In Every Dream Home a Heartache (Ferry) Roxy Music, 1973
In Every Dream Home a Heartache (Live, Musikladen 1973)
In Every Dream Home a Heartache (Live, Viva! Roxy Music)
In Every Dream Home a Heartache (Live, 1979)

[With Roxy] there are characters, there are scenes as memorable as Casablanca or some Francis Ford Coppola film. The light is just right, the camera moves across, the objects in the frame are detailed. It’s a writer’s eye.
Bono, The Story of Roxy Music

In every dream home a heartache and every step I take
Takes me further from heaven is there a heaven?
I’d like to think so standards of living they’re rising daily
But home, oh sweet home it’s only a saying
From bellpush to faucet in smart town apartment
The cottage is pretty the main house a palace
Penthouse perfection but what goes on?
What to do there? better pray there

Open plan living bungalow ranch style
All of its comforts seem so essential
I bought you mail order my plain wrapper baby
Your skin is like vinyl the perfect companion
You float in my new pool deluxe and delightful
Inflatable doll my role is to serve you
Disposable darling can’t throw you away now
Immortal and life size my breath is inside you
I’ll dress you up daily and keep you till death sighs
Inflatable doll lover ungrateful
I blew up your body but you blew my mind!

Oh heartache, dream home heartache
Oh heartache, dream home heartache
Oh heartache, dream home heartache
Oh heartache, dream home heartache

There is little doubt the deep psychological scrutiny that was taking place in Bryan Ferry’s writing in the winter of 1973 was being explored with considerable depth and characteristic fastidiousness. The first line of ‘Heartache‘, one of Roxy Music‘s most famous and critically successful songs, situates us squarely within his personal zeitgeist: “In every dream home a heartache and every step I take.” These very steps have taken him past the wary Pop art splendor of ‘Virginia Plain‘, past the star tripping Hollywood fantasies of ‘Beauty Queen‘, past the schizophrenic suicidal despondency of ‘Strictly Confidential‘ and onward towards the dark finale of the album, where the author sees himself clearly as if for the first time, old man, “through every a step, a change.” When we are young the steps we take help us dream the dream of our future, for every dream home is our castle, our destiny, our personal heaven in this world. Yet what happens when you realize your dream may contain the seeds of your own destruction. As in all good Pop art, the consumer is the also producer, and in ‘Every Dream Home‘ the Implied Author Bryan Ferry realizes he is becoming his own product, and it is unlikely he will ever be able to go home again.

It is a interesting quality of classic albums that the initially favoured and popular songs become less played over time (except on rock radio) and the less celebrated/more ‘difficult’ cuts receive more of your listening time. In the case of For Your Pleasure, fan favorites ‘Do the Strand‘ and ‘Heartache‘ may be replaced by ‘Bogus Man‘ or, say, ‘Strictly Confidential‘. [Your choice Here].  All is well and good – and when you return to those popular tracks after a period of time you slip into their worlds like old friends, as they gain back their original power and potency. Such is the case with ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache‘ a track so familiar to Roxy fans as to be part of their DNA. On re-visiting the song I was surprised to find a new reading of the lyric, less focused on Pop art properties and the racy subject of inflatable dolls, and more on the song’s prophetic qualities, how well it penetrates and anticipates the mess consumer capitalism has delivered to us in 2018. Also surprised and unnerved to find that the song, literally, is smothered in Death.

Much has been made of ‘Heartache’s connection to Richard Hamilton‘s famous photo collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? Certainly, for any reader of this blog can attest, Hamilton’s influence was incalculable to the Roxy Music story, especially if we bear in mind that Ferry conceived Roxy not as a rock band per se, but as a “holistic art project” (Bracewell). The reason for the association of ‘Dream Home‘ with the art work has been two-fold: the title of Hamilton’s collage contains the word “home” (and the world loves easy associations); and the themes of both collage and song focus on the Pop art critique of consumer capitalism. “The finished collage presents all the multiple ways of communicating information available at that time,” notes the Tate Museum on the work, “reflecting Hamilton’s ironic interest in popular culture and modern technology. It shows a domestic interior complete with armchairs, coffee tables, pot plants and lamps”.

But there the association ends: while the collage is very Roxy-like in its use of American imagery (the piece was created using cut-outs from American magazines) and the analysis and satire of consumer society is equivalent, the differences are more striking than the similarities. ‘Dream Home‘, for example, does not follow the key concepts of Pop art (see ‘Editions of You‘): the use of the sex doll is not an especially witty device for the subject is treated with seriousness and a smattering of real horror; the song is not sexy for it is the opposite of sexy – cold and creepy to the touch (your skin is like vinyl); and there is little that is glamorous about the song for ‘Dream Home‘ contains one of the most embarrassing seductions in rock history: man and rubber doll. And perhaps most importantly, unlike ‘Editions‘ – which relied on the Marcel Duchamp Pop art concept of “ready-mades” and found objects – ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache‘ is an utterly original work, lacking any previous pop music template both in structure and lyrical content.

I like [For Your Pleasure] better than the first one, actually, I think sonically it’s better. It’s dark, and when I heard the vocal and the idea for the title, you know, about an inflatable doll, it was just so outrageous.
Paul Thompson

We can do texture very well. ‘Dream Home’, which has a long monologue, we created our own special texture to go with that song, it just worked really well, it’s a brilliant lyric.
Phil Manzanera

I. Is There a Heaven

In a July 1974 Melody Maker interview Bryan Ferry commented on the importance of religious poetry in his work:

“It’s strange how the most degenerate kind of characters can flirt with religion… What’s always interested me is the gradual process of a lot of poets and the phases they go through. Like intense love poetry, over 20 years or so it can become stranger and stranger, and more introspective, until it reaches this amazing religious intensity. John Donne, for instance, was always the most amazing one for me”

Bryan Ferry, 1974

Religious intensity finds its most acute expression in the Roxy track ‘Psalm‘ from Stranded – reportedly the first song Ferry ever wrote – a formal replication via pop music of a church sermon, delivered without irony, complete with closing exaltation: Singing His praises I know that I’ll be heard/For evermore, for evermore. As we know, religion (as in politics) can be a very personal matter, yet when we review Ferry’s work, religious and spiritual examinations are taken seriously, often seen as a pinnacle of human thought and aesthetic achievement. Ferry’s stated attraction to John Donne (1572-1631) can be seen in the depth of Donne’s desire to forge a meaningful spiritual relationship to the world and the possibility of attaining divinity through art. As poet, churchman and priest, Donne’s sermons were spell-binding and intense, and can, in the modern context, sit comfortably within the context of a rock concert delivered by – you guessed it – a spellbinding and articulate performer.

While celebrating the new and reveling in its earthly pleasures and opportunities, Ferry was clearly looking under the hood, keen to understand where these new musical and intellectual ideas might take us, and whether they were worth more than “party-time wasting” or merely adding to a stock-pile of material possessions. So ‘Dream Home‘ became an interrogation of a state of mind that Ferry had been aspiring to all his life – the coal miner’s son – a state of mind we all aspire to: love, freedom, prosperity, wealth, goods & services – all achieved, presumably, with minimal effort. Yet what comes through in Ferry’s song-writing in 72/73 is the nagging suspicion that something was wrong with the new world view, something to do with what John Donne called our “decaying faculties”:

And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out;
The sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit
Can well direct him where to look for it – The First Anniversary, John Donne.

In Donne’s poem – written over four hundred years ago – the philosophies of the new generation “calls all in doubt” – extinguishes fire, sun and earth – but no modern intelligence can decide “where to look” for their replacement. There is only the illusion of progress and enlightenment, and that the highest pinnacle of our intellect – say, the creation of those masterworks by the artists described in ‘Do the Strand‘ – Picasso, Nabokov, Da Vinci – are actually laughable attempts to make sense out of chaos, to bring order to that that had been lost. By 1972, as we danced in the lap of contemporary luxury, our lack of divinity could not be more pronounced.  As a thinker, artist and mass communicator Ferry took this problem seriously, as he made his way through his own changes and imperfections and landed, quite horribly, at the core of the problem of the new dream. Is there a heaven? he asks, as he steps further and and further away from the ability to even ask the question.

A song like ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache’ was rather unorthodox for the time. You know, it didn’t come off one of the standard shelve of rock lyrics at all. It was trying to paint a picture of another world, and a world with which the band’s listeners would not be familiar, a rather kind of decadent, almost depraved kind of the world of the very rich, if you like, living in a completely different sort of society.

Richard Williams, The Story of Roxy Music

II. Penthouse Perfection

On December 12 1972 – a few weeks before Roxy Music prepared to record their second album For Your Pleasure – a member of the mega-wealthy Rothschild banking family, Marie-Hélène Naila Stephanie Josina de Rothschild, held a socialite party at her residence, the spectacular Château de Ferrières, in Seine-et-Marne, France. The setting of the party was stunning in its opulence: when commissioning the Château’s build, James de Rothschild is reputed to have told the architect Joseph Paxton, designer of the massive Mentmore Towers in Buckingham and the original Crystal Palace in London,  “Build me a Mentmore, only bigger.”  Covering 4,000 hectares, the estate is considered to be the largest and most luxurious 19th-century château in France with room for one hundred servants and stables for 80 horses. The kitchen was housed separately, and, in order that the food might arrive hot in the dining room, an underground railway conveyed it to the house. Napoleon III was a house guest and the Château was considered the high point for modern civilized living: a massive library held more than 8,000 volumes; vast collection of works of art and statues adorned a number of the château’s 80 guest rooms; a size and scale so opulent that the conquering Emperor of Germany was quoted as saying “No Kings could afford this! It could only belong to a Rothschild!”

Penthouse perfection but what goes on?
What to do there? better pray there

On the night of the Rothschild party on December 12 1972, Marie-Hélène had the Chateau lit up in a vision of hell worthy of Hades. The building was swathed in red floodlight with sweeping amber lights, designed to create the illusion the building was on fire. The theme was a Surrealist Ball; the invitation was written backwards and could only be read when held up to a mirror. The dress code was “black tie, long dresses and surrealist heads”. The invitation was printed with reversed writing on a blue and cloudy sky, inspired by a painting by Magritte. To decipher the card, it had to be held up to a mirror (Alexis de Redé).

For the evening, the host wore an oversized stag’s head, decorated with tears made out of diamonds. According to accounts of the evening – few photos have been published – as the famous guests arrived along the main staircase, servants and footmen dressed as cats pawed at each other and pretended to be asleep. On entry, guests were led into a maze, an immersive theatrical experience in a scene full of dark surprises. If you got lost, you could call a cat to “help” you. Plates were covered in fur, tables decorated with taxidermied tortoises and food served on a mannequin corpse on a bed of roses. The party focus was alternate states, the guest of honor Salvador Dali. The party was the hedonist epicentre for European high-society, a rigorous mix of nobility, Hollywood stars, artists, musicians and fashion designers, business associates, politicians, and couturiers – supermodel Marisa Berenson (Barry Lyndon), Audrey Hepburn, Aesthete Baron Alexis de Redé, Princess Maria Gabriella de Savoia, Baroness Thyssen-Bornemizza and Guy Baguenault de Puchesse. An online copy of The Rake (The Modern Voice of Classic Elegance) goes on to say, “Few parties are genuine works of art, but the Rothschilds’ 1972 ball sounds and looks like it came close. Semi-curated by the founder of surrealism and played out by the leading ladies of the day, it was (like Buñuel’s seventies films) a self-satirising social labyrinth, a Garden of Earthly Delights in a secret forest, endless immersive theatre avant la lettre” (2016). Such was the parties’ allure that one prominent social figure threatened to commit suicide if she wasn’t invited to the next one.

The impact of that night would span the decades, spawning conspiracy theories, occult fantasies, antisemitic bile, before finally settling in its most accurate and visually arresting form in Stanley Kubrick‘s flawed but fascinating Eyes Wide Shut, a story of secrecy, opulence, sex and intimacy separated from the moorings of the ordinary, or the real. Taking place as if in a dream, the key scene in the film is the lavish party/orgy sequence, filmed at Mentmore Towers, the Rothschild owned British original of the French Château de Ferrières, and also the filming location, intriguingly, of Roxy Music‘s swansong video, ‘Avalon‘, where we join the scene at the close of the evening, “now the party’s over/I’m so tired.”

III. Perfect Companion

It’s a very healthy thing to give parties, don’t you think? But people don’t know how to dress any more – it breaks my heart. People have even lost the taste for perfumes. Nothing is done now for good taste or for the beauty of things, but to appeal to people’s lowest instincts.

Marie-Hélène Rothschild, 1992

One might argue there is something decidedly unhinged about a view that feels that lavish parties that celebrate some of the darker elements of the human psyche – twisted imagery, misogyny, blatant flaunting of wealth – are actually “healthy” or in “good taste.” This is snobbery of course, carrying with it the privileged hypocrisy that goes with living a disconnected life. On one level the brilliance is applauded – the art, the clothes, the furniture, the palaces – all so exquisite that they form the highest state of human creativity, that “ideal of beauty” that is the essence so many Roxy songs. Yet at what cost does a life of aestheticism bring? This was the crux of the matter for the sensitive and developing Roxy front-man during late 1972 through 1973, and, ultimately, a question still unresolved by 1974 (see: ‘Casanova‘ – You, an island on your own/Complete in every detail/ Monumental a precious jewel/Or just a fool).

Writing at the time of the Rothschild party in late ’72, Ferry was striving to be honest with his experience, his art and his audience, and was finding his first footings with the designers, models, artists of the exclusive London ‘In’ Crowd (our share is always the biggest amount). The fact that the Rothschild party would have caught his eye is an understatement, for the Roxy front-man had already struck a friendship with soon-to-be For Your Pleasure cover-girl Amanda Lear, and Lear was the confidante and sometimes partner of painter Salvador Dali. Dali was Special Guest at the 1972 Rothschild party, the theme of the party, after all, being the Surrealist Ball. And Dali, of course, The Daddy of Surrealism, was known for his outrageous artworks and his fascination with the perverse (inflatable dolls included) along with weekly orgies, wife-swapping and homes littered with sex toys and lobster telephones. Indeed, Roxy Music would capitalize on this notoriety by having tea with Salvador Dali and Amanda Lear at the Hotel Meurice in Paris, April 1973 (Viva), a few short months after the Rothschild party. Roxy were touring For Your Pleasure and were enjoying the rewards of their new-found fame and status. For Ferry it was the best day of his life – and, according to one interview, also one of the strangest:

“When we got famous the biggest thing for me was being invited to have tea with Salvador Dali. We had to sit on a crocodile then we went out to dinner in Paris in a Cadillac with these six amazing blonde models and ate with a waiter behind each chair. Dali didn’t speak any English but it didn’t matter. To me, that was just the most amazing experience for a working-class boy from the North East (of England)”  Bryan Ferry, 2010. 

Sounds like a bit of a romp eh, all this party-going, fancy dress-up, sex, sadism (aesthetic or otherwise) and beautiful people, yet, as Dali biographer Ian Gibson noted during a paternity case against the painter, the energies of art, wealth and aesthetics were a mere decoy for a more depressing truth:  “I’m impotent,” Dali proclaimed on several occasions:  “You’ve got to be impotent to be a great painter!‘

Top: Dali and guest, Rothschild Surrealist Ball (December 72)
Bottom: Dali with Roxy (Eno/Ferry) and Amanda Lear (April 73)

IV: Til Death Sighs

And so Bryan Ferry had the perfect ingredients for a song that would explore the impacts of an increasing Western fascination with consumer goods, glamour and the lifestyles of the rich and famous. In early 70s Great Britain much of the middle class was still struggling to make ends meet, but there were signs that household luxuries were becoming more commonplace, much like they had been in America for quite some time. TVs (color!),  fridges, (bigger!) and other mod cons were being introduced to British homes, a bit limited to be sure, but the pace was beginning to pick up.  Bryan Ferry was at the front of this change in the UK – in many respects the poster boy for the new and desirable upwardly mobile life-style – as the singer was beginning to mingle with London’s finest upper-crust socialites and artists, his sphere of influence reaching outside the rock and pop world, to art, fashion, and the glamour model runway.  ‘Dream Home‘ was unique in that it was a response to what Ferry was seeing with his artist’s eye and, instead of celebrating the glamorous consumer life-style he had projected so successfully in Virginia Plain‘ and ‘Editions of You‘, Ferry chose instead to analyze the unsettling face of materialism and wealth. Whether he was ultimately bothered by these goings on is debatable – but in ‘Dream Home‘ the Roxy front man completely nailed the Metaphysical poet’s idea that the new capitalism had come up with little to replace the House of God as a system of belief.  John Donne was clearly on Ferry’s mind, as was Fitzgerald‘s much-loved book The Great Gatsby, with its timeless warning for the New Capitalist age, where, by the end of the novel, Gatsby floats dead in his swimming pool (you float in my new pool), providing a final startling image of wealth, decadence, narcissism and death.

Structurally, ‘In Every Dream Home’ is separated into two parts and is told from the perspective of a man who is observing himself and his society, and confessing his love for his most cherished consumer good – a mail-order inflatable sex doll. The tone is vacant and weary – in this world ‘home sweet home’ is only a saying – but picks up as he moves from social commentary to what can only be described as sexual release – I blew up your body but you blew my mind! Ferry’s vocal performance here continues to rank as some of the best of his career on an album already filled with dramatic set-pieces (‘Beauty Queen‘/’Strictly Confidential‘) as the narrator recites his well-enunciated words as if in the confessional booth, which given the context and theme of the piece, is wholly appropriate.

This mechanical tone is enhanced by the quirkiness of the keyboard Farfisa cycling through a four-bar chord progression (D# F# F G#) making a sound that is at once creepy and cringe-worthy – younger audiences must wonder what all the fuss is about when compared to the industrial synth thunder-blasts of, say, Trent Reznor – but the weirdness of the approach does add to the overall effect of the subject matter, which is in itself … considerably creepy and cringe-worthy!  (The sound is fuller on the masterful Viva! live recording). The robotic tone is further enhanced by the precise rhythmic stresses of the lyric, that, after the opening lines, you notice the meter maintains a sustained combination of 5 and 6 beats until eventually winding down into a strident 4 count measure.

/      / /         /          /       /     /       /
In every dream home a heartache (8)
/        /    /     /     /   /
and every step I take (6)
/           /      /     /        /      /     /
Takes me further from heaven (7)
/     /       /    /    /
is there a heaven? (5)
/      /     /    /          /
I’d like to think so (5)
/           /      /     /   /
standards of living (5)
/              /   /      /   /
they’re rising daily (5)
/        /         /     /            /
But home, oh sweet home (5)
/        /   /  /   /   /
it’s only a saying (6)
/           /    /        /    /    /
From bellpush to faucet (6)
/     /            /      /   /      /
in smart town apartment (6)
/         /    /     /    /   /
The cottage is pretty (6)
/       /            /        /    /   /
the main house a palace (6)
/     /         /    /    /
Penthouse perfection (5)
/         /      /        /
but what goes on? (4)
/      /   /      / 
What to do there? (4)
/     /     /        /
better pray there (4)

Once established, the second stanza continues with the 5 and 6 beat emphasis, the hypnotized narrator now fully fixated on his disposable darling: Open plan living (5)/bungalow ranch style (5)/All of its comforts (5)/ seem so essential (5).  The metronomic consistency of the piece is thematically apt, for human desire and relationships are messy and unpredictable, deeply variable in a way that consumer commodities are not – a synthetic doll will always be available, dependable and, presumably, willing. And so Ferry chooses a poetic emphasis that calls out the replicated regularity of the experience, free of diversion or uncertainty: the expectation is consistency, and anticipation and pleasure is encoded, built, produced, and distributed by the manufacturer with the goal of providing the consumer with complete satisfaction or money-back guarantee (just be sure to fill out the coupon).

The emotional vacuity of the narrator in this case does not mean lack of insight, nor is having a relationship with a love doll necessarily a dysfunction – sex dolls have a long and useful history – indeed the narrator’s intelligence and insight is palpable in the very first line – In every dream home a heartache – for he identifies immediately that there is a pain at the core of the modern spirit. Moreover, he recognizes his actions take him further from heaven – though he may question its existence – he still gains comfort from the idea of the Great Eternal Home (Is there a heaven/I’d like to think so). This is philosophical discussion of a high order and demonstrates a keen intelligence. The narrator criticizes common platitudes (home, oh sweet home it’s only a saying) and provides keen insight in one of the key lines of the song: Penthouse perfection but what goes on?/What to do there? better pray there. Yes, better pray, because what goes on at home is not good. When Ferry sings these lines in concert, they carry with them the weight and conviction of the pulpit: Be-tt-er praaay there! Magnificent stuff.

Yet it must be said that the narrator’s insights are the product of a background of wealth and privilege, and form the basis for his disconnected and damaged thoughts. His description of those higher standards of living sound as if they have come from the mouths of one of the Rothschild party guests. The types of homes mentioned are certainly more glamorous than the terraced houses of middle-income folks. In this view home is a smart town apartment, cottage, penthouse, bungalow, even palace. There is open-plan living, fancy bellpush and faucets, new pools, all comforts essential but spiritually vacant. The laundry list of luxury homes slides easily into what could have been an abrupt and jarring transition – out of nowhere comes the introduction of the sex doll:  I bought you mail order/my plain wrapper baby. “Plain wrapper” identifies the nature of delivery, as it hints of dirty magazine purchases wrapped in brown paper – this may be confusing to younger listeners, as today of course everything is delivered in a box marked ‘Amazon’ – but the transition from the description of opulent Penthouse Perfection to seedy Disposable Darling works so well on account of the parcel being delivered – where else – directly to his home. The doll then is just another “essential comfort” that makes modern homes so appealing.

Instead of praying, of course, our man goes about his daily routine: serving his dolly; letting her out for a swim (you float in my new pool); dressing her up; getting into an argument or two (lover ungrateful); and no doubt doing what all God’s critters like to do when the sun goes down. What is incredible though is the imagery Ferry attaches to his narrator at this point: at once moneyed, sophisticated, even insightful, the narrator allows the rubber doll to morph into something human, and, in the end, even God-like, immortal and life size. Ferry continues to tease out the religious aspects of the song by equating this vinyl product with the Great God Almighty.  Clearly a disconnect, or, as Ferry’s Metaphysical poet hero John Donne might have it, an example of the “decaying faculties” of the modern individual. In this world even the element of fire is put out, the sun is lost, and the spiritual self dissolves into extinction and death, a path our physical body is sure to follow in due course.

‘In Every Dream Home’ juxtaposes desire with heartache, dreams with loss, and the view at this stage of the record is relentlessly sleazy and bleak, as the narrator struggles for life, air, and spiritual meaning before he is consumed by his own lifeless masturbatory impulses, all of which are, ultimately, impotent. Death and lifelessness haunts the song:  Oxygen, the essential element of life, is provided to the doll – My breath is inside you – but the gesture is futile: she “floats” in his new pool, dead to everything but the life he invents for her. Yet he will keep her, in the end,  “til death sighs“, which, in a brilliant Roxy Music touch, provides the final life-giving emanation while also signalling the final failure: Til death sighs – by definition, his death, not hers.

Our experience of For Your Pleasure at this juncture is to witness the effects of several kinds of disassociated and fractured minds traveling through their nocturnal modern slipstream, with Ferry in the unusual predicament of pointing to the future, yet quietly yearning for the certainties of the past.  ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache‘ was stunningly prophetic in its capture of a certain kind of modern malaise, accurately capturing our contemporary love-affair with money, glamour, and idle pursuits. One need look no further than the greed and lack of empathy that our new culture engenders, with its unfeeling and disconnected engagement with real violence and horror transmitted for the people by the people as entertainment on the internet, social media, and other mass communications.  Based on the current predicament of our political situation, our faculties have decayed to the point of decrepitude, way past the world Ferry imagined in his startling and original song. Still, the impacts of this dissociative sensibility reaches its apotheosis with ‘Heartache‘ and next track ‘Bogus Man‘. Ferry never again goes as dark or as deep in the Roxy Music catalogue as he does with these two songs, peeling back the layers of an increasingly uncomfortable and ill-fitting mask. Moving through the final moments of the second side of FYP,  ‘Grey Lagoons‘ signals the turnaround, shifting from dark to light (the ‘grey’ of the track’s title) before arriving at final track ‘For Your Pleasure‘, part true, part false, the Implied Author Bryan Ferry steps forward and grasps an answer to his dilemma, for now at any rate. Here’s hoping we can do the same.

Credits: Photos from the real-life Rothschild Surrealist Ball (Dec 1972) and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, the fictional account of the Rothschild party (or at least informed by) are dotted through this post. A fantastic journey of oddness, disconnection, and depravity. And that’s only the movie..

From Top: Nicole Kidman sleeps beside Doctor Tom‘s mask (EWS); Richard Hamilton‘s genre defining Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?; white tux Ferry-wannabe plays the gig (EWS); A portrait of John Donne as a young man, c. 1595, in the National Portrait Gallery, London; roxymusicsongs (RMS) photo collage, Bryan Ferry looks to the heavens for Roxy Music’s performance of  In Every Dream Home a Heartache, Musikladen 1973; several from Rothschild party – house; invitation; RMS composite of party pictures; shot of BF from Roxy‘s ‘Avalon‘ video, filmed at Rothchild‘s Mentmore Towers; Guy Baguenault de Puchesse enjoys the evening with his perfect companion. Or just a two headed Baroness Thyssen-Bornemizza.woman mask (EWS); Dali and guest, Rothschild Surrealist Ball (December 72) Bottom: Dali with Roxy (Eno/Ferry) and Amanda Lear (April 73); Eyes Wide Shut RMS composite; Kubrick mask maker @ Ca’ Macana – “the world’s best Venetian carnival masks.”