FEATURE:
Beauty Queen
Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure at Fifty
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LOOKING ahead quite a bit…
IN THIS PHOTO: Roxy Music (Brian Eno, Bryan Ferry, John Porter, Andy Mackay, Paul Thompson and Phil Manzanera) in 1973
I am thinking about a terrific album that has its fiftieth anniversary. Roxy Music’s phenomenal second album, For Your Pleasure, celebrates that anniversary on 23rd March. Featuring Roxy classics like Do the Strand, their second album was a stronger and broader work than their 1972 debut, Roxy Music. With stronger material from Bryan Ferry, and finer and more remarkable production, there is greater experimentation and variety through For Your Pleasure. One of the best albums of the 1970s, and one of the most influential Glam Rock/Art albums, I hope there is a new release or a reissue of For Your Pleasure closer to its anniversary on 23rd March. Even though it was not commercially successful in the U.S., the album did reach number four in the U.K. With Do the Strand and Beauty Queen opening the album, you are absorbed into For Your Pleasure right away. I want to get to a couple of positive reviews for a masterpiece album. First, I found a 2012 feature from Pop Matters, where Jason Mendelsohn and Eric Klinger discussed the merits and impact of For Your Pleasure. For those who I have never heard it, then go and listen to this remarkable album:
“Mendelsohn: I’m completely confused by Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure. I’m unsure how to work it in to my musical narrative, let alone placing it contextually in the canon of great albums, so I’m just going to work it out as we go. From the outset, this album seems a little off-kilter and yet so progressive and forward-thinking that it sounds a full decade ahead of its time. There are so many opposing forces working in the music that it’s hard to believe the band could make a coherent whole, and that strange dichotomy seems to be personified in the presence of Roxy’s dapper frontman Bryan Ferry and the flamboyant, oddball Brian Eno.
This record is strange and wonderful. I’m left wondering why I hadn’t given it much of a chance until now but I can’t help thinking that a certain amount of patience and appreciation for the forebears of the punk and glam standard would first have to be cultivated. In my younger days, I don’t think I would have made it past the first couple of bars of “Do the Strand” and that would have precluded me from finding the scary genius of “In Every Dream Home a Heartache”, the epic grandeur of “Strictly Confidential”, or the sly funk of “The Bogus Man”.
My only question is, where did this album come from? Looking back to the early 1970s British rock scene, you have a rather large power vacuum created by the absence of the Beatles now slowly being filled in by the likes of David Bowie and Pink Floyd. To my ears, Roxy Music is more in line with the glam that Bowie was proffering than the bluesy space funk from Pink Floyd. Even so, For Your Pleasure seems like such a non sequitur in comparison to Dark Side of the Moon or The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Or are we looking at a music supernova—an odd mix of both—where the rambling, explorative space funk ran headlong into the bright lights and glitter of the glam ethos?
Klinger: Well, it certainly seems that there are two distinct forces at work here, between the grit and glitz of glam and the more esoteric soundscaping of what critics used to call “art rock”. And you’re right, in one sense For Your Pleasure seems very rooted in its time, and yet it also sounds very much like something we could call the headwaters of New Wave. I’ve always heard a distinctly retro sensibility in glam, although sometimes it’s hard to put my ear-fingers on exactly what I’m hearing that puts me in that mind. Still, I suspect it’s very much there, from Mott the Hoople’s “All the Way from Memphis” right up to Bryan Ferry’s modified quiff. There are flavors of that all the way through For Your Pleasure as well, especially when Andy Mackay’s saxophonery heads down into the honking range, like it does on “Do the Strand”.
The first review I want to bring in is from AllMusic. In their five-star review, they highlighted how tensions between Brian Eno and Bryan Ferry within the band did result in some peaks. The differences of direction and ambition saw Eno shortly leave Roxy Music, but it also resulted in a terrific album where those differences provided beneficial. Nearly fifty years after its release, For Your Pleasure remains this iconic and stunning album that truly announced a mighty force in music. The band would follow For Your Pleasure very quickly. In fact, November of 1973 is when they put out Stranded:
“On Roxy Music's debut, the tensions between Brian Eno and Bryan Ferry propelled their music to great, unexpected heights, and for most of the group's second album, For Your Pleasure, the band equals, if not surpasses, those expectations. However, there are a handful of moments where those tensions become unbearable, as when Eno wants to move toward texture and Ferry wants to stay in more conventional rock territory; the nine-minute "The Bogus Man" captures such creative tensions perfectly, and it's easy to see why Eno left the group after the album was completed. Still, those differences result in yet another extraordinary record from Roxy Music, one that demonstrates even more clearly than the debut how avant-garde ideas can flourish in a pop setting. This is especially evident in the driving singles "Do the Strand" and "Editions of You," which pulsate with raw energy and jarring melodic structures. Roxy also illuminate the slower numbers, such as the eerie "In Every Dream Home a Heartache," with atonal, shimmering synthesizers, textures that were unexpected and innovative at the time of its release. Similarly, all of 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”.
I am always keen and excited to mark important album anniversaries. A fiftieth is a thing to be proud of. I wonder what Bryan Ferry and the rest of the band think of For Your Pleasure all of these years later. It is one of the all-time great British albums. It has lost none of its passion, oddness, beauty, intelligence, and influence after fifty years. Pitchfork offered their thoughts on For Your Pleasure back in 2019. I have selected some sections of the review that caught my eye and are particularly insightful and interesting:
“Throughout the album, the band is puffed up with ideas, and desperate to make an impression. Ferry summarizes his passions for artifice and postmodern thought in manifestos: “Part false, part true, like anything/We present ourselves,” he sings in a theatrical baritone that recalls, at various times, Noël Coward and Dracula. For Your Pleasure is happily pretentious and self-involved, the juncture where glam and prog meet 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.
Ferry was drawn to the anxious, feminine side of R&B, evident on the album’s most retro moment, “Beauty Queen,” which the band bookends into a salmagundi of a song, complete with tempo changes navigated by stalwart drummer Paul Thompson. Ferry is dumping a woman who has “swimming pool eyes,” but it sounds more like he’s pitching woo. He lavishes her with purple praise, promises she’ll be fine without him, and carefully lathers his words with his heaviest Scott Walker vibrato. Ferry, with his fondness for dualities, uses theatricality and even camp to prove his sincerity, implying that everything make-believe is also real, and vice versa.
For Your Pleasure’s two longest songs, “The Bogus Man” and the album-closing title track, leave plenty of time for Eno’s deviations. This first sketches out a musical design for trance, years ahead of it, with a long, minimalist break that confirms Eno’s mantra, “Repetition is a form of change.” Each instrument mutates, minutely transmogrified, on some mysterious cycle. On “For Your Pleasure,” Ferry makes only a brief vocal appearance. Over the last four and a half minutes, producer Chris Thomas and Eno are playing the recording studio as though it’s an instrument, conducting the song at a mixing board, and building a panoramic disorientation. They add more echo on the electric piano, more reverb on the guitar, phasing, tremolo, the drums slip away, and it gently becomes hazy and puzzling: Chopped-up bits of “Chance Meeting” from Roxy’s first album come in—Roxy are sampling themselves—then Judi Dench murmurs, “You don’t ask why,” and almost randomly, la fin. An album that began with Ferry’s request for your attention ends with Eno placing you in the strange new world you were promised. A new sensation has delivered new sensations of arousal and uncertainty.
A few months after For Your Pleasure was released, Eno left the band, quitting before he could be fired, and starting an unparalleled career as a solo artist and producer. Bryan and Brian were incompatible. Ferry was a neurotic—Woody Allen trapped in the body of Cary Grant—while Eno was a disruptor. In interviews, Ferry withdrew like a turtle; Eno excelled at them, and talked fluidly about Marshall McLuhan, Steve Reich, or his ample pornography collection. Eno most avidly pursued the band’s androgynous style, and dressed like he was Quentin Crisp’s glam nephew (leopard print top, ostrich feather jacket, bondage choker, turquoise eye shadow). Out of the chute, he was a cult hero, and Ferry grew tired of hearing punters yell “EEEEEE-NO!” in the middle of ballads, or seeing Eno credited as his co-equal.
The music had no immediate impact in the U.S., where it grazed the album chart at number 193. The band’s two-album deal with Warner Bros. had expired and the label happily left them go. American audiences, Ferry told a British interviewer, “are literally the dumbest in the world, bar none.”
But in England, it was the album of the moment, and Roxy returned to TV’s Old Grey Whistle Test, where Whispering Bob Harris, a stodgy presenter who was still stuck in the ’60s, sneered at them, as he had the previous year as well, dismissing them as great packaging with no substance”.
On 23rd March, the incredible For Your Pleasure turns fifty. One of the best Roxy Music albums in a career that has more than its share of brilliance, the album is still played to this day. I am not sure what is planned for the anniversary, but I do hope that something happens. If it has been a while since you heard For Your Pleasure, then spend some time today re-familiarising yourself with…
THIS work of genius.