Roxy Music: For Your Pleasure

For Your Pleasure

Best song: For Your Pleasure

Worst song: you’re implying that there’s a bad song on this album? there isn’t of course, but let’s say Beauty Queen

Overall grade: 7

It’s been forty years since 1973, and not one of them has come close to topping the number of exciting, innovative, near-perfect albums that were put out that year. Roxy Music trailblazed here, getting their second album out in the first quarter of the year, and actually going above and beyond to put out another one before the year was over. Despite this, there’s nothing at all rushed about any of this work. If anything, it feels more carefully put-together than ever.

‘Roxy Music’ and ‘For Your Pleasure’ are, in my opinion, two halves of the same double album that just happened to be released at different times. ‘Roxy Music’ is the late afternoon and the early evening, where people are poised and careful and there’s an anticipation of what’s to come, and ‘For Your Pleasure’ had moved onto the late night where everything is wilder, sexier and more dangerous. You can even see this just by looking at the album covers, and there’s all kinds of links between the two in song titles and musical ideas as well.

‘Do The Strand’ is an intense and passionate opener that sums up the essence of Roxy Music for me; there’s some great texture in all the instruments and Ferry sounds so involved in his vocal performance. It’s only four minutes long, but has the feel of a much longer song all packed together into a shorter length, and it never takes a moment to find its way – it knows exactly where it’s going and powers through to get there as fast as possible.

Both ‘Beauty Queen’ and ‘Strictly Confidential take things in an entirely different direction, slowing the pace right down and allowing more time to show off the band’s talents. Ferry certainly demonstrates to anyone who didn’t already know his capability of adding copious amounts of emotion into his vocals on ‘Beauty Queen’, a song that some people consider too ‘normal’ – but in actual fact there’s a lot of weird stuff going on in the synth and guitar parts, they’re just not such a blatant part of the song. They are there, though, quietly resisting the vocals’ insistence on becoming a straight up love song. ‘Strictly Confidential’ is a definite highlight on both lyrics and atmosphere, and I love the role the sax plays in this.

If Roxy Music had been going to release a single from this album at the time, then my pick is for ‘Editions of You’, the definitive fusion of pop and art rock, with foot-tapping rhythms, hooks everywhere, amazing solos from pretty much every member of the band. It’s one of those songs that succeeds in being instantly likeable but also has a lot of long-lasting appeal. If it had been released in the 90s, it would probably have its own dance.

But if they were going to release a retrospective single, then what could be more recognisable than ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache’? I mean, how many songs can you think of that are about inflatable sex dolls? Personally, I can think of two (some people might think that’s two too many) and this is definitely my favourite. It’s almost an inside joke, the way everything seems so cinematic and melodramatic at first even despite the subject matter, and Ferry’s singing this love poem as though he’s entirely serious about it, right up to the ‘I blew up your body…’ line, and then gives up all pretence at the punchline ‘…but you blew my mind’, and then it’s like nobody else can keep a straight face any more as all the instruments cascade in at once. It’s genius.

There’s a dreamlike, surreal quality to the first few minutes of ‘Bogus Man’, which definitely ties into this being a nighttime album: it’s like that feeling when it gets so late that nothing seems real anymore. Its rhythm seems to predate the Talking Heads, who Eno would of course go on to work with, but that’s not the only foreshadowing of Eno’s later work; the hypnotic, repeated phrases are exactly the same principle that he would take to extremes with his ambient work. Then, ‘Grey Lagoons’ is a 50s-style song with an inimitable solo from Phil Manzanera that tends to get overlooked because of its position on the album, but definitely holds its own by rocking out between the two epics of the side.

Course, absolutely everything else is leading up to the pure indulgence of the title track, where the vocals are rich and the piano is lavish and the whole song is a special treat that never really gets moving because it doesn’t need to; it’s perfectly OK with just lazing around and getting the absolute most out of everything it has to offer. Still, it has that unsettling feeling that something’s not quite right beneath the surface, keeping you alert, making every second of the song fascinating. Eno may not have a writing credit but he’s all over this song in the haze of synths coating it and steps forward to take his bow in the experimental section that closes it all out. If such a thing were possible, then I’d say this song knows just how good it is.

Though that may be the culmination of it all, every part of this album is essential, and I wouldn’t want to change a thing about it.

And so ends the altogether too brief period of Eno’s Roxy Music, which can overall only be described as one of the most successful genre mishmashes of all time. Eno would go on to have an incredibly impressive good-to-bad ratio in his string of song-based solo albums as well as invent an entire genre of music before the decade was over. Roxy Music, meanwhile, would stay together with Ferry coming to the front more than ever before, and within months would release the album that most people consider to be their best. Personally, although the first time I heard ‘For Your Pleasure’ was before I heard ‘Stranded’, I was pretty confident even then that they couldn’t release an album greater than this one.

Roxy Music: Roxy Music

Roxy Music

Best song: Re-Make/Re-Model

Worst song: The Bob

Overall grade: 6

My second new artist for this week will be… Roxy Music! That’s pretty exciting, as is this album. Every time I listen to either of the first two Roxy albums, I feel like I’m discovering them for the first time, almost like Eno and Ferry are changing the music each time you hear it, just to mess with your head and make you feel like you’re listening to something entirely different. Still, it’s always just as good, and I love the feeling it gives me, like I’m venturing into the unknown.

So. Roxy Music was formed by Bryan Ferry between 1970 and 1971 after he’d failed to win his audition for King Crimson (can you imagine if he had won?!) and was originally supposed to have Davy O’List, that guy from the Nice, on guitars, but he quit before this album was recorded. I can see how he would have been drawn to the band in the first place and I like to imagine him playing this album at home just after its release, sick with jealousy. The band picked up their second choice, Phil Manzanera, and almost immediately they were ready to start recording.

Of course, what makes this album brilliant is the perfect balance between the indulgent, high-society glam-rock that Ferry writes and the general insane weirdness that Brian Eno brings to the table. To see this in action, you need look no further than the opening track ‘Re-Make/Re-Model’. It opens with a recording of a large room of people talking, and a guy tapping on the side of his glass, as if he’s going to make a speech. This song is the speech. Dripping with mellotron and saxophone, this song actually rocks really hard, which you wouldn’t expect if you only knew the band’s later albums. It also shows just how smart this band is. They wanted to prove they weren’t just your everyday glam rock band, and so included a bunch of little references to other pieces from all genres and periods of music. You can listen out for ‘Day Tripper’, but there’s a bunch of others too, and I’m sure I’ve missed some.

Moving swiftly on, we have ‘Ladytron’. The beginning melody always reminds me a little of ‘Outside the Wall’, but predates it by about 7 years, so that’s impossible. Anyway, this song donated its name to a British electronic band years in 1999, which gives an idea of how ahead of its time and futuristic-sounding it was. Repetitively synthy and containing a wonderfully eclectic mix of sounds and emotions, Bryan Ferry’s acquired-taste voice is not yet the central aspect of the band’s sound – it’s just used to add flavour. (And when I say acquired taste, I mean in the exact OPPOSITE way that, say, Jon Anderson is an acquired taste.)

There’s a little descending guitar line that opens ‘If There Is Something’ and it’s awesome. Mostly, I like the song because it includes the country and blues-rock influences that so many prog and art-rock bands of the time completely rejected, and proves that these styles can make interesting, inventive music too.

Eno lets Ferry take the lead on ‘2H.B.’, the latter’s tribute to famous film star Humphrey Bogart. It’s a quietly timeless track that wouldn’t sound out of place at a late night intimate soiree, and creates an entirely different atmosphere to the early tracks, and it is all atmosphere, except for the vocals and electric piano that carry the song through. Did I mention the other King Crimson tie-in? This album is produced by Peter Sinfield, and now that he’s not let loose on the lyrics, he does a good job – this song in particular stands out with its pensive production.

Sadly, opening side two is the album’s only real flaw. It just seems like such a waste! There are a LOT of good musical ideas in ‘The Bob’, but for whatever reason – laziness, time constraints, lack of ideas, whatever – their chances of becoming full songs was stolen from underneath them, and they were all thrown together in this, a song that, every time you get into it, abruptly changes and throws you off course, leaving you disappointed.

Ferry must be a big movie buff, because I’ve heard ‘Chance Meeting’ is some kind of homage to the film ‘Brief Encounter’. I’ve never seen it, so when I listen to the song I more think about the spacey, endless sax notes and how they work with the wash of smooth vocals and the short, fast, evenly spaced piano plinking.‘Would You Believe’ is, at first, a beautiful jazzy ballad that abruptly picks up the pace and becomes something that makes you want to get up and dance, getting faster and culminating in a fast-paced solo before a gorgeous lament of an ending.

To finish is ‘Sea Breezes’, which is mostly quiet and minimalistic, and I’ve also heard it described as peaceful – but I’ve always heard a kind of creepy undertone, something a little shady going on just beneath the surface. And then ‘Bitters End’, which is a short, fun coda to the album that has another good sax part and an informal, winding-down feel to it.

The first side of this album is worthy of a 7 for sure. The second side is still extremely high quality, although not quite in the same league as it’s a little more safe and mainstream-sounding,  and if it wasn’t for ‘The Bob’ I’d be happy to put this as one of my very favourite records. Still highly recommended and the opening track is probably your best starting point with the band, if you’re art-music inclined at all.