creating "sinister feeling, but with an undertone of a fairly happy sounding riff. He called it "probably the most successful track". Roxy Music`s saxophonist Andy Mackay said "the`ve done one very weird thing with a reggae drum beat", and he played "completely atonal sax" stopping himself himself from performing in key. Drummer Paul Thompson particularly favoured this song. The versions of the song has been performed live before its official release on For Your Pleasure.[19]

The final song "For Your Pleasure" prominently features Eno, unlike any other song on the album. The song opens with minimalistic piano playing in the stop-start rhythm and Ferry`s lyricism conjuring "impossible gravitas". Over the last four and a half minutes, the song accumulates a "panoramic disorientation" of multi-layered sounds blurred together into one wave of the echo on electric piano, more reverb on the guitar, phasing, tremolo; and "it gently becomes hazy and puzzling". Producer Chris Thomas and Eno are "playing the recording studio as though it`s an instrument, conducting the song at a mixing board". The song inches towards an epilogue with the repeated samples of "Well, how are you?" taken from "Chance Meeting", the song recorded for the first Roxy Music album,[17][16] and "For Your Pleasure" ends with voice of Judi Dench saying "You don`t ask. You don`t ask why".[20]

Release and promotion

For Your Pleasure was originally released by Island Records in the United Kingdom and Warner Bros. Records in the United States.[2] It has been subsequently reissued by Polydor Records in the UK and Atco Records and Reprise Records in the US.[2]

"Do the Strand", backed with "Editions of You", was released as a single in the US and Europe in 1973;[5][2] it was finally issued as a UK single in 1978 to promote Roxy Music`s Greatest Hits album, released in December the previous year.[21] The non-album single "Pyjamarama", backed with "The Pride and the Pain", was issued in advance of the album in Britain, peaking at number 10 on the UK Singles Chart.[22]

Roxy Music, promoting the album, toured UK and Europe in 1973 with Porter continuing to fill in on bass.[7] They were supported by the Sharks and Lloyd Watson on the UK dates. The band "toned down slightly" on the costumes from the extremes of 1972. The tour included "Do the Strand" and "Editions of You", in addition to their older material represented by "Pyjamarama", "Ladytron", "If There Is Something", "Re-Make/Re-Model", and "Virginia Plain". Tony Palmer of The Observer, who was not a fan of their album, applauded their presentation, calling it "demonic, sinister, apocalyptic, monstrous, dazzling, flashy". The contemporary music critics[note 1] emphasised the band`s general technique`s improvements, highlighting the performances by drummer Paul Thompson and guitarist Phil Manzanera. They reportedly "didn`t make any money" from either of the tours.[23]

The original UK LP cover credits "Produced by Chris Thomas and Roxy Music" for the entire album, but only the side one label repeats that; the side two label credits "Produced by John Anthony and Roxy Music". Various foreign editions and reissues have confused the matter with random variations.[citation needed]

A concert version of "For Your Pleasure", recorded live at the Empire Pool Wembley in October 1975, was used as a B-side to "Both Ends Burning" single.[24][25]

Critical reception

Contemporary reviews

In 1973, For Your Pleasure made No. 4 on UK Albums Chart and remained in the chart for 27 weeks, while reaching No. 193 in USA. In the contemporary reviews, NME` Charles Shaar Murray wrote the new Roxy Music album is "staggeringly fine piece of work, easily outstripping the first album".[33] Robert Christgau also reviewed the album, giving it a B rating and saying, "These guys make no secret of having a strange idea of a good time, but this isn`t decadent, it`s ridiculous".[27] Roy Hollingsworth of Melody Maker, "initially sceptical of the band, was completely charmed" by For Your Pleasure.[33]

Music biographer David Buckley noted that the negative contemporary reviews mostly saw the album as a "contrivance to cash in on glam rock", regarded Roxy Music as "porr musicians whose ideas outmatched their limited technique".[15] Paul Gambaccini of Rolling Stone received mixed feelings, calling album "remarkably inaccessible" and writing that "the bulk of For Your Pleasure is either above us, beneath us, or on another plane altogether". Gambaccini reserved praise for "Do the Strand", "In Every Dream Home a Heartache", and saxophone solo on "Editions Of You".[34]

Eno said at the time that "one of the things that attracted people to the band before was that feeling of dilettantism—a lot of the ideas being just touched on—but I felt that nothing was really taken far enough, and this album`s [For Your Pleasure] got over that to an extent [..] The album might be criticised for not showing enough ideas, but the ideas in there have been investigated much more thoroughly."[4] In later interview Eno described the album as "just slung together, not worked on like the first one", and lamented the band didn`t release the initial version of "The Bogus Man", which he liked better. Moreover, Eno thought "Grey Lagoons" was a "very trivial track, their `50s gesture type of thing". However, he called "Beauty Queen" one of his favourite tracks from Roxy Music, which Ferry "did practically by himself". Regarding the rest of the album, Eno said he "would like to have seen the experimental stance maintained a bit".[4]

Retrospective reviews

Pitchfork`s Tom Ewing selected For Your Pleasure as the best album by Roxy Music, saying "it`s hard to imagine an album that better exploits the tension between two fast-diverging creativities" of Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno. The album`s converge into simultaneously sincere, light-footed, emotional, and creepy tones.[17] Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic also put accent on the creative tension between Ferry and Eno, giving "The Bogus Man" as an expecially evident example. Moreover, Erlewine liked how the album demonstrates that "avant-garde ideas can flourish in a pop setting"; For Your Pleasure "walks the tightrope between the experimental and the accessible, creating a new vocabulary for rock bands, and one that was exploited heavily in the ensuing decade".[26]

Another Pitchfork reviewer, Rob Tannenbaum, described For Your Pleasure as "happily pretentious and self-involved" creating a middle ground between glam and prog with the "greatest degree of success. Glam steals from prog`s song lengths and love of soloing, and prog swipes glam`s exclamation marks and sex appeal." Tannenbaum added that he did not hear a "struggle between Ferry and Eno, just two guys with similar ideas and a band juiced on its early success and acclaim, trying to get farther from earth while still holding on to the Marvelettes and the Shirelles." He additionally noted the strong work from Thompson and Manzanera who "grounded the music`s outlandish shifts". Tannenbaum called "Do the Strand" and "Editions of You" to be "models for the ferocity of punk rock".[3]

Simon Reynolds, writing for Uncut, lauded the song "For Your Pleasure" saying he "can`t think of anything in rock like it, before or after, except perhaps Nico`s Marble Index and Joy Division`s "Atmosphere".[16]

NME called the album "the pinnacle of English art rock".[35] Morrissey told the British press that "he could `only think of one truly great British album`... For Your Pleasure".[36] Radio broadcaster Mark Radcliffe and journalist Richard Williams called For Your Pleasure their favourite album.[7]

Bryan Ferry said the album is his personal favourite, if he had to choose a favourite, lamenting that "it`s awful to think that that`s his high spot, only his second year of doing anything".[7]

Accolades

Classic Rock named it as one of 10 "essential" glam rock albums.[41] Happy Mag included the album in its list of "10 records to introduce you to the world of art-rock" and called it "an art-pop, glam-rock masterpiece."[42]

Track listing

All tracks are written by Bryan Ferry

Notes

1. ^ LP editions of the album incorrectly listed the song`s timing as 4:25, due to its "false fade" referenced above

Personnel

The personnel is adapted from the liner notes.[43]

Roxy Music

• Bryan Ferry – vocals, keyboards
• Brian Eno – VCS3 synthesiser and tapes
• Andy Mackay – oboe, saxophone
• Phil Manzanera – electric guitar
• Paul Thompson – drums

Guest artiste

• John Porter – bass guitar

Production

• Chris Thomas, John Anthony, Roxy Music – record producers
• Roxy Music – musical arrangers
• John Middleton – sound engineer
• John Punter – sound engineer
• Jennings – crew
• Bryan Ferry – art direction, cover art concept
• Karl Stoecker – photography
• Nicholas Deville – art direction, photography
• CCS – artwork
• Antony Price – clothing/wardrobe, make-up, hair stylist
• Smile – hair stylist
• Amanda Lear – cover star
• Bob Ludwig – digital remastering

Charts

Certifications

Notes

1. ^ Most notably, Sounds` Martin Kirkup and NME` Steve Clarke.

2. ^ In the initial ranking in 2003, For Your Pleasure was ranked number 394 on Rolling Stone`s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time,[39] with the album`s ranking dropping to number 396 in the 2012 update of the list, and eventually climbing to number 351 in the 2020 update.[40]