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Review: Roxy Music / For Your Pleasure

“Suave yet muscular, like a gigolo gorilla”

By david quantick

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“There’s a new sensation/ A danceable creation…”

The first few seconds of ‘Do The Strand’ are the perfect opening moment to the second Roxy Music album: a lyric full of excitement, wit, and a retro reference (to the old dance crazes of old), a joyful noise that sounds both like the golden age of rock ’n’ roll and the future, plus thrown in for free, a hilarious list of people, places and things: Quaglino’s, Mabel’s, Louis Seize, Arabs at oasis, Eskimos and Chinese, Nijinsky, The Sphynx and Mona Lisa, Lolita and Guernica – all in four minutes and four seconds. No wonder ‘Do The Strand’ has been performed at every Roxy Music concert: it pretty much is Roxy Music in a Fabergé nutshell.

And that, as they say, is just for starters. For Your Pleasure (ribbed?) is the second Roxy Music album but in many ways it’s the record where Roxy Music as we know them today really starts. The first album (Roxy Music, it’s eponymous) is brilliant but it’s also chaotic. On the debut, songs veer off in all directions, often in mid-verse. There are medleys, changes of tempo, changes of direction, and a thousand ideas a minute. On For Your Pleasure, all that is out of window: even the most experimental moments are firmly under control.

Then there’s the production. The first Roxy Music album (Roxy Music) is sonically rough: it doesn’t sound too different from the demos and John Peel sessions that preceded it (which explains why Bryan Ferry felt the need to re-record half of it, in instalments, as b-sides for his solo singles). It’s a brilliant record, with great songs, but it seems oddly distant from the band’s image: the promised retro-future of glamour, old movies, rock ’n’ roll and futurism.

This is very much not the case with For Your Pleasure. It’s an early Chris Thomas production and as such it’s very much a calling card for his later work: in the polish and vigour of the new Roxy Sound – Phil Manzanera’s guitar, veering between power-chord rock and prog-invention, now sounds like it prefigures the chunky chug of Thomas’ work with the Sex Pistols, the Pretenders or even (for Common People) Pulp.  The sound of For Your Pleasure suits this version of Roxy Music: it’s rock, but it’s not bluesy sludge: it’s pop, but it’s not thin: and it’s like nothing you ever heard, but it’s listenable.

Which leads into the third difference between this album and previous Roxy recordings: the confining of Eno. On the first album (and the demos, and the Peel sessions, and the early live recordings, Brian Eno is both on everything and all over the shop: his sonic treatments and synth work are everywhere, constantly going off in all directions like an elephant’s car alarm, squonking and wailing and hooting: and while sometimes it’s extremely effective, quite often it fits in about as well as a tiger in a library. But on For Your Pleasure, Eno’s contributions fit the songs effectively (see Editions Of You’s remarkable soloing) and when they don’t, they are absent. Note if you will the LP version of ‘Grey Lagoons’, which is a marvellously controlled ballad, and the live version (included here), where Eno unloads his box of skronk to inappropriate (and over-familiar effect): it sounds like he’s trying to drown a stylophone and it has nothing to do with the song.

Equally notably, Eno’s other contribution is not so much minimised as removed: his role as a backing singer. Where he appears to great effect on the first album, he’s either inaudible here or completely replaced by Ferry backing himself. Perhaps Ferry was in agreement with future Eno collaborator David Bowie’s words: more likely he just wanted more of himself in the spotlight. Either way, Eno would be gone soon.

For Your Pleasure, then, was a step forward for Roxy Music. Its smooth, but tough, sound suited the band: suave yet muscular, like a gigolo gorilla, it also allowed for experiment as well as catchiness. If Roxy Music was the art school past, then For Your Pleasure was the future, the template for everything that Roxy and Ferry would do in the 1970s. This was no sell-out, either: nobody else was writing songs like the title track (its ending enlivened by swirling Eno tapes and the voice of Judi Dench) or ‘Grey Lagoons’, a song that sounds like nothing else on earth and a few things in space, or the longingly-phrased ‘Beauty Queen’, or ‘Editions Of You’, or ‘Do The Strand’ (“Rhododendron/ Is a nice flower!”).

Or ‘The Bogus Man’, or ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’, two of the most Roxy Music songs of all time, even though they sound nothing like any other Roxy Music songs. ‘The Bogus Man’ in particular is extraordinary – nine minutes of a repetitive, sinister groove about someone who might be bogus, might be Bogart, or might be the bogie man: it’s possibly one of Bryan Ferry’s songs about Bryan Ferry (like Country Life’s ‘Casanova’), and it’s very creepy, if surprisingly jaunty (and what they used to call a Firm Fan Favourite).

Even more remarkable is ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’, a song which seems to come from nowhere. Inspired by Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, the song contains the blankness in the face of consumerism of the artwork, and adds a surprising twist: that the resident in the dream home is so isolated that he has fallen in love with an inflatable plastic sex doll.  The first three minutes of the song are given over to a slow, repetitive arrangement that seems to mirror the static miasma that the singer finds himself in, until Ferry intones the famous line, “I blew up your body / But you blew my mind”, and the song explodes with Manzanera’s guitar and Paul Thompson’s voice. It’s a stunning moment, and Roxy never did anything like it again.

In fact, Roxy were changing already: the sleeve image of model Amanda Lear posing next to a limo driven by Ferry suggested a more conventional glamour, that of wealth and status. Roxy were a band full of ideas and experiment, true, but contained in Ferry’s vision was not just love of clothes and old movies, but elitism and snobbery: the latter would fuel both early punk and the New Romantic scene, both of which would create their own snobs and elites.

For now, however, Roxy had not only made one of their greatest records but also they knew where they were going – a journey made even more explicit by the superb additional material in this collection, demos and live recordings and early takes that tell the story of the new Roxy – making this a great boxed set and a fine tribute to a great album.

Review by David Quantick. The For Your Pleasure reissue is out now. The SDE blu-ray can be purchased from the SDE shop using this link or the button below.

Tracklisting

For Your Pleasure Roxy Music / SDE exclusive blu-ray

    • FOR YOUR PLEASURE: 2026 Bob Clearmountain Dolby Atmos Mix, 2026 Bob Clearmountain Dolby Atmos Instrumental Mix, 2026 Bob Clearmountain 5.1 Mix, 2026 Bob Clearmountain Stereo Mix, Steven Wilson 5.1 Mix, 1973 Original Stereo Mix Flat Transfer (192/24 & 48/24)
      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
      PYJAMARAMA: Bob Clearmountain 2026 Dolby Atmos Mix (48/24), Bob Clearmountain 2026 Dolby Atmos Instrumental Mix (48/24), Bob Clearmountain 5.1 Mix, Original Stereo Mix, Steven Wilson 5.1
      1. Pyjamarama
      THE PRIDE AND THE PAIN: Steven Wilson 5.1 Mix & Original Stereo Mix
      1. The Pride and The Pain
      Stereo bonus tracks
      1. Pyjamarama – studio outtake
      2. Beauty Queen – studio outtake
      3. Strictly Confidential – studio outtake
      4. Editions of You – studio outtake
      5. The Bogus Man – studio outtake
      6. Grey Lagoons – studio outtake
      7. For Your Pleasure – Eno Tapes
      8. Grey Lagoons – BBC Paris Theatre, London, August 1972
      9. Pyjamarama – Peel Session March 1973
      10. Do The Strand – Peel Session, March 1973
      11. Editions of You – Peel Session, March 1973
      12. For Your Pleasure – Peel Session March 1973

From Bowie’s original sleevenotes to The Buddha of Suburbia album: “Brian, he singe lik a litul gerl ha ha”

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