History… it’s out of date
Brian Eno

For Your Pleasure – Part 1
For Your Pleasure (1973)

One of the people saying goodbye (“ta-ra”) at the end of For Your Pleasure was Brian Eno, who quit the band in a hail of rubber bullets and bad vibes in July 1973 (Viva). While the subterfuge surrounding his exit makes for endless good copy – Eno’s super-hyped sex life was one highly quoted justification for getting the boot; his enjoyment of interviews and grabbing attention, another – but anyone with even a passing knowledge of Eno’s solo career knows intuitively that the obligations to a successful touring band would pall quickly beside the endless experimentation available within the confines of a modern recording studio. This is a man, after all, whose favourite word is “interesting” – and you’d have to go a long way to call an extended rinse-and-repeat World Tour interesting – fun maybe, boisterous, probably, but hardly interesting: “We’re not the kind of band to find a formula and then stick to it. That’s deathly!” (Williams). The quote is, tellingly, by Bryan Ferry, not Brian Eno. Why Brian Eno left Roxy Music is not really the question then, nor is it particularly interesting – ideas change, people change – what is interesting is what came after. Now that’s a story.

Roxy Music really was Bryan’s band, it was his vision … The whole construction was his in conception…It wouldn’t have been as interesting a band if I’d have been able to co-opt to go in my direction.
Brian Eno

For Your Pleasure remains one of Roxy’s most critically acclaimed albums, loved by fans, critics, and band members alike. The striking originality of the record still holds today. It was sexy, dark, mysterious, odd at times, musically inventive, lyrically potent – ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache‘ was pop song as novel – and, as Roxy cultural critic Michael Bracewell succinctly put it, the album was “as hard rocking as it was culturally knowing” (Bracewell). Contemporary reviews were ecstatic, the NME proclaiming the record “a staggering fine piece of work, easily outstripping the first album” (Shaar Murray), while contemporary views continue to rate FYP as the best of Roxy’s career: PopMatters likens it to a “music supernova”; Morrissey insisted it was the “only truly great British album”(Wiki); Soundblab reckoned “For Your Pleasure has few rivals”; Diffuser ranked it as #1 in the Roxy canon and so on. The band also highly regards the sophomore recording – Paul Thompson felt “that album was better than the first one…sonically better” (PT). And as recently as 2018, Bryan Ferry posited that he and Brian Eno had “stopped on a very high note. Our second album, For Your Pleasure, was one of my favorite ones” (Consequence of Sound). Released on March 23rd 1973,  ‘For Your Pleasure‘ hit number 4 during a 27 week run on the UK album charts (Viva) and it’s sold steadily ever since, influencing scores of musicians, writers and, of course, visual artists and fashion designers.

Musically, the band were delivering the goods both in the studio and in concert – one critic described the Roxy live experience as “demonic, sinister, apocolayptic, monstrous, dazzling, flashy” (Palmer). Major tours were launched on the back of the album’s release, their first headlining tour (with Chris Spedding‘s The Sharks supporting) took in both the UK and Europe, the opening dates of which had Amanda Lear dressed in full black leather gear viz ve the For Your Pleasure cover (no reports on whether the panther was in tow).  By now Roxy had developed a large and excitable European following with live appearances increasing sales in every city they visited, gigs rolling across England, Scotland, France, and the Netherlands like fashion parades. The band had become immensely popular style icons, promising their fans a glamour experience, a state of mind that coveted taste, refinement, adventure, and above all, escape.  The buzz on that first headlining tour was such that the “European Roxy mania would be an experience the group would never forget” (Rogan). The itinerary was long (see John O’Brien’s excellent Roxy site Viva for tour details) and the reviews spectacular, with one journalist noting that musically, “it’s drummer Paul Thompson and guitarist Phil Manzanera that came over best.” Of course they did – by this juncture Roxy were morphing into a hard-touring rock band and Paul and Phil were the heavy fuel needed for the six week, thirty-four date tour. By the end of the trek however, Brian Eno had had enough of the touring life, and Bryan Ferry was fed-up with Eno – the man the press were calling “the major visual phenomenon of ’73” (Guardian).

For Your Pleasure was a dark and important album for me to make –  it cleared the air of all that angst.
Bryan Ferry

Clearly Bryan Ferry was working through some thorny problems while writing the lyrics on For Your Pleasure, and much of it appeared to congregate on the problem of the direction Roxy Music should take. “I’d been nursing the idea for Roxy since 1964-65,” Ferry told the NME in 1973, “The actuality of Roxy is frighteningly close to what I wanted. Thank God it is – I’m very pleased with the way it’s worked out” (NME). As “chief architect” of the group, Ferry became increasingly alarmed as Eno started to obscure the hard-won vision of Roxy Music as an art-project and a successful band:

[Eno] loved doing interviews…And I sometimes thought that maybe he was taking credit – not wholly intentionally – for some of the things that I was doing. I didn’t want to be perceived as just the singer. I had written, and was the primary arranger of, the songs on the records. I felt that I was the main architect of everything, and I didn’t want to let go of that recognition. It was important to me. It was all I had. I was very proud of it, and I wasn’t very good at sharing.
Bryan Ferry

Taking his concerns to management as early as December 1972, Ferry was writing words and music that expressed anxiety and guilt, analyzing his personal insecurities while reviewing his future options.  “I didn’t really like the interview process,” he admitted, “I used to be really tongue-tied. I guess that’s what made me a singer; it’s a way of overcoming this verbal insecurity, verbal shyness… Brian of course had confidence in spades. He could give a lecture; stand up in front of any number of people about anything” (Buckley, 130). As an album defined by the “cloak of evening shadow” we cannot help but feel the personal turmoil:

‘Strictly Confidential‘ situates the anxiety –

Rolling and turning
How can I sleep?

And the agonizing internal dialog –

Haunting me always are the voices
Sometimes I wonder if they’re real

While lifting wording from music press interviews such as “tongue-tied” –

Tongue-tied the thread of conversation
Weighing the words one tries to use

And the possible feelings of guilt for actions that need to be taken to move Roxy Music forward –

Could it be evil thoughts become me? /
Guilt is a wound that’s hard to heal

‘The Bogus Man‘ struggles too with language –

Focused his mind on something he cared about
But it came out a shout just like before

As does the narrator in ‘For Your Pleasure‘ –

The words we use tumble/…
Gravel hard and loose

But the presentation of “such extremes” also provides a way forward, the undefined issue thoroughly investigated and fretted over, the author a shy and sensitive man who is a fighter at heart (“my work has to stand for everything I’m about really”) –

Getting older
But you’ll wake up soon and fight
In the morning
Things you worried about last night
Will seem lighter
I hope things will turn out right

And by album close the solution has been found – through every step, a change.

We feel you’re ready for a solo career
EG Records drops the hint to Brian Eno

The emphasis on the in-fighting between the two Bryan/Brians obscures a critical aspect of the Roxy Music story: namely, the presence and contributions of the rest of the group – Phil Manzanera, Paul Thompson and Andy Mackay. It is no coincidence that the For Your Pleasure album sees a brilliant advance on the musicianship and creative input of the Roxy band-members, with Brian Eno providing an equal share, yet no more important or transformative than the others. Indeed, critics and writers have often over-stated Eno’s contribution to Roxy Music and For Your Pleasure in particular, and in doing so have done a disservice to Thompson, Manzanera, Mackay, and even Bryan Ferry’s honest and original writing. “Eno’s stamp is all over the record” (BBC), is a common pronouncement made by critics and some fans, yet in point of fact producer Chris Thomas‘ stamp is all over the record, deploying the classic techniques he learned from working with The Beatles and also his contemporaneous co-mixing work on Pink Floyd‘s Dark Side of the Moon. The warmer more “organic” sound of the album is an outcome of Thomas’ production, and suits perfectly the Gothic countryside, night-time voices and haunted corridors that blanket the album.

Another popular misconception is that Eno was responsible for every “weird” sound on Roxy Music and FYP, and had more a hand in the studio manipulating sound effects then he actually did (a misconception that Tony Visconti endured under Bowie/Eno for Low, Heroes, et al – the subject of a hilarious cartoon here). The suggestion that Eno wanted “to move toward texture and Ferry want[ed] to stay in more conventional rock territory” (allmusic) is easy journalism: that Eno wanted to push for a move towards texture is true, but he did not want to do so within the confines of a modern touring band such as Roxy Music. Indeed, it was the recording of For Your Pleasure that enabled Eno to familiarize himself with the studio environment and the technology within it, learning the possibilities of sound manipulation: “I was completely comfortable in the studio. I was very at home there and in fact it seemed to me that I had finally found my instrument” (Eno, 2009). Eno saw the potential, freedom and opportunities while learning from Chris Thomas and the crack engineers at George Martin’s AIR studios. Indeed, his production skills were still raw and underdeveloped several months after the split when he produced the fantastic Here Come the Warm Jets his first proper solo album and a record that hearkens directly back to rough and ready, punkish recording of Roxy Music. Recorded in twelve days in September 1973, Warm Jets sounded very much like the experimental style of Roxy Music, an album described as sounding like a “half-a-dozen separate bands clamoring for attention” (Chapman). Warm Jets was a cheap album to make and utilized most of the Roxy team – Mackay, Manzanera, Thompson and Thomas – sans Ferry – as Eno needed the help and support. As Eno biographer David Sheppard points out, Eno was “still a relative greenhorn when it came to twenty-four track recording” (Faraway Beach, 150). One engineer on the album stated flatly: “Brian didn’t know what he was doing – didn’t have a clue” (ibid). Chris Thomas’s job was to organize Eno’s “clamorous multi-track master tapes on which so many of the instrumental overdubs were doubled or trebled, injecting some clarity into what was in places a wall of opaque noise” (ibid).

The point being made is not to dismiss Brian Eno or his contribution to For Your Pleasure but to see the split of July 1973 for what it was: inevitable (for starters) but also the beginning of an expanded Roxy Music, whereby the white-hot talents of Phil Manzanera, Andy Mackay and Paul Thompson achieve greater heights as Roxy re-configures after the hand-wringing angst of FYP, kick-starting solo careers that cross and conquer musical genres and influence new trends and generations of young people entering rock, music, art and television. Comments like “When Eno left the band it was all down hill from there” (Martyn Ware, Human League) needs reassessment and even challenge, for the art-project that was defined as “Roxy Music” had many more features than just glamour and irony – the nucleus of Mackay, Manzanera, Eno and Thompson performed across a number of musical and mass media platforms: books and television shows were written (Andy Mackay’s Electronic Music and hit TV series Rock Follies); production assignments included John Cale, Nico, Godley & Creme, Split Enz (Manzanera), Ultravox, Talking Heads, Devo (Eno); and inter-band collaborations included epoch defining records by David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Robert Fripp, 801, Talking Heads (again), Cluster, Bryan Ferry, and more. All the while they co-wrote, recorded, and co-produced four more brilliant 70s Roxy Music albums. And we haven’t even mentioned the solo records, many of them – particularly by Manzanera and Eno – are as good as the heights achieved by Roxy (Diamond Head, Another Green World, Music for Airports). In short, Roxy Music did not nose-dive after Brian Eno left the band in that hot summer of 1973 – a new and expanded ‘state of mind’ was just beginning:

What’s interesting about Roxy is that most people in bands don’t do solo albums until they’ve been together for years. We all started doing solo albums almost immediately. We always had our own agenda, and as long as there was enough common ground we stayed together – Andy Mackay

Usually people think that it is the musicians who create the music, but in fact it is music who creates the musicians
Robert Fripp

Credits:

Eno feather “theater” suit (’72-73) currently in storage at the Victoria and Albert museum (V&A), by Carol McNicoll; Japanese For Your Pleasure poster; stock photo Ferry/Eno; 2001 Re-union Tour brochure, courtesy John O’Brien’s vivaroxymusic archive; FYP US DJ copy; Roxy producer Chris Thomas; the Roxy Music New Musical Express Rock Family Tree

Next, March 2019: “Make me a deal”: Roxy Music solo careers kick off with Bryan Ferry’s These Foolish Things. Hard rain falls but Roxy keep it together.

For Your Pleasure (1973)
For Your Pleasure (Live, 1975)
For Your Pleasure (Live, 2001)

It’s good to have your private obsessions
Bryan Ferry

For Your Pleasure ends on a high note, though you would be forgiven for missing it. The namesake track of the album starts like a funeral march, Paul Thompson’s sombre drum roll signals the beginning of the procession towards the cemetery or crematorium. Our host and author the Implied Bryan Ferry has come to bury something here, put to rest the tormented personae and characters that have been haunting him and his listeners for the past forty-two minutes. He has taken it far enough. He has opened up his psyche and thrown open each layer to let it run free, seeing what it would reveal and where it would go. The confession is as real and as affecting as any modern pop star has allowed  – more revealing than John Lennon at his lowest ebb; more affecting than Bob Dylan at his most poetic; more theatrical than David Bowie speaking in tongues. “For mood, style, and substance” notes one scribe, “this is a Roxy pinnacle” (jazzshelf).  This is a song of endings on an album of endings: Brian Eno will be gone before the next record. The Bogus Man will be gone too. The play has been performed, the denoument is here. The For Your Pleasure funeral procession gathers, those myriad voices, characters, and agents of darkness stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the pallbearer, the ferryman of Hades. Our destination is the River Styx, the underworld, the place that divides the world of the living from the world of the dead.  For your pleasure in our present state, Ferry writes, part false part true, we present ourselves.

Stanza I. The Words We Use

For your pleasure in our present state
Part false part true like anything
We present ourselves
The words we use tumble
All over your shoulder
Gravel hard and loose
There all night lying
With your dark horse hiding
Abhorring such extremes

There is an extraordinary moment during the final concert of Roxy Music’s highly praised 2001 reunion tour. The venue is the Hammersmith Odeon (ne. Apollo); the show is being filmed for a live DVD (Live at the Apollo). The concert is over a 100 minutes in and it’s time to close out: the encore has been played (no surprises: ‘Do the Strand‘/’Love is the Drug‘); the audience is going nuts. And then the opening roll of Paul Thompson’s tom-toms and we are stunned to hear the opening bars of ‘For Your Pleasure‘. Roxy haven’t performed the song live since 1975. Ferry is deep into it. Thompson is solid, bold yet gracious (he knows it’s his song also). Manzanera and Spedding trade lines; Spedding smiles, no doubt surprised again at the simplicity of the notes but genuinely moved by the effect it has on an audience. At 1.44 the focus shifts center stage to Ferry (“Your rubbing shoulders…”). The eyes close (“Getting older…”). He appeals for daybreak, a way out of the worry, the torments. And at that moment you realize the audience is not only quiet but actually holding its breath. Will he..? (Would you..?). The voice cracks on cue – what was once the lyric of a young man singing to himself as an old man has now become the old man singing at us, his audience: part false part true, we present ourselves (2.22). The meta-textuality boomerangs around the hall as we look towards our younger selves singing back at us, and the key line is delivered, voice cracking, the defining Roxy Music moment: “Old man…Through every step a change…You watch me walk a-way…” His microphone traces a imaginary tear on his sweat-lined face and he leaves the stage. Ta-ra. Not a dry eye in the house (at least not in my house) as the rest of the band exit one-by-one, leaving Paul Thompson alone on the drum stool, proudly re-creating his finest moment, the audience reveling in the opportunity to tell him how great he really is.

It is an interesting characteristic of the track ‘For Your Pleasure’ that the word “present” is used twice in the first three lines (present state/present ourselves). Present in the sense of being a gift; a moment in time; a presentation or performance. In our current condition we play for you – thank you for coming to the show, buying the album, it’s been a gas. And that would be the end of it, usually, except that For Your Pleasure feels like something else, like it has staying power, like now that you’ve heard it it will be with you forever. Certainly, the journey has contained many musical twists – hard rock mixed with pantomime, balladry, doo-wop, psychedelia – and the record is great because of this, not in spite of it: you put it on when as mood strikes, for there is a tune for each mood, no matter how temperamental you might be. While the first album was a record of “chance encounters and wistful, evasive memories” (Jon Savage), the second is deeper, darker, more sexually charged (the cover alone is worth a good night on the town), but also melancholy, haunted, obsessed – by ideas, by private thoughts. The lyrics hide as much as they reveal, for Bryan Ferry applies the tools of a novelist or playwright: For Your Pleasure is an eight-act play populated by characters and personae found lurking deep within the writer’s psyche – or at least the psyche of his public persona, the Implied Author/Singer/Entertainer/Artist/Playboy/Pleasure Seeker. The author takes the fragile ball of his subconscious, his élan vital, and rubs it in his hands until the blood and sweat produce a perfect round sphere – at which point he smashes it down on the table, breaking himself into eight separate ragged stories. The results are mysterious, and a mystery to him also. But this is the journey, and, as the saying goes, all the world’s a stage, and we minions are all merely players.

The anxiety and self-analysis started with ‘Virginia Plain’, the hit single that provided lyricist and author Bryan Ferry with a vision for Roxy Music that took them beyond the avant-garde. “‘Virginia Plain’ was totally crucial for the way Roxy developed,” noted Andy Mackay in 2011. “Getting a hit single changed the perception from us being an album, art school band, to being a pop group, and then we got kids listening to us in every town in Britain, suddenly we were greeted with huge enthusiasm and warmth” (Thrill). ‘VP’ both imagines a new world of fame and, thrillingly, delivers it: “Opens up exclusive doors oh wow!” But beneath the surface there is Ferry’s desperation – “Just tryin’ to make make the big time“/ “throw me a line I’m sinking fast,” while the band clutches at straws, scrambling for a hit (“Havana sound we’re trying”).  The luster of glamour shines at each turn (“Dance the cha cha through till sunrise”), yet warning signs are everywhere: “Last picture shows down the drive in,” is both a movie title referencing the loss of independent Hollywood cinema and an ironic nod also to the demise of the American drive-in movie theater. And then there’s that sheer and chic “teenage rebel of the week” – the rebel is James Dean, the young movie-star who shot to stardom in Rebel Without a Cause in 1955 – the same year he starred in the film that made him famous, he was dead.

Antony Price designs Bryan Ferry’s ‘Virginia Plain’ Top of the Pops costume based on Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935). Oberon (“King of the Fairies”/Ferry) is played by Victor Jory.

‘Virginia Plain’ is the starting point for the discussion that will both continue into For Your Pleasure and be resolved by it. Cognizant of musical tradition and history, and aware of the seductive dangers of glamour and fame as represented by heroes such as Marilyn Monroe (suicide/’Strictly Confidential‘) and Salvador Dali (sexual, artistic impotence/’Pyjamarama‘) Roxy Music positioned themselves as postmodern, “boundary blurring, self-reflexive, both serious in an art rock vein and playful in a glam rock vein” (popmatters). Brian Eno saw Ferry’s writing and Roxy Music’s performances as a new form of honesty and revolt – as a battle between the modern pop sensibility and the “folkies” of the 60s: “Folkies saw their music as pure, socialistic, honest – belonging to a world of decent work and real values, whereas pop fans saw it as rural, hairy and irrelevant. Pop fans in turn saw their music as modern and dangerous, part of a world of malleability and revolt, but folkies heard that same music as synthetic, ephemeral and shallow” (Eno, “From Roots to Relativism”, 2006).

Emphasizing both postmodernism’s playfulness, “revolt” and honesty, ‘For Your Pleasure’ states its lyrical case in the opening line by declaring itself an object of fictional autobiography – a play or presentation:

For your pleasure in our present state
Part false part true like anything
We present ourselves

Ferry speaks to us, his audience, very clearly and directly here stating that the performance is done at our request, his fans have urged this record into being. The dictionary term “for your pleasure” tells us that “something is done because someone wants it to be done” (Webster). Ferry admits, as all postmodern writers must, that the narrative will be “part true, part false” – like all story telling – but that he and the band stand in their present state as honest as possible, naked and ready to be examined and critiqued. By defining the origins and context of this brand of entertainment the power structure is laid bare – like pulling back the curtains to find the Wizard of Oz controlling the drama. Another variant on ‘for your pleasure’ is of course “At Her Majesty’s Pleasure” – the time served in jail or prison for an indefinite period. In this meta-textual pop game, Ferry is not willing to let his audience sit back and merely throw popcorn from the stalls: on this record, his torments are the result of our demand for new product and he’s letting us know there could be blood on our hands. (Yes, fictional blood, but is this not all a game – what’s real and make belief?).

So the play is set in motion with its honesty, paranoia and dread clinging to each line:

The words we use tumble
All over your shoulder
Gravel hard and loose

Within this marvelous refrain Ferry provides a number of postmodern maxims – the slippage of language and meaning via semiotics and structuralist theories –  “the words we use tumble” – but also, crucially, references the themes presented by many of the songs on the album, in particular the haunting and haunted ‘Strictly Confidential‘.  Both ‘Strictly Confidential’ and ‘For Your Pleasure’ take place during restless nighttime (“the cloak of evening shadow”), the narrator haunted by doubt and insecurity, those moments that Ferry concedes is an important part of his creative process: “When I’m writing a song, I’m very much on my own. That first stage is a kind of lonely one, where you’re wrestling with your demons” (2012). ‘Strictly Confidential’ promises to tell us the “secrets” we must know, while ‘FYP’ asserts that words never convey the truth – “The words we use tumble/…/Gravel hard and loose.” To which ‘SC’ responds, “nevertheless communication/This is the gift you must not lose.” Communication and honesty is For Your Pleasure‘s battleground and ‘Strictly Confidential’ is such a deep and dark song that album closer ‘For Your Pleasure’ is compelled to address its power: by album close the suicide is either thwarted (“How can I sleep/Hold on till morning/What if I fall“) or the sufferer is summoned by Paul Thompson’s death-march drumming to join the funeral procession, condemned for eternity as punishment for taking your own life: the Ferryman of Hades ready to take you to The Acheron, the river of pain, the river of lost souls.

The emphasis on broken communication, isolation and loneliness was a ballsy gambit for a second album, especially in 1973, as this was a year of glitz and stardust, a time that Bryan Ferry biographer David Buckley described as “rock’s annus mirabilis: twelve months of exhilarating foolery that presented British pop at its most theatrical and its most showbiz.” (Buckley). The exhilarating foolery is evident in For Your Pleasure – tracks ‘Do the Strand‘ and ‘Editions of You‘ are rockers trying to outrun the darkness – but even the solemn death-march of ‘For Your Pleasure’ plays with our expectations as the song trips over itself with puns and allusions – “The words we use tumble” suggesting that a delight in language is not the same thing as trusting language (part true, part false). If the words we use tumble and consist of loose associations then, ergo, the play we are enjoying is unreliable and open to misinterpretation. Ferry is having fun at our expense – suggesting that the album is unreadable or has options for multiple readings – or, more tantalisingly, promises us secrets will be presented, but not necessarily revealed. Don’t ask why.

Secrets are the glue that holds together the album. The first track recorded at the For Your Pleasure sessions, ‘Pyjamarama‘ has Ferry singing “The say you have a secret life” the nameless object of desire a key motif in the Roxy catalog. Secrets shadow the darker songs: ‘Beauty Queen‘s “Valerie” transforms over the course of the song from girlfriend into a glamour model or magazine cover (your choice); while the suicidal narrator in ‘Strictly Confidential’ tells us there are secrets “you must know,” the voice ambiguous enough to be either man or woman.  The Bogus Man is a secretive and murderous tyrant who lacks the sophistication to “find out about deception,” while the narrator for ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache’ unwittingly plumbs the depths of secret activities. Hence these aspects of the lead singer’s personality are toyed with, presented to us as the play progresses, but not confirmed in the biographical sense – no more than if David Bowie was Major Tom or Will Ferrel a real Elf from the North Pole – yet at this stage Ferry had the courage to take chances and let the mask settle a little closer to the skin without burning the flesh entirely. The slippage of signs and referents so common to Roxy (‘Re-Make/Re-Model’; ‘Ladytron’ et al) would enable Eno to theorize years later that the choice of pop band in the early 70s wasn’t just “an argument between people with different tastes, but between people who believed in quite different worlds” (2006). The concluding track of For Your Pleasure is the final working out of the Roxy Music ‘state of mind’, that new world of pleasure, sin and possibility, where glamour and style hold off the terrors of the night. With this dynamic in play the following lines are killer:

There all night lying
With your dark horse hiding
Abhorring such extremes

According to the Cambridge dictionary a “dark horse” is a person who “keeps their interests and ideas secret, especially someone who has a surprising ability or skill.” (Cambridge). Someone who keeps their interests and ideas secret…possesses a surprising ability or skill – like singing in a rock band and being hailed as a new-style savior, perhaps? There is lovely subterfuge here as the author keeps us guessing: “All night lying” is both a statement of physical pronation and not telling the truth. Nevertheless there is much honesty in that “dark horse hiding” line, admitting that you want a secret life in the face of increasing fame, while retaining the sense that you are as much a mystery to yourself as the Dream Home maniac or the womanizer in ‘Pyjamarama’ (“how could I apologise for all those lies”). Not only that, but you hope that your hidden secretive side has a moralistic backbone and that the answer to the question “could it be that evil thoughts become me?” (‘SC’) is yes, but only on the page. Yet in an act of exemplary honesty and faith, Ferry, abhorring extremes, goes in search of his dark horse in exactly the same manner he has chosen to reveal the misshapen and seedy characters in his play – he goes in search of himself.

Stanza II. Through Every Step a Change

You’re rubbing shoulders
With the stars at night shining so bright
Getting older
But you’ll wake up soon and fight
In the morning
Things you worried about last night
Will seem lighter
I hope things will turn out right
Old man
Through every step a change
You watch me walk away

Ta – ra …

Rolling Stone once described the experience of Roxy Music as Ferry presenting “a cabaret for psychotics” (RS). This is certainly the case of For Your Pleasure, where the cabaret of freaks and wounded are paraded past us doing a mad dance called The Strand. Clearly a record that comes deep from within Ferry’s authorial psyche, the singer-songwriter tantalizing us with visions of “nighttime decadence” (Cope), poetic hauntings, and a “classically romantic impulse to seek moments of transcendence from the mundane and the known” (Bracewell). Within this rich labyrinth is much humor, incredible musicality courtesy of Mackay, Manzanera, Thompson and Porter (we’ll talk more about Eno in Part 2), and a sense that by the album close a problem has been overcome, the issue of communication resolved –  even though words are prone to “tumble/gravel hard and loose” he has clarity now, the morning has come: the gravel forms the path, the path provides the steps towards Stranded, The Third Roxy Music Album.

Forward moment has been critical to Roxy ever since ‘Virginia Plain’ took the band on that imaginary airplane ride down to Rio. In search of the new, author and band have had their sights set on the future while keeping one eye on the past. This dynamic created a wonderful tension of transition, of straddling multiple worlds, of what Shock and Awe author Simon Reynolds described as a “crush-collision of progressive head music and danceable pop, experimentalism and showbiz, abstraction and cliche, Europe and America, anti-commercial and commercial, irony and passion…” (Glam Rock and Its Legacy). The past and future is therefore at the core of For Your Pleasure, as Bryan Ferry invents characters that dramatize his internal worry, his refined sense of authorship and honesty providing his audience with an entertaining spectacle – record, movie or play, take your pick – that begins the moment we feel that panther’s eyes set on us.  “Every step I take/takes me further from heaven” notes the narrator in ‘Every Dream Home’, yet the central drama takes place knowing the forward movement is inevitable, even while the glamour life-style holds warnings. By album close Roxy Music will have changed: “guilt is a wound that’s hard to heal.” Is this the secret we should know?

They were postmodern before the word was invented
Martin Fry, ABC

As the lost souls on the album gather to take their last march – the Bogus men, the fetishists, The Sphynx and Mona Lisa, Lolita and Guernica – an extraordinary change takes place in the lyric regarding narrative point of view: not merely content to roll out his actors across the stage, Ferry decides to expose that dark horse in hiding – his own self. Throughout the song the possessive form of you has been consistently used:

Stanza I

For your pleasure/…/The words we use tumble, All over your shoulder/…/There all night lying, With your dark horse hiding.

The author stands outside himself – or if you prefer, points to us, the audience – and addresses himself as a character in the play (“your“). This continues in the second stanza:

Stanza II

You’re rubbing shoulders
With the stars at night shining so bright

The reference is ‘Beauty Queen’: those pre-fame soul ships passing on their way “to the stars in the sky.”

Getting older/But you’ll wake up soon and fight

The reference is mid-20s anxiety as highlighted in ‘Virginia Plain’ – determination, drive, ambition and no longer “sinking fast.”

In the morning
Things you worried about last night
Will seem lighter

The reference is the suicidal voice in ‘Strictly Confidential‘, the character rolling and turning, how can I sleep? Hold on till morning.

And then an important shift in narrative perspective, like the sun finally coming in those bedroom windows:

I hope things will turn out right

The subject changes from you to > I.  The dark horse has been found, unmasked, and Ferry faces himself directly in For Your Pleasure for the first time:

Old man
Through every step a change
You watch me walk away

The vocal performance is extraordinary – the timbre cracked and aged – has there ever been a more emotionally vulnerable phrase in all of popular music?

Ferry waves goodbye to this version of himself, the gravel path leading him now in a different direction, towards tomorrow and that concert hall at the Apollo.

“Ta-ra”

The Newcastle lad leaves the old life behind for good, evoking the Northern expression for farewell and goodbye:

“Ta-ra“… “Ta-ra” … “Ta-ra” …

Credits:

Stock photo, black panther as Death squares off with the viewer; River Styx etching by Gustave Doré; Ferry on Top of the Pops 1972 juxtaposed with Obernon in Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935); Brian Eno poses in front of his apartment duck wall, NME 1973, Pennie Smith; ‘Isle of the Dead‘: “Basel” version, 1880 by Arnold Böcklin; ‘Isle of the Dead’: Third version, 1883 by Arnold Böcklin; Isle of the Dead movie with Boris Karloff (1945), directed by Mark Robson. Scary kids!

Next, February 2019: For Your Pleasure Part 2 – the music! the madness! Brian Eno leaves Roxy Music. Bryan Ferry goes solo. Phil and Andy grumble but decide to stick with it. Paul’s talent continues to bloom (or boom-boom). Roxy Music arrive on that island, stranded, and make one of the best albums of their career.

Til next time – ta-ra!

Grey Lagoons (1973)
Grey Lagoons (“Bogus Man Part 2” Live 1972)

I would really be missing the point if I didn’t mention Bryan Ferry, because I thought he was the most exciting singer that I’d heard. His voice had limitations, but what he managed to do with it was beautiful, I mean, b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l. For me it covered the whole emotional spectrum, and I just couldn’t get enough of it.
Kate Bush

I’d sooner have somebody drive nails through my scrotum, generally, than play a live show
Brian Eno

Remarking on his Roxy Music and solo career to the New Musical Express in 1977, Brian Eno didn’t care very much for ‘Grey Lagoons’, citing it as “a very trivial track – our Fifties gesture type of thing.” There is some justification to this view as Roxy had already recorded a 50s homage on the first album, leading one band-watcher to remark that ‘Lagoons’ was revisionist, in both subject and execution: “it’s ‘Would You Believe?‘ all over again!” (Rigby). Certainly, the 50s revivalism in British pop music in 1973 was suffering from over-exposure –  topping the UK charts were a multitude of I-IV-V hits along the lines of ‘See My Baby Jive’, ‘Tiger Feet’, and ‘Roll Over Beethoven’. Bands like Showaddywaddy, Alvin Stardust, Mud, even the great David Bowie (‘The Jean Genie‘/’Drive-in-Saturday‘) was using the looks and hooks of 1950s rock n’ roll culture to generate sales. Yet for Roxy – who had celebrated the 50s Teddy Boy look most effectively via Andy Mackay’s heavy eye-shadow and rocker quiff – the insertion of ‘Grey Lagoons’ as the penultimate For Your Pleasure track made perfect sense: as part of the album’s conceptual song-cycle, ‘Lagoons’ provided important passage from the sleek and disturbing night-time hauntings of ‘Strictly Confidential’, ‘Dream Home’ and ‘The Bogus Man’ to the tentative optimism of 50s doo-wop cultural nostalgia as represented by grey lagoons – grey being the the transition shade from dark to light – before settling finally on album closer ‘For Your Pleasure’, the brilliant postscript track that summarizes and assesses all that comes before it, sign-posting and ushering Ferry and Roxy towards the sunnier (though still ship-wrecked) world of Stranded.

Arguably, the key to ‘Grey Lagoons’ is to hear it in the context of the overall fabric of the record and less as a stand-alone piece. While ‘Lagoons’ has sometimes been identified as the second-part of ‘The Bogus Man’  – the title ‘The Bogus Man Part 2‘ was a last minute throw-in for the BBC live performance of the song in 1972, well before the title ‘Grey Lagoons’ had been nailed down or the track even recorded. Indeed, ‘Lagoons’ had a long gestation period – it was on Ferry’s Roxy Music demo tape shoved through the letter-box of Melody Maker‘s Richard Williams in 1971 (Viva), and then it was passed over in favor of 50s pastiche Would You Believe? on the first album. Nonetheless, Ferry was right to finally include ‘Lagoons’ on For Your Pleasure, in spite of Eno’s reservations. The song provides relief from the dense and disquieting tracks that come before it, particularly the final death-sigh of ‘The Bogus Man’, as the track reaches its sordid end  and the gentle piano notes of ‘Lagoons’ are introduced. Lyrically though, events remain largely pessimistic.

Album reviewer Kevin Orton perhaps sums it best: “While the band aren’t shy about plumbing the depths of misery, they never commit the cardinal sin of being dreary” (Soundblab). Musically, the track evokes the retro sensibility of Glam by mashing up 50s rock n’ roll, blistering West Coast lead guitar, folk harmonica, and a convincing run at honky-tonk piano in the spirit of Mott the Hoople‘s ‘All the Way from Memphis‘, a track that Andy Mackay played on at AIR during the FYP sessions. (Mackay was friendly enough with Mott the Hoople to seriously consider joining the band after Eno’s departure from Roxy). The brightness of the Eno/MacKay barber-shop choir during the introduction (“Blue sunsets and grey lagoooons…”) lifts us from the conundrum of the groove-inspired yet terminally dying ‘The Bogus Man’ into a brighter world, nostalgic perhaps for a time before bogus men and dream home heartaches. Paul Thompson’s drumming is simply superb as it kicks in at .23 and then maintains a typically solid yet buoyant beat throughout – a toe-tapper perfectly in time with the humorous 50s doo-wop evocation of fake alibis and morning sickness on Friday nights.

This optimism is throttled over the course of the song as Ferry uses a classic three-part dramatic structure to slowly reveal ‘Grey Lagoons’ secrets:

I)
Blue sunsets and grey lagoons
Silver starfish with honeymoons
All these and more to choose
If you

II)
Satin teardrops on velvet lights
Morning sickness on Friday nights
Heaven knows what others I might bring
To you

III)
Broken partings making strange goodbyes
Hopeless cases with fake alibis
Even hoping we’ll be there to share
With you

Blue suns and grey lagoons
Grey lagoons
Grey lagoons

There three stanzas can be said to be observations on (I) Courtship; (II) Marriage; and (III) Break-up. This can be seen if we substitute the words “marry me” after the closing phrase of each stanza:

Heaven knows what others I might bring
If you (marry me)

Heaven knows what others I might bring
To you (if you marry me)

Even hoping we’ll be there to share
With you (if you marry me)

For this vantage point context is everything: the first verse presents the lovers with the fresh optimism of Silver starfish with honeymoons; the second verse offers the sordid domestic realism of Morning sickness on Friday nights; and the third, the pessimistic and relationship-ending Broken partings and strange goodbyes: All these to and more to choose/ If you.. While he may have had aspirations to be a romantic crooner and lounge-lizard, no one can accuse Bryan Ferry of being a sentimentalist…!

The ‘Lagoons’ love story is similar to second Roxy single ‘Pyjamarama’, that entertaining domestic comedy of manners and the first song recorded at the FYP sessions, where the narrator’s declaration Oh how I’d love to hold you tight is reduced by song’s end to How could I apologise for all those lies. We hear again this apology in ‘Grey Lagoons’ where the narrator admits his alibis are fake – cover-ups, presumably, for what will be relationship-killing affairs. The narrative arc is the same as ‘PJ’ but as ‘Lagoons’ was written over a year or more earlier, Ferry was still interested in setting up a rich set of classic romantic couplets and imagery to convey the desired sense of promise followed by collapse. In ‘Lagoons’ the writer stands outside the relationship, composing for the listener the story of failed love at a distance, as a work of narrative poetry. For the next set of songs – ‘Pyjamarama’ and, say ‘Mother of Pearl’ or anything on Country Life or Siren – the writer is smack in the middle of the party, desperate to score. This is in part one of the reasons over time Ferry de-emphasized the importance of his lyrics – as his career with Roxy progressed, the initial position of being outside of events looking in (Roxy Music; ‘Virginia Plain’; FYP) gave way to him being at the center of the action (Stranded/Country Life/Siren), then somehow moving beyond it all – with no solutions found – towards the crisp idealized soundscapes of Flesh and Blood/Avalon. (Manifesto is the transition record, the shift clearly marked by its East and West sides). Too pat a summary perhaps, but the general drift away from lyrical density is clear by the time we get to Avalon.

And so for early cut ‘Grey Lagoons’ Ferry was still interested in the tropes of romantic language, similar to those found in another early song, ‘If There is Something‘. Instead of growing potatoes by the score or swimming all the oceans blue, the singer-songwriter presents the hyper-romantic images of Blue sunsets, Satin teardrops, Velvet lights and Silver starfish, all establishing an intricate poetic scheme that paints broad strokes of blue, silver, grey, and velvet across the romance color spectrum. For Roxy Music biographer Johnny Rogan this emphasis on romantic diction in ‘Grey Lagoons’ showed Ferry at his most lyrically trite: “it certainly displayed Ferry at his most impressionistic, glibly combining meaningless couplets.” While Rogan is a welcome and intelligent critic, he’s off the mark here, as the lyric is far from glib. (Rogan is notable also for calling final track ‘For Your Pleasure’ “trivial” (56). Is he listening to the same record we are?). In fact the imagery in ‘Lagoons’ is carefully and scrupulously composed to demonstrate how romantic language can be glamorous yet contain opposite meanings – a favorite Ferry approach.

To begin with, our suspicions should be raised by a love song that sounds sincere – the music is warm and inviting after all – and by a writing style that looks like pure love poetry. Ferry intentionally selects a rich tapestry of romantic diction to put us in the context of time-honored romance balladry – there are sunsets, honeymoons, and teardrops in abundance, but they come at an odd angle – the sunsets are blue (when does that happen?) – the lagoons are grey (not emerald green?) – satin teardrops come with morning sickness and so on. Something is left deliberately amiss here, but the music is so seductive we do not catch it – the “ohhhhhhhhs” of the Eno/MacKay barber-shop choir alone are virtuous enough to put us off our guard.

The wreckage continues if you consider the meaning of the words themselves. For instance, a lagoon is a body of water separated from other bodies of water by a natural barrier. Hence, a lagoon is always stand-alone or separated or cut-off from its source, and in some instances this isolated body of water can become so self-contained that it becomes putrid due to lack of fresh water, and turns into a swamp. A grey lifeless quagmire – hardly the stuff of togetherness, courtship and romance. Indeed, the somber greys and blues in the song all serve to highlight a lack of connection or human contact: blue sunsets, for example, can actually only happen in one place – on planet Mars. (I’m not making this up!). The difference between Earth and Mars’ nightfall is due to atmospherics (see here) but while Earth traditionally has lovely red sunsets, Mars has a sunset that is truly blue. In other words, Ferry offers his lover the promise of a blue sunset but it can only be had on another world, on Mars, the red planet, the warrior planet.

I don’t think a group so much into advanced music has ever used these old sources so obviously before.
Bryan Ferry

And what about grey as a guiding metaphor: there’s those silver starfish and satin teardrops – both favored by jewelry designers across the ages as emblems of love and courtship. (Starfish tend to be necklaces, teardrops earrings). Sterling silver starfish charms, besides being aesthetically pleasing (the “star” is key), are also purchased and worn as a symbol of rebirth. The quality of rebirth is easy to understand; a starfish can easily regenerate a missing limb. But given this is a Roxy song we suspect this efficient replacement may not necessarily be a virtue – and so it turns out that we have met this narrator before, here and in other songs, particularly ‘Editions of You‘, where every new lover is a replaceable copy, endlessly substitutable like issues of a weekly magazine. This starfish will move forward alright, to live and feed, effortlessly replacing limbs at will as the need arises.

Another set of subverted romantic images comes to us courtesy of the cinema: Ferry situates the narrator and his audience within the flickering lights of the silver screen in order to tell his story of warning and vulnerability. Flush from visions of starfish and honeymoons, our narrator gushingly promises his lover Satin teardrops on velvet lights, which, all things considered, is a pretty seductive offer, as it carries with it the luxurious sensory evocations of satin and velvet to wrap our dreams in. It is interesting aspect of the song that the term “velvet lights” is emphatically cinematic – a widely read film magazine from the early 70s titled The Velvet Light Trap was essential reading for a generation of film-makers and cinema enthusiasts. The journal’s name originates from a specific part of a film camera that keeps the light out where the magazine is attached (wiki). A part of a film camera that keeps the light out – separation and concealment again as predominant image. And so too with the sweeping reference to movie-going and cinema, watching the drama of a failed romance unfold before us – the sights and sounds of Friday night’s satin tears falling against a background of flickering velvet lights before the reality of Monday morning sickness sets in. An un-love story for the ages.

The use of 50s doo-wop makes perfect sense in a song that subverts the language of romance and turns it on his head to reveal the sordid truth beneath the glamour. Ferry’s story is told by a charlatan remarkably similar to the voices we have already heard on the record – ‘The Bogus Man’ is an imposter both to himself and to others (a dangerous one at that) – the narrator in ‘Dream Home Heartache’ is an unhinged fantasizer – yet we are inclined to see the track as softer, lighter in touch as it tunefully reaches back into the past to recall an American Graffiti style idealism, an idealism recalled through our collective desire for nostalgia. Ferry’s voice cracks at the end of the song (Grey lagoons/Grey lagoons/Grey lagoon-oooun-oonanooos) sounding if he can’t really take seriously the song or story he has just told. He loves the words, loves the music – as we all do – but this is the story of a courtship gone wrong, a bill and coo designed to frighten off any potential sweetheart. The narrator starts from a position of self-loathing – or, if you prefer, personal insight – but he cannot bring himself to tell the truth to his loved one, so he tells his story the only way he knows how – through the well-worn tropes of love poetry, of romantic symbolism, of cinematic reverence. Yet all this does is demonstrate the distance inherent in language, and perhaps love itself, that unobtainable object.

‘Grey Lagoons’ belongs on For Your Pleasure alright, for it is every bit as dark and subversive as the songs that precede it, perhaps even more so, for it is presented and packaged as something it is not – like a sterling silver starfish given to a sweetheart, or a single satin teardrop shed at the movies on a lonely Friday night. To you..

Dedicated to Director and Cinematographer Nicolas Roeg (1928 – 2018).  “I fell in love with him then and will love him forever” – Donald Sutherland, star of Don’t Look Now.

Recorded: AIR Studios, London February 1973

Credits: Art work “B-Movie” by the brilliant John Foxx (early Ultravox), a true heir of Brian Eno’s ambient music; John Foxx again, Quite Man II; ; Two Worlds One Sun, from https://blog.briankoberlein.com/two-worlds-one-sun/; Velvet Light Trap magazine; and, keeping in theme, John Foxx’s the Projectionist 1

Next – January 2019: we come to the end of this particular journey next month with the track ‘For Your Pleasure’ – part false, part true, like anything. The culmination of this amazing record.

Happy New Year! and thank you all for continuing to support the blog and the writing – readership has increased substantially each month for the past three years, and for that I am thrilled and indebted to you. Muchas gracias!

I’d like to thank John O’Brien and his excellent site VivaRoxyMusic as the go-to place for Roxy Music news and info. A gentleman and a scholar. Cheers John.

And finally, though I never knew I cared about these things, congratulations to Roxy Music on getting into the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame. The email campaign was a hoot, but more importantly the recognition was good for the band, “the musicians, engineers, producers, designers and numerous people behind the scenes…and of course our loyal fans” (BF.com). Perhaps the band, after thinking they’ve been on the outside all these years, will now feel more part of it all – something we have known all along – it just took the world longer to catch up! 🙂

Goodnight 2018!

The Bogus Man (1973)
The Bogus Man (Live, Viva! Roxy Music)

The bogus man is on his way as fast as he can run
He’s tired but he’ll get to you and shoot you with his gun

Focused his mind on something he cared about
But it came out a shout just like before

The bogus man is at your heels now clutching at your coat
You must be quick now hurry up he’s scratching at your throat

Concealed his doubt by skillful evasion
But he couldn’t find out about deception

The bogus man is on his way as fast as he can run
He’s tired but he’ll get to you and show you lots of fun

Arguably the most contentious song in the Roxy canon – certainly the longest at nine minutes plus – ‘The Bogus Man’ has generated considerable discussion and comment from the band, critics and fans alike. For the group, the excitement generated by the recording was palpable: Paul Thompson enthused on The Thrill Of It All radio broadcast that ‘Bogus Man’ was “trance-like…mesmeric…it just grooves along, I love that track.” For Andy Mackay it was “more than almost any other Roxy track…a conscious effort by all of us to try and sort of put in our own contributions.” For Phil Manzanera ‘Bogus’ was simply “incredible,” and for Brian Eno the song was the most successful piece on For Your Pleasure “because it’s the one on which the band is most obviously working together, and it’s also got a lot of discipline” (Thrill/Shark).

For critics and fans however, ‘The Bogus Man’ is a mixed bag, both loved and neglected, often overlooked due to its length. One listener noting that “at an ominous, nearly ten-minutes, ‘Bogus Man’ is the one track that I tend to skip past” (Soundlab). For another, the song “is 9 minutes long, which I [feel] is inexcusable” (albumclub). Yet for many others (myself included) the music is “strange and wonderful” (Klinger), well “loved” (Terich), and for one playful critic there’s no reason not to dance to it: “Is there any Stranding kid on your block who doesn’t groove to The Bogus Man?” (Ingham).

It should come as no surprise that ‘The Bogus Man’ arouses admiration and suspicion in equal measure as it is unique in the Roxy catalog, and not only for its length. It is a disquieting song, hinting at menace without actually delivering any real shock or gore. And yet it would be a mistake to overlook it: ‘The Bogus Man’ is a pivotal Roxy track – it is where all the chaos and uncertainty from the first album and much of For Your Pleasure is finally put to bed, for the song contains all the tensions and contrasts that made the first edition of the band so special, not only at the level of personality and musical approach, but also as an articulation of what all band members agreed was the Roxy manifesto: “all styles served here.” The song is no more a product of Brian Eno’s influence than it is of Bryan Ferry’s manic and dark visions: this is the sound of Roxy Music working it out.

While Mackay, Manzanera, Eno and Ferry contribute considerable musical skill and intellect, the track is really propelled into existence by Paul Thompson and bassist John Porter: ‘The Bogus Man’ is all back-end, it’s a rhythm section trapped in the mud, agitated, like an abomination bubbling up from the grave. On one level, the slumbering historical Rough Beast from ‘Do the Strand‘ has returned. On another, ‘The Bogus Man’ inhabits the human realm as a sexual predator, bogeyman, record company executive, Hammer Horror cliche – all of these things and more, but only if you reduce the word “Bogus” to its stereo-typical meanings. Bogus also means counterfeit or fake; not genuine. And the synonym means phony. As in Glamour. Acting. Misrepresentation. Ambition. Lies. For Your Pleasure is an album of masks and personae, a tool used to explore the subconscious, the art-making process and the personal requirements needed for a life of celebrity and fame. During the damp dark winter of ’72/’73 the story has been written that Ferry stared vacantly for weeks at a television set with the sound turned off. A story has also been written that during the recording of For Your Pleasure the singer drove deep into the Derbyshire countryside to stay at the cottage of friend Nick De Ville, alone day and night, intensely concentrating, paper all around him, trying to find the right words. Focused his mind on something he cared about. Look no further: Bryan Ferry is The Bogus Man. Of course he is.

I like all the dark stuff
Bryan Ferry, 2011

Sequentially, ‘Bogus Man’ comes at an important point on For Your Pleasure: on the original LP  (in ye olden days) ‘Bogus’ was the opening cut on side two – a slot often used for re-establishing the flow of an album: think of funky cut ‘Money’ opening the second side of Dark Side of the Moon (after ‘Great Gig in the Sky‘); or the Rolling Stones‘ highly motivated ‘Bitch’ on Sticky Fingers (after ‘You Gotta Move’); ‘Higher Ground’ opens the second side of Stevie Wonder’s Inversions, and so on. It’s a great slot for re-engaging the listener – the physical act of turning the disc over meant a temporary break in proceedings (lighting a spliff, walking the dog) – and it is surprising that ‘Editions of You‘ did not open side two: it would have followed the hit parade formula by providing a “knees up” (Ferry’s term) rocker to kick off and balance the arty proceedings. But there is very little about For Your Pleasure that is formulaic: side two has a mere three tracks and, although together they meet the desired length of a side of music (typically twenty minutes) the tracks do wind FYP down considerably, with ‘Grey Lagoons‘ offering lively, though revisionist, respite, sandwiched in between two of the most experimental tracks Roxy ever recorded for an LP, ‘The Bogus Man’ and ‘For Your Pleasure‘.

And so the sequencing of ‘The Bogus Man’ is telling: it confirms Ferry’s desire to create albums of songs that clash and contrast in style and mood, and it also sends a message to listeners: if you thought the first side (or even the first album) was weird or unsettling, what til you get a load of this. Ultimately then, ‘Bogus’ becomes the ultimate non-formulaic track on a non-formulaic album, and its positioning pushes the listener further into uncharted territory, which suited the band’s ambitions perfectly. Brian Eno takes up the story:

We had an undeveloped idea of making something that had a sinister feeling to it, but with that being an undertone with a fairly happy sounding riff; it was just meant to sound uneasy. But the problem until about a week before we did the album was that it was tending to sound a bit ‘let’s do something sinister’, very forced. Then Paul started playing this kind of reggae beat to it, a very bland sort of thing, and John Porter…joined in, which it put a totally different face on it, and it gradually developed parts that were completely incongruous but worked because they were held together by sheer willpower. 

– Sounds, March 1973

As with so many powerful Roxy songs (If There is Something/Mother of Pearl) the drumming in ‘The Bogus Man’ kicks off proceedings. Paul Thompson provides a classic 1-drop reggae beat (1, 2, 3, 4/1, 2, 3, 4/…) and, coming after the drumming pyrotechnics of the fade-out ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache‘, his touch is surprisingly subtle, bright even. At 0.6s bass and guitar kick in – or at least it sounds like guitar, as one of Phil Manzanera’s greatest contribution to Roxy was his sound texture (and taste) and so it is difficult to know where Brian Eno’s contributions end and Phil Manzanera’s begin. John Porter’s bass line is masterful, thick and cheeky, twin strings plucked at once to produce a reverberating sound that only be described as minimalist funk. It’s like walking through mud – plodding, two steps forward, one back (He’s tired but he’ll get to you). Indeed, Thompson and Porter hold the piece together, as does Manzanera’s single note riff on the guitar – ba/ba – ba/ba/ba/ba – that morphs and changes over the course of the song.

Brian Eno can’t wait to get stuck in of course, and at .20 seconds the infamous and beloved Voltage Controlled Studio Version #3 (VCS3) synthesizer starts its Star Trek riff, sprinkling the track with bogey dust that bobs in and out of the duration of the song. At .26 the other Bryan cranks in with a very funky call and response routine on electric plange piano. The sound is rich and full and Roxy sound particularly well-recorded in these opening moments. All the ingredients are present – except for Andy Mackay’s masterful off-center saxophone, an acoustic a-tonal addition that more than any other musical element is responsible for the sinister atmosphere of the song. Again, Eno provides the detail:

Andy was playing a kind of a-tonal saxophone part that had nothing particularly to do with the song – the same twelve notes over and over again in different times and inversions, a kind of Schoenburgian thing of all the possible ways of arranging twelve notes…All the elements are very strange but they do work together to give this feeling of something very uneasy proceeding in a direction it’s not quite sure of.

Then, a chilly disembodied voice begins to sing at 1.06, multi-tracked and even-tempered, the bogus man is on his way. By the time of the first bridge at 1.37 (Focused his mind..) the vocal morphs, ghosted and distorted, a visitation from the suicidal voice of ‘Strictly Confidential’ – the subconscious is back, soaring aloft and below.

I love it. Maybe it’s the funkiness. Maybe it’s just because it’s so damn eerie. Either way, it’s a triumph, and I have yet to hear anything like it.

Roxy Music fan, Treblezine

‘Bogus Man’ has its precedents in the Roxy catalog, the most conspicuous being the chilly ‘Chance Meeting‘, a haunted and sinister song from first album Roxy Music that pre-dates the ‘Bogus Man’ by eight months, ‘Chance’ shows Bryan Ferry creating a narrator that is at once sinister and seductive, as noted in RMS Sept 2016: “If there is a truism that the Devil gets all the best lines, then there is indeed menace in these words, a portrayal of looming violence set against Haiku-style imagery (red dress mine).” The atmosphere of ‘Chance Meeting’ is claustrophobic and menacing – you can almost see the fingers on the victim’s throat as the narrator utters “time spent well is so … rare”. Yet while ‘Chance’ holds ambiguity at the core of its frigid heart, ‘Bogus Man’ does no such thing – this guy’s extremely dangerous, and there is little ambiguity regarding his intentions: he is on his way, ready to shoot you with his gun, untiring and relentless. Just like in your dreams, where running away never seems to get you anywhere, except that dead-end alley, and nowhere to hide.

It is an indication of Ferry’s skill as a poet and narrative writer that ‘The Bogus Man’ is presented as a carefully chiselled piece of language that expresses single-minded ruthlessness and lack of mental sophistication (came out a shout/couldn’t find out). The control and attention to detail can be seen in the song’s straight-forward – though alarming – series of rhyming couplets: run/gun; coat/throat; run/fun. Rhyming couplets are the stuff of nursery rhymes and the bogus man has this sense of being a mythical creature, a ‘bogey-man’ type character, sent in to frighten the kids. But Ferry’s bogey-man and its play on words is far from child-like: there’s a killer on the road, Jim Morrison sang in 1971 (rhyming road with toad), and Ferry builds on the same tension: bogus man is on the road and he’s coming at you as fast as he can. This sense of forward movement and frightening inevitability is heightened by the regularity of meter repeated across the stanzas: for example, 11 beats per line in sections 1/3/5 (blue).

The bogus man is on his way as fast as he can run (11) ⇐
He’s tired but he’ll get to you and shoot you with his gun (11) ⇐

[Focused his mind] on something he cared about
But it came out a shout just like before

The bogus man is at your heels now clutching at your coat (11) ⇐
You must be quick now hurry up he’s scratching at your throat (11) ⇐

[Concealed his doubt] by skillful evasion
But he couldn’t find out about deception

The bogus man is on his way as fast as he can run (11) ⇐
He’s tired but he’ll get to you and show you lots of fun (11)⇐

And while the language and killer move forward in steady meter, the song’s poetic structure is detailed and nuanced: ‘The Bogus Man’ has several points of narrative view, all localized, as Ferry has his evil-doer describe his actions and then provide reasoning for his actions. For example, the first, third and fifth (blue) stanzas identify the Bogus Man by name and are in the third person, the killer watching from outside himself (the bogus man is on his way), naming himself in the same manner as other psychopaths like Son of Sam, Doctor Death and so on. In doing so, a persona is created, a character or mask to be hidden behind. This is like a Grimm fairy-tale containing masks and deranged game-playing – a modern Riddles and magic are my game/Rumpelstiltskin is my name kind of word-play.

The second and fourth stanzas (red) tease and tweak this point-of-view – the killer still refers to himself in the third person (concealed his doubt) but the ‘bogus man’ moniker drops in favour of a heightened personal insight – Focused his mind on something he cared about/But it came out a shout/just like before. The narrative and message is clear: once upon a time the bogus man tried to learn something (focused his mind) that had emotional importance to him (cared about) but he couldn’t comprehend or explain (came out a shout). ‘Shout’ is a brilliant word choice for it expresses the bogus man’s response to his predicament: hopelessness and frustration, followed by a wail of inarticulate anger. And ominously, this has happened more than once (just like before).

In its lyrical approach ‘The Bogus Man’ is at once a song about murder and mayhem, but it also displays a curious attempt to explain the actions of the assassin, or at least present a picture of a man who struggles with communication and belonging, and consequently creates a mask or in order to justify – or simply explain – his hideous actions. Psychotic rage is a hot topic for rock stars – perhaps the most famous example being ‘Midnight Rambler‘ by the Rolling Stones, a first-person telling (allegedly) of the murder spree of the Boston Strangler. An engaging though lyrically unimaginative song – building on Jagger’s sympathy for the devil schtick – the narrative merely defines the killer in the first person:  I’m talkin’ ’bout the midnight rambler/Did you see me jump the garden wall/I don’t give you a hoot of warning. So too with the Jim Morrison’s brilliant ‘Riders on the Storm‘ – the last song recorded by The Doors – where the point-of-view is third person but fairly conventional at that (If you give this man a ride/Sweet family will die/Killer on the road). Fantastic music, incredible atmosphere and imagery, but no point-of-view ambiguity or de-centering during the telling of the tale.

The closest relative to ‘The Bogus Man’ though is the classic ‘Psycho Killer‘ by the Talking Heads. (Or, Son of Bogus Man, if there could be such a thing). The first person is used with the narrative goal of getting deeper inside the killer’s head as the murders occur. Lyricist and songwriter David Byrne describes the process:  “I thought I would write a song about a very dramatic subject the way [Alice Cooper] does, but from inside the person, playing down the drama. Rather than making it theatrical the way Alice Cooper would, I’d go for what’s going on inside the killer’s mind, what I imagined he might be thinking” (2002). This lead to Bryne creating a duality of mind in the killer: a conventional first person telling (I can’t seem to face up to the facts) and the the killer speaking french to himself, as in Qu’est-ce que c’est?” (“What is this/it?”).

David Byrne, ‘Psycho Killer’ translation

Pretty punk, and pretty postmodern too: the alienation of the French language for most English speakers mimics the difficulty of getting inside the killer’s head. Such literalism however throws a bit of a wrench in the anticipated poetic reward, but this is a justifiable merging of theme and content in such a magnificent song. And while Bryne’s killer speaks to himself in French – an urbane art school joke if ever there was one – Ferry’s killer is clueless, too busy trying to understand why he is always on the outside. Concealed his doubt by skillful evasion we are proudly told, but the bogus man misses the irony of “but he couldn’t find out about deception”. And on this, arguably, we are asked to relate to the killer, if only on a trivial level: how often in our daily lives do we feel we don’t understand something but hide that fact, conceal our doubt by skillful evasion. (God knows I spend most of my days in a state akin to acute joy and an abstract fear – and that’s just before my morning coffee). The difference between “us” and “him” is that the bogus man is not aware or intelligent enough or not educated enough – or just not part of society enough – to understand how to deceive, a skill most of us take for granted. The catch here of course is that a killer who cannot deceive is going to get caught, and this is insight the bogus man does not possess – the inevitability of his own eventual capture and incarceration.

Deception is the most necessary art in life.
Sophocles

The one thing we always knew was that Roxy had to keep changing
Phil Manzanera, 2012

He’s Tired But..
At the conclusion of ‘The Bogus Man’ the song and the executioner run out of energy. We hear the sounds of exhausted breath, the cold air suggesting death or some horrible necrophilia, or both, the final actions of the song almost certainly sexual and murderous. In both ‘The Bogus Man’ and ‘In Every Dream Home’ the goal of human connection is reduced to sex with a dead or inanimate being or commodity. Grim stuff: thank goodness the music and the brilliance of the lyrics saves us from slitting our wrists. (Or worse, becoming a Journey fan). This roll-call of death and fleshly absence haunt For Your Pleasure like mist settling on cold skin: the lovers in ‘Editions of You‘ are lifeless, bot-like fashion models; ‘Beauty Queen‘s Valerie is a pin-up remembered from an old glamour magazine; the female suicidal voice in ‘Strictly Confidential‘ contains the ghostly presence of the deceased Marilyn Monroe or some other tragic Love Goddess;  ‘Do the Strand‘ invents a dance that has never been and never will be.

The over-riding sense of ‘The Bogus Man’ then is that it is a thematic termination of sorts, that this is where the game is up, for both Bryan Ferry and for this version of Roxy Music. After ‘The Bogus Man’ the Roxy ‘state of mind’ shifts to brighter colors – there is angst and self-criticism (and much beauty) still to come – but a decision is made in ‘Bogus Man’ that pulls the Roxy front man from the brink of what can only be described as the ‘dark cloak of evening shadow’. Ferry uses his constructed characters as masks and personae to interrogate his newly found circumstances: the sudden rush of fame; the achievement of a dream (and the problem of how to hold onto that dream); and so on. In spite of his success he feels alone and isolated, a situation explored most clearly in ‘Strictly Confidential‘ a song in which creativity is likened to the condition of mental illness, and a sense of inadequacy and dread take hold in the form of personal shyness and a fear of public speaking (Tongue tied the thread of conversation/ Weighing the words one tries to use). These themes culminate in the extraordinary confessions contained behind the masks and persona created for the ‘The Bogus Man’:

Focused his mind on something he cared about
But it came out a shout just like before

I am inadequate

Concealed his doubt by skillful evasion

I doubt my abilities

But he couldn’t find out about deception

How long can I keep up the pretense

He’s tired but he’ll get to you

Ever had a dream where you turn on yourself?

Clutching at your coat
Scratching at your throat

The singer who cannot sing, the entertainer who cannot communicate. A star who feels like an an outsider. A star who feels like a fraud.  A phony. A fake. A bogus man. ‘The Bogus Man’ is Bryan Ferry’s own nightmare, played back to his audience via a mask he created for a psychopath. Another horror story written in strict confidence, to us, his loyal and dedicated audience, for our pleasure.

We never really felt accepted…And we’re still not a part of it, not really, even to this day.
Bryan Ferry, 2018

Recorded: AIR Studios, London February 1973

Credits: Bryan Ferry 1973; bogey night-light man appears in celebrated film noir, Scarlett Street (1941); early type-written ‘Bogus Man’ lyric, courtesy bryanferry.com; Brian Eno pulls a face, 1973; David Byrne loses an eye; Bryan Ferry bad guy hero Dirk Bogarde is cornered in the over-the-top, appropriately named The Singer Not the Song – great pants Dirk!

Next: We go swimming in ‘Grey Lagoons‘ – December!

In Every Dream Home a Heartache – Part 1
In Every Dream Home a Heartache (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)

I loved free-form jazz and the stuff like that and also psychedelia; what was happening on the West Coast or the East Coast was more about freedom, not being constrained.
Phil Manzanera

“You just blew my mind!”
Kramer, Seinfeld

In 2012, Roxy guitarist Phil Manzanera recorded a collaborative album of music and poetry dedicated to the life and work of Jimi Hendrix. Nth Entities made perfect sense as a Manzanera project for the Roxy guitarist shares with Hendrix the same qualities of innovation, control, attention to texture, and when needed, tenderness and savagery in equal measure. Not known for a flashy style or presence (no playing guitar with his teeth!), Manzanera nevertheless brought to Roxy Music a creative and technical ability that provided the band with many of their best moments. Perpetually in lock-step with band-mate drummer Paul Thompson, Manzanera gave Roxy the fuel needed to move beyond pure art-pop and forge a heavier progressive rock sound when needed. The Manzanera/Thompson groove not only attracted the attention of the future punks of ’77 but also served to tickle the elbows of the art crowd – Kate Bush, Japan, Human League, Simple Minds and many more. Which brings us to ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache‘: just how did a song partly based on the religious poetry of John Donne and one man’s intimate relationship with an inflatable doll turn into an inspired slab of musical insanity, of progressive and unapologetic rock psychedelia? Well my friends, it’s all in the last line of the song: Love. Reverence. Irony. Shock. Awe. And the rest, as they say, is history.I. Blown to Bits

Praying at the altar of consumable goods, our jaded narrator breathes life into his inflatable disposable darling and in return has an epiphany of God. Or, if you rather, in return for the breath of life he is given an exceptional, mind-blowing orgasm. It is probable we all favor the latter, for all sorts of good reasons, but consider for a moment the tortured steps the narrator takes before he arrives at his climatic release. The song is about perception, and explores his ability to see things as they really are. At first he comes off as reasonably sane and insightful:

In every dream home a heartache (observation)
and every step I take (statement)
Takes me further from heaven (observation)
Is there a heaven? (question)
I’d like to think so (observation)

Penthouse perfection (statement)
but what goes on? (question)
What to do there? (question)
better pray there (statement)

What is interesting is that the closer he gets to his disposable darling, the clearer things become for him, the less clear they become for us. At the start of the lyric the narrator’s questions are legitimate, even perceptive, but we gradually see him move further away from what might be considered a general grip on reality:

I bought you mail order (statement)
my plain wrapper baby (introduced personification)
Your skin is like vinyl (erroneous metaphorical observation – the skin is vinyl)
the perfect companion (impractical observation)
You float in my new pool (macabre observation)
Inflatable doll my role is to serve you (bizarre statement)
Disposable darling can’t throw you away now (impractical idolization)
Immortal and life size my breath is inside you (impractical deification)
I’ll dress you up daily and keep you till death sighs (anthropomorphism gone amok)
Inflatable doll lover ungrateful (personification gone amok)

I blew up your body but you blew my mind!

And here in the climatic (and famous) line we arrive at something quite different, a change in word choice and vernacular. Our tortured and articulate narrator suddenly tosses off a run-of-the-mill hippy cliche like “blew my mind” – a phrase that could be placed squarely at the gates of the Grand Palace of Hippy Cliches. The phrase sticks out as surely as the one Ferry used in a 1978 interview (Darkness Falls: Ferry in the Confessional), where he responds to a critical mauling by a junior music paper writer – “You can’t get away with saying that I have nothing to say to humanity, man. That’s just too heavy a thing to say about anybody.” It the use of “man” and “heavy” that stand out in Ferry’s lexicon here as he calls up his 60s roots, perhaps even self-consciously wrestling with his verbal anxiety, the kind of anxiety noted in ‘Strictly Confidential‘ as Tongue tied the thread of conversation/Weighing the words one tries to use. “Blew my mind” is a specific choice then in an unfolding narrative that tries to record the transition of a 60s mind-shift to the postmodern weight of the 70s. Consider for a moment the cliched variants of “blew my mind” as it relates to 60s rock hero Jimi Hendrix, selected at random on a brief archive search (don’t try this yourself at home):

“Jimi Hendrix, a fantastic American guitarist, blew the minds of the star packed crowd who…” – review, Chris Welch, Melody Maker

“I heard Hendrix playing Are You Experienced and I said, “What the fuck is this?” It blew my mind!” – interview, Leslie West, guitarist, Mountain.

“He got up and blew everyone’s mind!” – interview, Eric Clapton, guitarist.

“When Jimi Hendrix Came to Washington and Blew its Mind” – article headline, David Montgomery, Washington Post

It’s been 50 years since Hendrix’s ‘Electric Ladyland’ blew our minds – album review headline, Timeline

And so on. Now, with a writer as fastidious as Ferry we know something is going on here. For starters, he reverts to linguistic cliche – a form of found-object or “ready-made” already used in ‘Editions of You’ – which, based on the Hendrix quotes, is a hackneyed cultural cliche obviously much loved by musicians, journalists and the public. Ferry is having fun here at his generations’ use of language and is packaging and presenting the phrase in the ‘knowing’ context of an early 70s zeitgeist. Moreover, he presents the phrase in a context that teases out the mind/body connection so beloved of the LSD/Psychedelics crowd: for example, I blew up your body has both destructive and life-giving connotations. In Part 1 we saw that breath was an essential element in 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.” The irony of course is that he thinks he is giving the doll life, but this is physically impossible as she is made of latex. (Dolly don’t surf!). He is however bringing her to life through an act of the imagination, and this is really the kicker of the song: blew up your body/blew up my mind is a definitive attempt by Ferry to explore the correlation between the two states of being, and is a continuation of the themes of displacement and alienation that populate For Your Pleasure, where physical experience, such as the haunted ‘evening shadows’ of ‘Strictly Confidential‘ shift to terrors of the mind (Sometimes I wonder if they’re real/Or is it my own imagination). Reality shifts to the figmental over the course of that song, and as a result a question is asked: which of the two states has more validity and just what is, in the words of ‘Virginia Plain‘, real and make believe?

‘In Every Dream Home’ is structured in a way that we can experience the mind/body transition for ourselves, and it is a fascinating journey, as we watch the narrator’s “every step I take” become a snapshot of the brain working through it computations: reality/ heaven (Verse 1); perception/comfort (Verse 2); creativity/ transcendence (Verse 3). The punning blew up your body is given its full expression as it transitions into you blew my mind and – BAM!- the narrator experiences the shuddering, thunderous spiritual epiphany he was seeking at beginning of the song.

And so we are off again, at the point where For Your Pleasure is beginning to confirm our suspicion that it is a concept album in all but name, a courageous analysis of a subjective state akin to art making or even madness, as Ferry describes himself as someone who is usually “on the inside looking out, or the outside looking in” (BBC) – the classic situation of the artist in society.  The mind is blown, the fuse lit and pure creativity pours forth into the cosmos, past the recollected historical artifacts of ‘Do the Stand‘, past the ‘solo trip to the stars’ of ‘Beauty Queen‘, past the internal mind-soaked terrors of ‘Strictly Confidential‘ and outward – dislodged from shared human experience or, in the case of ‘Dream Home’, moral worth. There is no celebration in this epiphany:  when the physical world transfers its powers to the mind and the mind alone – the mind, that dangerous instrument that, in the words of Ferry’s favorite religious poet John Donne, is the root of our “decaying faculties” – there can only be breakdown and loss, for we are physical beings, no matter how far we drift away from nature in this modern world – with our narrator’s striking realization caught echoing across oceans of time and emptiness:

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

II. Careful With That Axe, Phil

Why isn’t Jimi Hendrix regarded as one of the [20th] century’s great composers? … Why is he not spoken of like John Cage? He is somebody who defined the way people think about music.
Brian Eno

You got me blowin’, blowin’ my mind
Is it tomorrow, or just the end of time?
Jimi Hendrix, ‘Purple Haze’

The psychedelic impulse in 60s pop music started out innocent enough – the brilliance of The Beatles melodic song-writing applied to tabla drumming, tape loops, backwards guitar and manipulated vocals (‘Rain’/’Tomorrow Never Knows’) and the multi-layered masterpiece ‘Good Vibrations’ by The Beach Boys being arguably the high points – but the founding fathers in San Francisco (Owsley Stanley/Ken Kesey) watched as the original impulse morphed from whimsy & Tolkien to bad trips & violence. In England, Syd Barret’s Pink Floyd (‘The Scarecrow’/’Interstellar Overdrive’) strove for originality and insight, while in America Jefferson Airplane (‘White Rabbit’/’Somebody to Love’) spoke of a communal experience strong enough that the normal size of their native Haight-Ashbury swelled in the Summer of Love from 15,000 to around 100,000 (Wiki). In reality, most “psychedelic” music from the period is teeth-grindingly awful – along the lines of say, ‘Yellow Balloon‘ by The Yellow Balloon – but what exactly defines psychedelic music, or, as it’s also known – the psychotomimetic experience?

At its most basic level, psychedelia is defined by the way individual receives external stimuli – in short, how we experience or make sense of reality (a key Roxy Music topic). Experts suggest the core tenets of the psychedelic experience can be grouped into three distinct effects: dechronicization, depersonalization, and dynamization (Hicks). Dechronicization essentially messes with our perception of time;  depersonalization is when the user loses the self or the ID to a greater power such a community, Planet Earth, the Universe, or just a very good dance party;  and dynamization, as [Timothy] Leary noted, makes everything from floors to lamps seem to bend, as “familiar forms dissolve into moving, dancing structures” … Music that is truly “psychedelic” mimics these three effects (Wiki).

The psychedelic affect, while generated most readily with LSD, magic-mushrooms, and MDMA can also be the outcome of mental illness or “schizoaffective disorder,” which is characterized primarily by symptoms of schizophrenia, such as hallucinations or delusions, and symptoms of a mood disorder, such as mania and depression (nami.org). For Your Pleasure does a very good job of exploring these conditions, and we have discussed Bryan Ferry’s interest and presentation in different states of being, whether they be presentations of character and condition (‘Chance Meeting‘/’If There is Something‘) or mental illness (‘Strictly Confidential‘/In Every Dream Home‘/’Still Falls the Rain‘). As Roxy critic Michael Bracewell has noted, Ferry’s desire to “create, derive in great part from a sense of alienation and the classically romantic impulse to seek moments of transcendence from the mundane and the known” (Bracewell). In short getting outside of yourself  through art-making, game-playing or drugs, does sometimes replicate the state of an unhealthy mind, and can, for some, be the driving factor of the artistic or creative sensibility (see: Syd Barret; Brian Wilson). Thankfully, during his work with Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry was able to examine these alternate experiences with seriousness and true insight, and did not cheapen their impact by providing the crutch or gimmick of drug-taking as metaphor, as so many groups did in the early 70s, including Hendrix and The Beatles. That is, not until the penultimate line of ‘Dream Home’ enters the frame and the unexpected hippy trope spills out. As a last attempt at lucidity before the doors close in, the narrator steps back to consider the emotional transaction between him and his perfect dolly: he gives her life, she is ungrateful – yet in spite of it all, in his mind, his is the net gain: he peers over the edge of the cliff and then transcends it. The madman blows up the building and kills the innocent. The dream becomes the reality. A new home is invented. Is there a heaven? Not anymore.

The song is of course saved from its own black hole by the punchline, delivered in a camp and affected way by Ferry –  an obvious use of a rock n’ roll cliche in order to release tension from a dark narrative. The track has long been a live favorite, as Phil Manzanera recalled: “the audiences used to love it. There’d be an inflatable doll that some joker would buy and bring to the gigs. You’d see this thing bobbing towards you from the back of the hall, coming over people’s heads!” (Reynolds). And referencing the 60s mindset and slang was nothing new in the early 70s –  David Bowie in particular made a habit of using hippy cliches in his lyrics – Ziggy Stardust is full of them: freak out/lay it on/outta sight/don’t lean on me man etc etc. In this playful referencing, Ferry and Bowie share the same strategy of drawing attention to rock history as a narrative – inauthentic, plastic, malleable. As mid-to-late 60s art school alumni, both Ferry and Bowie were imbued with the burden of pop music’s relationship to politics and culture. But by the early 70s the question of rock changing the world had (albeit temporarily) been shelved, as Bowie’s own Young Dudes were quick to point out: And my brother’s back at home/With his Beatles and his Stones/ We never got it off on that revolution stuff/What a drag/Too many snags. Yes, Ziggy Stardust might have been a real-life space invader but he was almost certainly a fake rock star who followed the template and moves laid out by his predecessors Elvis, Vince Taylor, and The Legendary Stardust Cowboy.

For his part, Bryan Ferry was writing entire songs (‘Virginia Plain’/’Beauty Queen’/ ‘Editions of You’) that were aimed at sending up the idea of 60s authenticity and earnestness. And true to form the punchline to ‘Dream Home’ offered a wink and a nod because the modern audience was hungry for inclusion and distance, as well as wit, and the introduction of a knowing irony later later designated as postmodernism. Glam was self-conscious and arty, even when handling difficult subjects. As usual, Brian Eno captured the zeitgeist best: “All we are saying is at least enjoy the luxury before it’s too late…If the apocalypse does approach, at least rock music can now greet it in true decadent style” (quote, Viva). Indeed, for all their sophistication and artistic depth, Roxy were very capable of shrugging their shoulders and going “what the hell, let’s just have a good time” (party time wasting is too much fun). The presentation of the problem was what mattered: the narrator is becoming increasingly unhinged by the experience of living a modern, disconnected life. The solution, however, is nowhere to be seen.

Musically, the “blew my mind” punchline serves to resolve the harmonic tension built up in the song – Bryan Ferry’s early writing often repeated chord structures with no harmonic resolution (‘Virginia Plain‘/’Pyjamarama‘)  and in ‘Dream Home’ the D# F# F G# cycle serves the rhythmic consistency until the tick-tick monotone and increasing madness make our ears yearn for some respite. And it’s unclear if you could call it respite: the music stops with a thump from Paul Thompson‘s drums, Ferry offers his 1960s tag line and in return the band provide the definitive and – let’s be honest – extremely obvious reply: a rock n’ roll explosion in the form of a thunderous guitar and drum solo, frenetic in its desire to match the originality and heights of the lyrical narrative. This is joyful music and echoes and confirms what Pete Townshend called rock music’s “bloody explosion”:

It’s the event. That’s what rock and roll is. That is why rock and roll is powerful. It is a single force. It is a single impetus and it’s a single force which threatens a lot of the crap which is around – Rolling Stone, 1968

Roxy Music invite their audience to get out of their heads, to live, to transcend the common currency of work, health, responsibility, boredom, politics, and society. This is why the break is such a live favourite – it invites the audience to participate in an incredibly visceral experience – it’s physical – it cannot be translated into language or lyric: you either feel, or you don’t.

‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’ was a weird one. Bryan didn’t lay down any vocals for that, it was just an instrumental. He said he wanted the end to be “psychedelic“, so we just put some phase on it, ha ha. 

Chris Thomas, co-producer, For Your Pleasure

It is telling that Ferry’s instruction was for the ending to be psychedelic. As the album’s journey unfolded and singer/song-writer continued to interrogate internal states of mind and their relationship to art and society, it is useful to recall that Ferry artistic goal was to “seek moments of transcendence from the mundane and the known” (Bracewell). This then would have been the musical mandate the lyric pointed to in the recording studio and the message Ferry would have given the band: transcend the moment, escape the real, blow my mind.

For a collection of musicians as expressive and articulate as Roxy Music, coupled with the skill and experience of co-producer Chris Thomas (Beatles/Pink Floyd) and AIR Studios’ 16-track recording capability (rare, most studios of the time only had 4-track, including Abbey Road), there would have been recognition of an opportunity to pay proper homage to the music that had influenced and moved them all only a few short years before: 1960’s freak-out psychedelia. With Ferry’s wish for a psychedelic ending  there was an opportunity to update the cliches of the 60s and, on a more serious level, to take the pressures of modernity and place them in a contemporary context. Think of it as The Doors ‘The End‘ edited onto Francis Ford Coppola‘s swirling napalm in Apocalypse Now verses Michelangelo Antonioni‘s use of Pink Floyd‘s ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene‘ for the exploding mansion climax of Zabriskie Point.  Yes, everything explodes real good in both these movies, but the explosion of existential and social angst is offered as a serious social and artistic reference point: the destruction of Colonel Kurtz’s compound articulates the end of War and the hope of re-birth; the destruction of the Zabriskie mansion in the desert strives for the end of Consumerism and the demand for re-birth. What actually happens to these ideals is a different matter entirely: For The Doors, ‘The End’ would become literal, as the band used the song to close their last live performance in December 1970. For Pink Floyd, the angst of ‘Eugene’ turned into the lunatic song-cycle of Dark Side of the Moon – the multi-platinum mega seller that would provide the members of the Floyd with consumer wealth beyond their dreams (so much for exploding that mansion). And for Roxy Music, ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache‘ was an existential cry never to be repeated: the musical reference was Jimi Hendrix; the theme was transcendence, and the final outcome of the song the surprising ability to come back home again.

Instrumental Coda – 1

Was it an interesting experience for you to record “For Your Pleasure” (1973) at AIR Studios?

That was a magic time, actually. The time that we met the great producer Chris Thomas. He helped us incredibly with the sound and brought all the knowledge of working with The Beatles and George Martin  (The Beatles producer) to us. We learned from him about recording with this classical, traditional English method of recording. At the same time we had an experimental side, which is part of our ingredients. Brian Eno and myself, we were experimenting and Chris used some wonderful professional recording techniques to us, and we learned that as well.

Phil Manzanera

Described by one scribe as a “furious jam from hell” (Krajewski) the instrumental coda of ‘In Every Dream Home’ is a structural microcosm of the song as a whole, broke into two parts of one minute each, both quite different from each other yet containing their own mirror image in each. Our narrator elicits his weary monologue (1/1), triggering an instrumental release (1/2); the instrumental goes bang (2/1), then fades and returns in an altered state, warped, sweeping, re-absorbed into the imagination, back home again (2/2).

The fun starts at 3.07 with the camp and multi-tracked Ferry delivering his famous punchline and Paul Thompson and Phil Manzanera kicking into the marvelous instrumental. Manzanera plays a clean multi-note refrain twice before the cycle splits at 3.20 and the notes break apart as the first flanger effects are administered by co-producer Chris Thomas and team. The modulation increases between 3.20–3.48, yet we can still hear the primary guitar line clearly as Manzanera plays a la Hendrix, striking multiple quarter/half-notes while working his way up and down the fretboard. Thompson’s well-recorded drums provide the primary power, yet pull-back when needed, giving room, not yet released from the center spot in the stereo spectrum. Left and right treatments start now: Eno injects noise into the right channel (3.37) while keyboards (presumably Ferry’s) lather up on the left. Our lost narrator howls his existential refrain at 3.25 (Oh heartache, dream home heartache) and finds himself riding on a wave of instrumentation and increasing destabilization – this is music and emotion being blasted out into the cosmos, waves of sound delivered deep into the universe until eventually discovered by flame, dust, or some unsuspecting life form. The soundscape starts to entropy at 4.00-4.08, fading one minute after the initial explosion, signal lost at 4.17.

Deep in the night plying very strange cargo
Our soul ships pass by solo trips to the stars in the sky
Gliding so far that the eye cannot follow
Where do they go? We’ll never know – ‘Beauty Queen‘

Instrumental Coda – 2

The man in black is back again as human heartache shoots across the universe, hitting the Great wall before boomeranging home, before being sucked back into the recording console.

There is silence for little less than three seconds (4.17-4.20) as the sound makes its journey back from the great unknown and arrives at our ears, reconstructed. Two significant changes occur on the return: the vocal is gone, swallowed by prominent and exaggerated studio effects. And the effects themselves have morphed from flanging modulations into sweeping phasing treatments. The drums sound like they are being pulled through the eye of a tornado, while guitars, VCS3 synthesizer, Farisa organ, even saxophone, swoosh across the sound spectrum,  producing the famous swept comb filter effect so loved by rock producers, musicians, and audiences alike. You hear it on Queen’s Killer Queen (1974), reel tape phasing on the vocal line “a laser beam” and also on the (by now) cliched prerequisite “guaranteed to blow your miiiiind“. Phasing is liberally used at the beginning of Bowie’s “Station to Station” (1976), as it is on the 70s recordings of Kraftwerk – the modulation and whooshing sounds applied to the synthesizers on Autobahn (1974) still hold up today. Indeed, the effect is so ubiquitous in rock music you can select your favorite example – there’s lots to choose from.

What is exciting about the phased return in Coda 2 is that the intensity is turned up to 11 and the sound carefully manipulated to reproduce the core psychedelic conditions of dechronicization, depersonalization, and dynamization (see Hicks, above). As noted, dechronicization messes with our perception of time, as is evident in the trick fade at 4.17-4.20.  Dechronicization is also as key component of the modulated manipulation of the recording tape: phasing takes the recorded sound signal, processes it, and in doing so creates a series of peaks and troughs across the frequency spectrum. The position of the peaks and troughs of the waveform is modulated to vary over time, and this creates the ‘swooshing’ sweeping sound we know so well. The effect is loved by psychedelic bands and audiences for this very reason – instrumentation and sound is delayed, manipulated over time, transforming acoustic signals into something grander or more kaleidoscopic than their origin. Depersonalization is represented thematically (man + dolly) but also in the effect of the fade-in/fade-out: the dramatic cry of Oh heartache hurtles across time and place, and on its rebound is absorbed and resubmitted as part of the sound universe, not apart from it. And dynamization, as [Timothy] Leary noted, makes “familiar forms dissolve into moving, dancing structures” – take a listen then to Paul Thompson‘s drums in Coda 2: warped and phased they spill across the sound spectrum like heavy waves coming right at you.

Coda 1 uses mostly flanged effects, as seen in spectrum wave at top
Coda 2 uses mostly phased effects, seen at bottom

We loved psychedelia. We weren’t a psychedelic band, but we wanted to say, “Yeah, we like this,” as well.

Andy Mackay

When Ferry asked the band to create a psychedelic ending to ‘Dream Home’ they were all in agreement on who would provide their template and inspiration: sonic artist and experimentalist Jimi Hendrix. For Roxy, the legendary guitarist was ripe for homage: Bryan Ferry had already channeled Bob Dylan and John Lennon in his songs (‘Virginia Plain’/’Beauty Queen’) yet in the Melody Maker edition of October 14, 1972 (The “Roxy Music File“) it was Hendrix who Ferry named as his favourite musician. (Favourite songwriter was, a little less surprisingly, Cole Porter). In keeping with most guitarists, Phil Manzanera was a fan before he was out of his teens: “I remember watching Jimi Hendrix do ‘Hey Joe‘ on Top of the Pops… I ran to the telly and sort of wanted to jump in it, I thought what the… that’s amazing!” (Manzanera).  Yet notably, it is Brian Eno who was the staunchest Hendrix supporter in the Roxy camp, repeatedly citing him as “the greatest guitar player of all time” (Spin), and the first “proper electronic musician” (Hartley). “He was the first guitar player to realize that the guitar was more than a piece of wood that hung around his neck, and he really understood that there was a relationship between the room acoustics and the amplifier he was using, the whole situation” (Tamn).

Roxy Music’s Hendrix adoration makes sense, for while known for his rock-God heroics and Classic Rawk hits – you’d think that Hendrix had only written ‘Hey Joe’ or  ‘Purple Haze’ – when the guitarist was given a break from a punishing touring schedule and given artistic control, he took his time to create worlds of innovation, texture and sound. Take a listen to Electric Ladyland‘s rock symphonic ‘1983 (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)‘ or the gentle layered sheets of feedback in ‘Drifting‘. Or even his greatest moment, the live masterpiece ‘Machine Gun‘ with its penetrating lyric (I pick up my axe and fight like a farmer) and the sonic replication of bombs, napalm, jungle heat, and all-out blitzkrieg. And so in order to evoke the spirit of Hendrix, the production team saturated the close of ‘Dream Home’ in studio phasing and flanging effects, the definitive example and reference for this approach coming from Hendrix’s second album, Axis: Bold As Love (thank you to reader Steve for pointing this out!). Though not the first example of production phasing – that honor belongs to the hit single The Big Hurt by Toni Fisher, 1959 – the track ‘Bold as Love‘ is credited to producer Eddie Kramer as the first example of stereo modulation, which is important, for phasing and flanging techniques allow the soundscape to modulate and sweep across the sound spectrum, channel to channel. Listen at 2.48+ for the ‘Bold as Love’ coda – in typical fashion, Roxy Music dial up and channel the first authentic use of stereo phasing and then let rip in homage on the famous ‘Dream Home’ instrumental.

You know, when you play guitar, you can play, or you can transcend, and you can go as far – there’s no boundaries –  how far you can go in your own body and how far your mind?

Neil Young, Inducting Jimi Hendrix into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, 1992.

The increased tension during the return of the instrumentation in Coda 2 is palpable: Phil Manzanera’s guitar in particular maintains its steady assault, clearly audible, stretched but including a demented series of lines that start at 4.52, with a brilliant drop at 4.59 that really gets the blood going. What is interesting about Manzanera’s solo is that the guitar actually breaks down, steadily reducing its multiple chord/note positions in favor of an increased a-tonal complexity, until all that is left is a two-three note motif that signs the song out for good (5.00-5.25). And throughout Coda 2 the drums are a masterpiece of playing – heavy and syncopated – Paul Thompson just never lets up, like he’s trying to outrun the maelstrom to which his thunderous drumming is being subjected.

And so in creating their psychedelic freak-out at the close of ‘In Every Dream Home a Heartache’ Roxy were seeking a number of outcomes. Firstly, executing on the band motto of “All styles served here”, they were keen to introduce psychedelic music to the mix and add to the stomp, ballad, proto-punk, and 50s doo-wop styles intended for the record. During the instrumental coda there was also an opportunity to pay homage to their musical heroes and also branch out and provide a shocking and menacing song the kind of pay-off that could translate into a thrilling listening experience. It was also a mark of humor – Ferry in full camp mode with his ‘blew my mind’ line – intended to undercut the creepiness of the narrator and deflect the reality of what happens when one loses the capacity for human relationships and love.

Yet more than anything, two items stand out most clearly in the song: the issue of spiritual value in the materialist age; and the importance of art as an act of transcendence, of a lifting above the concerns of the every day, especially for the artist. Ferry was brave to write a song about loving an inflatable doll and was inspired for providing a spiritual context to balance the strangeness of the subject: ‘Dream Home’ questions the role of Faith and God quite explicitly: Is there a heaven? the narrator asks. Yet he knows that every demented step takes him further from heaven, or at least his idea of heaven, which is important, for the story suggests that heaven is a concept, a ‘dream home’, a place invented by the mind, if you will. This is further implied by the mind-blowing instrumental: at the moment of his greatest indulgence, the narrator transcends his reality and is blown to bits: this could be suicide, drugs, sexual climax – or perhaps even a spiritual release or epiphany, for something wonderful does happen during the Coda – the voice is expelled (oh heartache), but returns, changed, absent, wrapped now into shape-shifting sound, as all good psychedelia demands.

Recorded: AIR Studios, London February 1973.

Credits
Jimmy Hendrix Explosion, Australian artist Martin Sharp; Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), David Hockney‘s $80M painting; flying object, Electric Ladyland – the First Museum of Fluorescent Art; 3D painting by Shaka; Zabriskie Point soundtrack album cover; Phil Manzanera, mid-70s; Doctor Tom mask, Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut; roxysongs photo collage: Phil plays one of my favourite versions of ‘Dream Home’ solo Live, Manchester, 1979; screen shot of excellent phased/flanged recording studio presentation by Pro Audio Files; Stanley Kubrick drawing for Eyes Wide Shut Mask w Ayahuasca Raura painting by Pablo Amaringo.

Titbits
Bryan Ferry wrote a song of transgression and then asked his band to provide an appropriate musical backdrop to complete it. In naming Hendrix as his favourite musician Ferry may have had the guitarist’s master work of spiritual transcendence in mind – ‘1983 (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)‘ –  after all, it fitted the jigsaw for both musical expressionism and lyrical honesty, the only difference was its act of transgression was not a trip to the infinite, rebounding stars, but to the bottom of the Earthly ocean:

So my love Catherina and me
Decide to take our last walk
Through the noise to the sea
Not to die but to be re-born
Away from a life so battered and torn
Forever

In recognition of Hendrix’s achievement, a team of artists in Amsterdam opened up Electric Ladyland – the First Museum of Fluorescent Art. The museum houses “a large room-sized Fluorescent Environment that the visitor enters, becomes a part of the piece of Art, and then experiences Participatory Art.” Well, how psychedelic is that. Jimi’s iconic song and its psychedelic underwater terrain is reflected in the art pieces and installation photographs below.

See you for ‘Bogus Man’ – November, 2018

Happy Halloween, be safe out there kids!

In Every Dream Home a Heartache (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 (4)
/         /      /        /
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; 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; the great Kraftwerk get down (Das Model); Kubrick mask maker @ Ca’ Macana – “the world’s best Venetian carnival masks.”

Titbits

Another shot from the Rothschild Surrealist party, December 1972:  Guy Baguenault de Puchesse enjoys the evening with his perfect companion. Or just a two headed Baroness Thyssen-Bornemizza.

Next: ‘In Every Dream Home, A Heartache’ – Part 2, October 2018.

Editions of You (1973)
Editions of You (Live, 1973)
Editions of You (Live, 2001)

Gentlemen take polaroids
They fall in love, they fall in love
– Gentlemen Take Polaroids, Japan (1980)

I: The Perfect View

Muscular and intense, the fourth cut on For Your Pleasure, ‘Editions of You’ releases the pent-up energy wrought by deep cuts ‘Beauty Queen’ and ‘Strictly Confidential’ while continuing the interrogation of paranoid fame, artistic authenticity, and the role and effect of glamour on the modern world. Bryan Ferry’s over-phlanged electric piano catches the ear immediately as it pounds out the same chords used by Beethoven for his Eroica Symphony – Eb being the “heroic key, extremely majestic” – and the cheeky ‘mmmmm‘ invites the listener to the first good party of 1973 (come with me walking down the street from ‘Street Life’ is the second). John Porter’s meaty bass line establishes the groove, and the band join in and deliver a high-voltage proto-punk classic. And boy, do they deliver: this is a band performance, stunning in its intensity – particularly during the solos – with Eno, Mackay, Manzanera, Ferry and Thompson all delivering the goods in style with synth, sax, guitar, piano and drums all thrash-out in blistering precision. First played live by Roxy on March 28, 1973 at Sheffield City Hall, Sheffield, England, ‘Editions of You‘ is still in circulation 45 years later with Bryan Ferry even playing the song as recently as June 11 2018. The song has been covered by bands as diverse as Men Without Hats, Mudhoney, R.E.M’s Peter Buck and others, yet the performance by Roxy as recorded at AIR Studios in February 1973 has, to these ears, never been bettered.

After the fantastic Ferry/Porter intro (0.-016), Paul Thompson kicks off the party with a machine-gun bash on the toms and we’re off for three verses of uninterrupted pummeling before the instrumental break: Well I’m here looking through an old picture frame …

Just waiting for the perfect view
I hope something special will step into my life
Another fine edition of you
A pin-up done in shades of blue

Sometimes you find you’re yearning for the quiet life
The country air and all of its joys
But badgers couldn’t compensate at twice the price
For just another night with the boys oh yeah
And boys will be boys will be boys

They say love’s a gamble hard to win easy to lose
And while sun shines you’d better make hay
So if life is your table and fate is the wheel
Then let the chips fall where they may
In modern times the modern way

One of the extraordinary things are about the ‘Editions’ lyric is that it takes an exact U-turn from the lyrical density we have experienced from Ferry up to this point – gone are the multiple literary allusions, narrative voices, carefully considered metaphors of Roxy Music/’Virginia Plain‘ et al – and in its place are slick surfaces, throwaway conceits, and above all, the first song perhaps (intentionally at least) entirely composed of clichés.

The dictionary defines a cliché as a phrase or opinion that is “overused and betrays a lack of original thought” – hardly a candidate for a classic Roxy Music track. Clichés are so often used in every day conversation and media that they go unnoticed –  how often have you heard phrase “old as the hills” or “diamond in the rough” or “calm before the storm” or “gangs of roving youths” – this is journalism as marketing and/or novelists meeting deadlines. Extraordinary then that just about every line of ‘Editions’ contains a clichéd zinger:

• yearning for the quiet life
• country air and all of its joys
• boys will be boys
• while sun shines you better make hay
• let the chips fall where they may

And so on. In some quarters (see: Martin Amis, The War Against Cliche) the use of well-worn phrases by writers using language and metaphors that are as old as the hills (cough) is a sign of laziness and lack of imagination – but in the case of ‘Editions‘ the use of cliché presents a perfect blend of form and function: the song is a celebration of the new, using the existing “ready-made” materials of the modern age. Ferry is audacious in this one, funny and postmodern to boot. Let us count the ways..

II: Modern Times the Modern Way 

Thematically, ‘Editions of You’ is an attempt to answer the question first posited in ‘Virginia Plain‘: So me and you, just we two/Got to reach for something new. What exactly is the “new” and what kind of new band or movement did Roxy represent? Seven months on from the summer 1972 hit, the time had come for Ferry to engage and identify what this “new” thing actually was. A tricky proposition given that Roxy were not a political or socially conscious band in the same way that, say, solo Beatles or The Who, or even a Bowie struggling with his own dystopian vision on Diamond Dogs. As always, Ferry ruminated on his answer, creating a diverse and multifarious response across the span of For Your Pleasure, answering the question more for himself than for any audience demands. He first sent up the very idea of sloganeering and pat answers with ‘Do the Strand‘ (and later during the punk years, with ‘Manifesto‘). ‘Strand‘ was an homage to political, personal and aesthetic energy via the dance floor, a kind of ‘Its the End of the World of the World As We Know It‘ fourteen years ahead of its time. Do the Strand, we are told, when you feel love/It’s the new way. Love is the way, say Roxy, as did the Beatles before them, but here the message was a conflation of seriousness (the meaning of life) juxtaposed with the trivial (a dance craze), laid down with pizzazz, fun, wit, frivolity and some sweat.

‘Beauty Queen‘ provided its answer by shifting the content away from conventional memory to the memory of youthful infatuation with Hollywood pin-ups and magazine layouts – so deep is the process of recollection for the narrator (see also: Re-Make/Re-Model) that the pin-up images influence and define his future plans and dreams (All of my hope and my inspiration/I drew from you). And so it is with ‘Editions of You‘: our man sits waiting for the perfect view, not a flesh-and-blood lover, but a pin-up done in shades of blue, and relates to her solely in the language of young moderns – as a magazine edition, a replaceable, disposable, glossy, sexy facsimile of the real thing (another fine edition of you. *Note the punning “addition” / “edition“). Replace Ferry’s print media with Instagram or Tinder, and you have in 1973 the beginnings of postmodern culture: popular, transient, and infinitely expendable.

It just seemed like an amazing piece of pop art had come to life and sort of was performing on your television.

Michael Bracewell, The Story of Roxy Music

Pop art is: Popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business.

Richard Hamilton, Collected Words

If cliché is the language of the commonplace, the familiar and the over-used, why not use cliché to generate a song that celebrates modernity and its devil-may-care “who knows what tomorrow might bring” sensibility. Once again, Ferry turned to the influential and ground-breaking work of his mentor and teacher, pop-art painter and collage artist Richard Hamilton for inspiration. By creating paintings or sculptures of mass culture objects and media stars, Hamilton’s Pop art movement aimed to blur the boundaries between “high” art and “low” culture. As Philip Yenawine wrote in his 1991 classic How to Look at Modern Art, Pop art’s “appropriations examine the look, content, and effect of ‘pop culture,’ including package design, celebrity watching, and advertising.”  It is hard to think about Roxy Music without these central pop art qualities of design, glamour and advertising, so easily do the band abide by the key concepts of pop art:  “Popular” (FYP album Top 5 BBC charts); “transient“ (27 weeks in top 50); “expendable“ (“teenage rebel of the week”); “low-cost” (less than a month’s recording); “mass-produced” (a million copies needed sold to get in the the Top 10 in 1973); “young” (yes); “witty” (very); “sexy” (immensely); “gimmicky“ (undoubtedly); “glamorous” (in spades); and “Big Business” (with Avalon at least, see platinum).

Pop art was a sensation for the very reason Roxy Music was a sensation: the artists worked in the expectation of change and wanted to communicate to as wide and as young an audience as possible. Like most art movements, Pop art in both Britain and America was a good 15 years ahead of the pop music business, so there was an opportunity that Ferry recognized and acted on as he searched for an audience. As the (possibly) female narrator states in ‘Strictly Confidential‘ “communication is the gift you must not lose.”  For Hamilton, the quest for communication was a search for what is epic in everyday objects and attitudes. For Ferry this meant composing a song from the everyday language of cliché (learn from your mistakes/too much cheesecake too soon, etc). For Hamilton‘s mentor Marcel Duchamp, this meant seeing a toilet bowl as a piece of art. And so it is with Ferry, applying considerable energies to receive, replicate and deliver the pop art manifesto within the context of a rock group. In writing songs, Ferry was keen to use the materials and commonplace objects of everyday life, utilizing modern mass media to elevate popular culture to the level of fine art: magazines, advertising, television, pop music and cinema. In this manner, Ferry saw infinite possibilities in pop music, as American critic recently noted in his 40th Anniversary review of first album Roxy Music: “and while the Beatles and David Bowie got there before him in terms of layering rock with irony, ambiguity, theatricality and alter-egos, [Ferry] brought a formidable intellect and subversive sensibility that stamped Roxy Music as innovators” (Tribune).

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-23, oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, dust, two glass panels, 277.5 × 177.8 × 8.6 cm © Succession Marcel Duchamp (Philadelphia Museum of Art).

This kind of high-concept, sleazy equivalent of found objects helped change pop audience’s relationship to art and what could be seen as art, and it also changed the audience’s relationship to how it situated itself in a constantly evolving world. In this view, our everyday experience is interrogated or “defamiliarized” and made new, seen in a different way because we are conscious of the act of framing. Ferry highlights this sensibility in the very first line of the song:

Well I’m here looking through an old picture frame
Just waiting for the perfect view

Like a pop art object by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, or Richard Hamilton, the first subject in ‘Editions’ is vision, what we are looking at and how we are looking at it. The narrator looks through an “old” picture frame (old art) that actually no longer provides him with useful information or guidance – the old frame holds no picture or content – therefore he must create the content (waiting for the perfect view). However, if  you look at an empty picture frame you inevitably look through it towards reality or the real – Ferry literally suggesting the perfect view can only exist if constructed or framed, placed in an aesthetic context. This brings to the fore the pop art idea that there is no unmediated access to anything, be it the natural world, the self, or a constructed or built environment. Meaning comes from aesthetic engagement: a key Roxy Music concept.

The found-object, “mass-produced” aspect of ‘Editions’ comes rather obviously in its magazine influenced title and key line: I hope something special will step into my life/Another fine edition of you. The idea is intriguing for it has both aesthetic and real-life implications: in every day reality the “something special” that the narrator hopes for is another relationship, shockingly similar to his previous relationship (another fine edition), which is a bit crazy, for we all know the oft-repeated quote that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again. Moreover, this guy is not actually desiring a real flesh and blood person but a fabricated, fantasy woman, whether she be a clone of a magazine shoot or an actual pin-up done in shades of blue. As in ‘Beauty Queen‘ the import and emphasis is on mass media content and assimilation, with the caveat that, as in the Pop art world, the content of magazines, newspapers, and television is so real in our lives – has real impact – it is no less important for having come from Hollywood or any other constructed, mediated entertainment. Like Andy Warhol‘s soup cans, the repetition and uniformity of every day experience – including the search for new relationships – is replicated endlessly across our individual time-span, targeting each time a fresh individual canvas, perhaps tainted with the same forlorn, unsatisfying or merely safe and comforting outcome. “I used to drink it,” Warhol famously said of the soup, “I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.”

Campbell’s Soup Cans Andy Warhol, (American, 1928–1987) 1962. Synthetic polymer paint on thirty-two canvases, Each canvas 20 x 16″ (50.8 x 40.6 cm). Overall installation with 3″ between each panel is 97″ high x 163″ wide.

When I started writing music I found it was like pop art. I was using images… like in the lyrics, throwaway cliches and amusing phrases that you found in magazines or used in everyday speech… stylistic juxtapositions…But you have to do it properly, you can’t just throw them together at random.

Bryan Ferry

III. Boys Will Be Boys

Sometimes you find you’re yearning for the quiet life
The country air and all of its joys
But badgers couldn’t compensate at twice the price
For just another night with the boys oh yeah
And boys will be boys will be boys

They say love’s a gamble hard to win easy to lose
And while sun shines you’d better make hay
So if life is your table and fate is the wheel
Then let the chips fall where they may
In modern times the modern way

When Richard Hamilton contributed to the ground-breaking exhibition This is Tomorrow in August 1956, his section was designed so that entering it would feel like stepping into a fun house. And so too with ‘Editions of You‘ – built on the incessant drive of a classic I-IV-V chord sequence, Pop art’s found-object/”ready-mades” idea applies here as the track follows the template and reproduces the formula of E/A/B rock n’ roll classics such as Twist and Shout, La Bamba, Louie, Louie and Wild Thing. From Roxy Music through to For Your Pleasure, Roxy continued to draw on various rock templates  – blues, rockabilly, doo-wop – to create what Brian Eno had referred to as “about 12 different futures.” (He was only slightly exaggerating). In a sense, there was no way around it, for the most progressive glam stars – Bowie and Roxy – were both creator and consumer of their own products. Bowie’s smash Jean Genie was Bowie-doing Howling Wolf, and ‘Editions of You’ was Roxy doing Velvet Underground doing Eddie Cochrane. Indeed, when ‘Editions of You’ was finally issued as a UK single in 1978 (B-side to ‘Do the Strand’), AllMusic‘s Dave Thompson noted the musical potency of the release: “Even at the height of punk’s metamorphosis into the seething trickery of the looming, post-Low electro scene, ‘Editions of You’ tore every other contender to shreds.”
The solo breaks in ‘Editions’ comprise a statement of compressed modernity defined by the found objects of pop music and as heard in the rock n roll classic chord sequence E/A/B. Roxy had played with the forms of pop before, most notably in Re-Make/Re-Model, referencing The Beatles (Day Tripper); Eddie Cochrane (C’mon Everybody); and Wagner (Ride of the Valkyrie). Roxy quote and pay homage to the past, the band thrilled to play an ever-increasing role in the greatest show on earth. Even Eno, a man for whom musical experimentation was the norm, understood the concession to popularity and the every day, commenting,  “Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You’re glad someone’s done it but you don’t necessarily want to listen to it.” So the twelve possible futures had limitations and, recalling Pop art’s central requirements that art should be popular, mass-produced, sexy, and big business, the Roxy roadmap was defined by the driving rhythms of ‘Virginia Plain‘ and ‘Do the Strand‘, building on the competing requirements of melody and noise towards the insanity music of ‘Editions‘ and its gone-to-ground instrumental breaks (1.11-2.23).

At 1.11 into the track, Ferry’s brings in the band with an infectious introduction – in modern times the mod/ern way-a-hay-a-hay-a-hay-eh-hay-eh-hayhayhay! – and Andy Mackay is first up at bat with a break that, when performed live, had him doing a Chuck Berry duck walk across the stage (“It got so I slightly dreaded that part of the show”). In sharp contrast to the plaintive oboe line in previous track ‘Strictly Confidential’, Andy attacks ‘Editions’ with a saxophone solo that starts on a raw blues-influenced timbre, and ends with a tremolo strike at the top of his range that segues into the musical insanity of Eno‘s VCS3 solo. Throughout the instrumental passages this “passing the baton” between soloists highlights their musical empathy, both as musicians and as friends, giving each other the room needed to shine without minimizing their own time in the spotlight.

Next up at 1.30 is Brian Eno’s crazed synth jumping into the song like it’s on a bender, applying no brakes to stop the approaching carnage. The VCS3 is on an elevator ride that cannot decide which floor to land on, bouncing up and down along the chordal E/A/B axis, dropping and climbing, pushing the tune past its origins and up, up out into the future. Texture is the thing with Eno: the VCS3 solo on ‘Virginia Plain‘ maintains simple playing but is imaginatively applied to bend the sound, fill the track with synthetic presence.  Eno is a brilliant artist, as much a master of ambient as heavy metal – is there anyone else out there like him? – and his ‘Editions’ passage points to his future solo musical assaults on the ears (‘Baby’s on Fire’; ‘Wire Shock‘; ‘Third Uncle’). Up and down we go for several gravity-defying seconds, the mad synth hitting the visceral cortex like all the best rock music can – nestling in your bones, leaving you hungry for more.

‘Editions’ is about what all the best rock songs are about: release. There is an evangelical dedication here to getting out of your head, this “crazy music drives you insane” as the party stays rooted in the city, eschewing the country life and its badgers in favour of another night with the boys. The band is drunk on the music and there’s a sense of demented possession, particularly with Eno pushing the buttons on the tone-deaf elevator. There are two halves to the Eno solo, the first at 1.30-1.47, is the unaccompanied sonic attack, until something really special happens at 1.48, where Eno takes his foot off the gas a little to give some space. For the second half, Phil Manzanera‘s guitar is brought into the mix, foreshadowing one of his best solos with the band. One more climb up before Eno hits the top floor and jumps off, hands the keys to Manzanera, who catches Eno’s final notes on a nest-bed of perfectly sustained feedback at 2.03-2.07.  A sublime Roxy Music moment.

Phil Manzanera has made original guitar solos part of his considerable appeal with Roxy and as a solo artist. It is little wonder that he and Eno have enjoyed successful collaborations on some of the best records of the 70s – Diamond Head, Another Green World – for they share the same interest in sonic manipulation and texture – in Manzanera‘s hands the guitar can be an instrument of startling precision, killer lines and tone poems, yet fierce when needed – look no further than his solo collaboration with Eno on the track ‘Miss Shapiro‘ (1975) – at 3.36 a blistering over-heated note shakes the foundations and pulls Eno’s vocal back in. And you hear the same feedback note on ‘Editions’ before Manzanera takes complete hold and riffs way wonderfully through the solo (2.03-2.23). John O’Brien (VivaRoxyMusic) calls this “one of Phil Manzanera’s finest guitar breaks,” and who are we to argue.

 IV: Stay Cool is Still the Main Rule

And as I was drifting past the Lorelei
I heard those slinky sirens wail, ooo!
So look out sailor when you hear them croon
You’ll never be the same again, oh no
Their crazy music drives you insane, this way

So love me, leave me, do what you will
Who knows what tomorrow might bring
Learn from your mistakes is my only advice
And stay cool is still the main rule
Don’t play yourself for a fool
Too much cheesecake too soon
Old money’s better than new
No mention in the latest Tribune
And don’t let this happen to you

Coming off the solos at 2.23, Paul Thompson re-introduces Ferry by bashing the skins – typical Paul, condensed, precise, powerful – and Ferry comes back in, barely catching his breath for the funniest line of the song – And as I was drifting past the Lorelei/I heard those slinky sirens wail, ooo! We are in Siren territory here folks, the Lorelei is a 132 m (433 ft) high, steep slate rock on the bank of the river Rhine in Germany.  A statue has been erected that describes a mermaid-type siren who, sitting on the cliff above the Rhine and combing her golden hair, unwittingly distracts shipmen with her beauty and song, causing them to crash on the rocks (Wiki). The Sirens of Ulysses is a favourite theme of Ferry’s, as we noted when discussing Roxy Music‘s Ladytron: “‘Ladytron’ is the first entry in the canon of Ferry’s Greek Odysseus siren theme of dangerous yet beautiful women who lure sea-fearing sailors (read: lost men) to shipwreck and ruin with their haunting music.” High and low art combined – Ulysses meets rock n’ roll. Mission accomplished!

Throughout ‘Editions’ the Implied Author Bryan Ferry has been discussing his own experiences, his own needs and desires (Well I’m here looking through an old picture frame/Just waiting for the perfect view) but by the time the solos have delivered their feverish lunacy, the narrative shifts to one of good-natured advice, warning his sailor brothers of the dangers of the countryside and glamorous women waiting to ground you on the rocks. The hedonism of lust and music is made explicit here, and the Roxy manifesto becomes more solidified (“I always thought of Roxy as sex music ” BF) – hilariously, moving past those slinky sirens, ooo! –  as the musical croon is enough to drive you insane – this way.

Ferry joins the other band members, fully infected and intoxicated himself now and lets rip on a slightly wobbly, slightly sinister keyboard solo that replicates the verse melody – not as psychotic as Eno, but melodic, joyful, happy, in tune with the rest of the song – as he turns to address the girl that has now finally stepped into that old picture frame:

So love me, leave me, do what you will
Who knows what tomorrow might bring

Let fate wash over you, let the chips fall where they may. This is modernity so take pleasure in the dance, even though it may be civilization’s last chance. Replication and duplication may be the status quo, but do not repeat the same mistakes each time. Be smart about it. Stay cool is still the main rule. And somewhere at this point we realize a shift has taken place, the object in the picture frame has momentarily changed, and a familiar singer’s face fills our field-of-view:

Don’t play yourself for a fool (there’s only one chance – better get this right)

Too much cheesecake too soon (fame is a powerful drug but too much too soon will derail you. Don’t end up like Marilyn, James Dean).

Old money’s better than new (a notable shift from the first line “old picture frame” – a nod and concession to the old world, or a nod to future state desires – a wish to become part of the establishment, or a seeking of merging the new with the old to make something more solid and long-lasting).

No mention in the latest Tribune (a social-climbers’ worst nightmare)

And don’t let this happen to you (the punchline: you only exist if you are in the latest edition…)

The artist in twentieth-century urban life is inevitably a consumer of mass culture and potentially a contributor to it.

Richard Hamilton

That was the band that broke so many barriers – they were poncy, pontificating, absurd, over-melodramatic, and absolutely adoringly excellent live. They way they would draw us in, all our different elements socially, it was the most intriguing period. And I don’t see too much of that in the modern field of music – you don’t have that sense of fun, drama, tease, and – hell – bloody good song-writing!

John Lydon

Recorded: AIR Studios, London February 1973

Credits: Richard Hamilton, “Self-portrait,” produced by Richard Hamilton and used as cover image for Living Arts, 1963; AIR studios advertising brochure; FYP collage: Japanese FYP/famous female editions/Monica Bellucci FYP cover tribute; The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-23, Marcel Duchamp; Campbell’s Soup Cans Andy Warhol, (American, 1928–1987); Do the Stand/Editions UK 12″ vinyl single, 1978; Andy live; EMS advertisment; Phil live; Lorelei montage: mermaid observing sinking sailors at Sankt Goarshausen in Germany/BF tries to avoid the inevitable outcome.

Dedicated to Lindsay Kemp, 1938-2018

An innovator, essential to the artistic development of art-rock pioneers David Bowie and Kate Bush and so many more.  From Kate’s website:

A Message for Lindsay:

The world has lost a truly original and great artist of the stage. To call him a mime artist is like calling Mozart a pianist. He was very brave, very funny and above all, astonishingly inspirational. There was no-one quite like Lindsay. I was incredibly lucky to study with him, work with him and spend time with him. I loved him very much and will miss him dearly. Thank you, dear Lindsay.   Kate Bush

Next: ‘In Every Dream Home, A Heartache’ – September 2018.

Happy final days of summer everyone!