‘For Your Pleasure’: How Roxy Music made the quintessential glam rock masterpiece
Glam rock was an era and musical style salvaged by David Bowie and Marc Bolan from the dying embers of the 1960s psychedelic phase. The trend burgeoned through the early 1970s with the emergence of glamorous acts like Sweet and Slade, who all aspired to challenge the genre’s most cherished and consummate works, T. Rex’s Electric Warrior and David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. Alas, in 1973, Roxy Music became the only band to succeed in this near-impossible feat.
Roxy Music launched their discography in 1972 with the eponymous debut album, which was swiftly followed up by the top ten single ‘Virginia Plain’. These early releases saw Bryan Ferry and the group, which then included Brian Eno, thrown under the spotlight as fame and fortune warranted a larger budget for a follow-up studio LP.
The debut album was an exciting canon of ideas that promised what it perhaps lacked in cohesion and production value. The LP was recorded before Roxy Music’s record deal with Island, so the group’s managers at EG financed the project with £5,000 of their own money. Production was helmed by King Crimson’s Peter Sinfield, who was, at that point, relatively inexperienced in the field. Ferry was particularly disheartened by the record’s production and later opted to re-record some of its tracks.
As Roxy Music set foot in London’s AIR studio to record the follow-up, For Your Pleasure, the band were spoiled with time and financial solvency. Exploiting both, they created a true masterpiece and quite possibly the quintessential glam-era record. With ample studio time, Roxy Music could work meticulously with producers Chris Thomas and John Anthony to bring a pristine mix of immersive and well-textured tunes.
Following For Your Pleasure, Roxy Music remained a dominant force in the glam rock scene, but subsequent albums failed to hit the same peaks of lyrical and instrumental extravagance, a bow to which Brian Eno, who left the band in 1973, was undoubtedly a strong, tensile string.
For Your Pleasure captured the group’s zany art school whimsy in glittering hits like ‘Editions of You’ and its only single, ‘Do the Strand’. The latter opens the album to introduce a fast fashion theme intrinsic to the glam era and in keeping with the glamorous cover photo of Ferry’s then-partner, Amanda Lear. The album throbs with lavish opulence in the instrumentals and Ferry’s sensual croon, but as early on as ‘Beauty Queen’, the LP’s second track, shadows are never far away. As Ferry sings: “Valerie please believe / It never could work out / The time to make plans / Has passed, faded away,” all hope has already been dashed in the opening lines of the song.
At the close of side one, ‘In Every Dreamhome a Heartache’ enters the ominous atmosphere of the album with a gentle, spoken-word introduction. Ferry meanders through some of his most potent lyrics that suggest a total decline in mental health as the narrator details his infatuation with an inflatable sex doll. Following the words, “I blew up your body / But you blew my mind,” guitarist Phil Manzanera takes over with a powerfully climactic solo that trails off into a synth-laden kaleidoscope.
The sinister edge of the album bleeds into the second side and its nine-minute documentation of a sexual stalker on the loose, pursuing his wicked fantasies, ‘The Bogus Man’. The track displays Roxy Music’s staggering level of sonic command with a bouncing rhythm teeming with furtive tension that’s somehow more revealing of the song’s narrative than the lyrics. For Your Pleasure finally takes a bow with its classy title track, which begins an airy ballad but works itself into a perfect sound storm infused with an impressive blend of tape loop effects. The track perfectly exemplifies the album’s most admirable quality: combining pop sensibilities with a progressive edge is no easy feat.
For Your Pleasure never garnered the same level of appreciation as David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, and I’m not here to declare one superior to the other. However, if I were to hand an alien one album to convey the best of the glam era, I’d look no further than Roxy Music’s 1973 masterpiece. The artwork, the titles, the music and the band’s collective wardrobe positively oozed with the uneasy opulence of this striking chapter in rock history.
Roxy Music’s saxophonist Andy Mackey once told The Mirror: “We were never a typical rock ‘n’ roll band. We were basically a group of art students, and my focus was always about creating this theatrical style and look, a really strong image.”