For Your Pleasure

It’s good to have your private obsessions
Bryan Ferry

For Your Pleasure ends on a high note, though you would be forgiven for seeing it as such. The title track – the last track – begins like a funeral march, Paul Thompson‘s sombre drum roll signals the beginning of the procession towards the cemetery. 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. Ferry 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; more affecting than Bob Dylan at his most insightful; more theatrical than David Bowie at his most engaging. “For mood, style, and substance” notes one music scribe, “this is a Roxy pinnacle” (jazzshelf). Indeed, ‘For Your Pleasure‘ 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 – struck from the page by its author. The play has been performed, the denouement is here. And so the characters of For Your Pleasure gather on their death march, 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. Life beckons – there’s a solo album to be recorded, after all. And the next Roxy Music album ‘Stranded’ is scheduled for recording. The time for abhorring extremes is over.

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 revelling 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.

Emphasizing both 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 marvellous 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:

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:

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

‘Night shining’ is a nod to ‘Beauty Queen’: those pre-fame kindred soul ships passing each other on their way “to the stars in the sky.”

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

See 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. The singular “I” is unique on For Your Pleasure but before we think there are no more characters, Ferry sees himself in the future – “old man” – from the perspective of the hard-won clarity of the present moment:

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 early version of himself, the gravel path leads him now in a different direction, towards tomorrow and that concert hall at the Apollo.

“Ta-ra” evokes the common 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; 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!

Til next time – ta-ra!

December 26, 2018
by roxymusicsongs Leave a comment

Grey Lagoons

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

November 23, 2018
by roxymusicsongs 6 Comments

The Bogus Man

The Bogus Man (Ferry) Roxy Music, 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 (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.

Brian Eno,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 here is surprisingly subtle, bright even. At 0:6 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 0.20 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 0.26 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. 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?”).

Lyrics in French	Translation
Ce que j’ai fait, ce soir-là Ce qu’elle a dit, ce soir-là Réalisant mon espoir Je me lance vers la gloire… OK	What I did, that evening What she said, that evening Fulfilling my hope Headlong I go towards glory… OK

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’ 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 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‘

October 30, 2018
by roxymusicsongs 1 Comment

In Every Dream Home a Heartache – Part 2

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

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

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

A: 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.

Instrumental Coda – 2

…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.

September 21, 2018
by roxymusicsongs 2 Comments

In Every Dream Home a Heartache – Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I. Is There a Heaven

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

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

Bryan Ferry, 1974

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Williams, The Story of Roxy Music

II. Penthouse Perfection

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

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

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

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

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

III. Perfect Companion

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

Marie-Hélène Rothschild, 1992

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

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

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

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

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

IV: Til Death Sighs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Maybe America didn’t need art and inner miracles. It had so many outer ones. The USA was a big operation, very big. The more It, the less We.”

Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift

Recorded: AIR Studios, London February 1973.

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

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

August 25, 2018
by roxymusicsongs Leave a comment

Editions of You

Editions of You (Ferry) Roxy Music
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

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

July 27, 2018
by roxymusicsongs Leave a comment

Strictly Confidential – Part 2

Strictly Confidential (Ferry), Roxy Music 1973
Strictly Confidential – Part 1

I’m not sure what Bryan thought his roots were, but they probably had more to do with Marilyn Monroe than with any musical influences
Tim Clark, former marketing director of Roxy Music’s label

Gimme your body
Gimme your mind
Art for arts sake
Money for Gods sake
10cc, (Gouldman/Stewart)

I. American Gothic – Goddess of Love

For Bryan Ferry, Marilyn Monroe was America’s most important visual icon – or at least until Kate Moss came on the scene, apparently – and in 2002 he co-wrote with Eurythmics Dave Stewart a song specifically about his feelings for Monroe – ‘Goddess of Love’ For anyone following the plot, it goes without saying that Marilyn Monroe was a key motif in the delivery of Roxy’s cinema music. (See: Virginia Plain Part 1-5; Beauty Queen Part 2). The lyric for ‘Goddess of Love‘ contains traces of old obsessions – “nobody cares like I do” is a throw-back to the hand-on-brow Romantic sensitivities of ‘Sea Breezes‘ – yet what stands out is the love impact Monroe had on Ferry’s zeitgeist:

Goddess of love
Never a day goes by
Goddess of love
When I don’t cry

A fun song with a throw-away funky lightness, the solo track confirms what we already knew from ‘Beauty Queen‘: Ferry’s first true love is a matinee movie star pulled from the pages of a magazine cover, not necessarily a flesh-and-blood girlfriend or cupid’s memory. Early single ‘Virginia Plain‘ confirmed the Ferry world view: that art, glamour and the processes that make them are more interesting than narrative earnestness. The tools of commerce and advertising – magazine covers, cigarette packages, fashion design – are utilized by Roxy Music to gain maximum effect, connecting directly into the circuitry of the consumer and their desires. These experiences produces a deep emotional connection as the listener falls in love with the moment, song, performance, artist. It makes sense then that in ‘Goddess of Love’ all that Ferry has left is to leaf through Marilyn Monroe’s magazine articles and pictures (will you spend a little time with me?) and feel the emotional impact of time gone by.

Style critic Peter York once memorably said that Bryan Ferry had led such an avant garde ‘art-directed existence’ that he should be “hanging in the Tate [Gallery]”. It comes as no surprise then that with his training and sensibility, Ferry interrogates to a high-level the patterns and strategies of narrative story-telling and art presentation. This sensibility accounts for the duality that exists in his work: stories of decadent romance that peel open the mechanisms of infatuation, effect and glamour while holding fast on the idea that the song itself is the “ideal of beauty” not the artificially pampered female model or lounge-singer. For Ferry, the the human experience “is all about contrast” (Telegraph) and this produces a wonderful depth to his work – the pinks and blues of Roxy Music juxtaposed with the somnolent, tormented darkness of For Your Pleasure. When Roxy cut a convincing path up the charts in late 1972 the giddy excitement was palpable (opens up exclusive doors/oh wow!), yet a sense of dread clung to many of the lyrics – ‘Virginia Plain‘ was a zippy roller-coaster ride populated with dead teenage idols; ‘Pyjamarama‘ posited that “sacrifice” was the key to paradise; ‘Beauty Queen’ lamented the end-goal of fame: Solo trips to the stars (Where do they go/We’ll never know). Utilizing his eye for narrative, Ferry took these contrasts and, while enjoying his new fame and perks, saw clearly its contrasted darker qualities, and no one epitomized these qualities and their inherent sadness like Ferry’s beloved 50s Hollywood star Marilyn Monroe.

Marilyn Monroe was all about sex – or at least, that is how she was packaged and sold, a process that she, her audience, and the Hollywood system cheerfully participated in. Acutely aware of her appeal, and insightful to boot – “People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person. They didn’t see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts” – Monroe used her looks to crawl out of a tough life: she had a mentally damaged mother and grandmother, lived in foster homes, was a victim of sexual abuse, and was married at 16. Yet in spite of the difficulties she was strong and intelligent, supported in part by reading, writing and literature. The full import of reading and writing on her life was not discovered until 2010 with the discovery and publication of her poems, intimate notes and letters, entitled Fragments (book and re-titled documentary). The poems are good, some very good, and the quotes and personal notes are compelling. Monroe knew the game she was playing (“An actress is not a machine, but they treat you like a machine. A money machine”), and was equally articulate in describing the disorientating affect of fame and its un-reality:

There was my name up in lights.
I said, “God, somebody’s made a mistake.”
But there it was, in lights.
And I stood there and said,
“Remember, you’re not a star.”
Yet there it was, up in lights.

For the sensitive Monroe, fame became a trap of misappropriated identity and crushed creativity. She resented being controlled by the movie studios, where, as cultural critic Elizabeth Winder noted in her business article on Monroe, you can “forget about talent, creativity, or even free will—the studio controlled your every move, from the roles you accepted to the directors you worked with to how often you went to the bathroom and occasionally even whom you married.” Monroe fought against the pay discrepancies that went beyond simple male discrimination. Even co-star Jane Russell made more: for 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Monroe made $18,000; Russell banked $100,000.

As an indicator of Monroe’s internal strength and resolve, it is worth quoting in full 20th Century Fox’s treatment of the star as she tried to branch out into more challenging and meatier roles:

“Monroe deserved better from Fox, and she knew it. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was their highest grossing film to date, earning more than $5 million worldwide ($50 million in today’s dollars). Surely they’d give their power earner a raise, some respect, and a little independence. She longed to challenge herself, to take on meatier roles, like the lead in playwright Henrik Ibsen‘s Hedda Gabler or Grushenka from Dostoevsky‘s The Brothers Karamazov. She’d just finished reading Emile Zola‘s Nana—the perfect novel, she thought, for a film adaptation…[but film mogul Darryl F. Zanuck] already had her lined up for River of No Return, a formulaic Western with a sloppy plot. Bound by her contract, Monroe submitted with clenched teeth: “I think I deserve a better deal than a grade-Z cowboy movie in which the acting finished second to the scenery,” she said.

The next time Fox presented her with an idiotic script, Monroe flung it back with “TRASH” scrawled on the title page in heavy black marker. Zanuck’s secretary sent her an ominous telegram ordering her to report for work … [but] the star was already on a plane to New York, dressed in dark glasses and a black bobbed wig, traveling under the name of Zelda Zonk” – Article, Marie Claire, 2017

Monroe eventually won the dispute with Fox, and was re-signed with a higher salary (the bump to 100K per picture she had originally demanded). She formed her own Production Company and joined the famed Actors Studio for Method Acting (Brando, James Dean, et al.). But the damage was done. The lines became frayed and the talent was broken down by the repetitiveness of the questions, the male newspaper hacks engaging in sexual innuendo bordering on bullying, and it never did work out for her, in the end.

If fame goes by, so long, I’ve had you, fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle. So at least it’s something I experienced, but that’s not where I live.

Marilyn Monroe, Fragments, 3rd August 1962, shortly before her death.

Fame is fickle and not to be trusted is a riff on a poem by Emily Dickinson, titled ‘Fame is a Fickle Food‘.

Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate
Whose table once a
Guest but not
The second time is set.

Whose crumbs the crows inspect
And with ironic caw
Flap past it to the
Farmer’s Corn —
Men eat of it and die.

The arts-mad Ferry would know the Dickinson poem, and would have clocked already that fame was a fickle food that even the crows would pass over (“men eat of it and die“). Moreover, Ferry would have felt keenly – like everyone must have done in 1962 – that Marilyn Monroe’s story was tragic, tragic in the real sense of the word – a character flaw unhelped by an unyielding and fickle society – and that something beautiful and real had been trampled on, ultimately defeated by the American Dream.

Here’s Monroe take on the subject:

They taught my body
to squeeze grapes.
Warm wine pours out.
And once or twice,
a slick skin.

The depiction of loss of self – the “slick skin” – is devastating and insightful, extremely poetic (a Roxy song title contender), and ultimately sad. For Bryan Ferry and his famous pop-art mentor/teacher Richard Hamilton, Marilyn Monroe’s suicide had a lasting and keenly felt emotional impact both on their art and on their personal lives.

II. American Gothic – My Marilyn

I’m not obsessed by suicide by any means, but the idea does interest me.
Bryan Ferry, interview, 2015

In our reading of ‘Strictly Confidential’ Part 1 we suggested that the song was a dramatization of the mental condition schizoaffective disorder, which involves ongoing hallucinations and other distortions of reality. Voices heard within the mind telling the person they are going to rot, die, kill: a chilling and debilitating experience experienced by many people, some famous enough – such as Brian Wilson and Syd Barrett – to impact the public’s perception of the condition for a generation. In ‘SC’ Ferry wrote a powerful song that utilized conventions of Gothic literature, dramatizing the frightening grip voices or “fragments” of unreality can have on common experience. Thankfully, the narrative was hopeful – the “magical moment” does eventually come with the light of morning (the spell it is breaking) but the song is realistic enough to know that mental illness does not simply vanish, it is like many ailments of the body and mind, and has to be managed, treated, endured. (Is there no light here/Is there is no key?).

So rich is the For Your Pleasure song cycle that an alternate reading is readily available however, as the magazine cover girl Ferry is love with in ‘Beauty Queen‘ segues into the suicidal voice in ‘Strictly Confidential‘. Unfortunately, in this reading the suicide is not averted but executed according to plan – the “magical moment” of death becoming the final answer to is there no light here/is there no key? Many critics have commented on the “otherness” of For Your Pleasure, the “shimmering alien beauty” of the record (Burchill) combined with Ferry’s “odd vocal styling” (Rolling Stone), the “swooning, crooning, yelped, panted, whispered and robotically intoned narratives of covert confession” (Bracewell). The voice is the thing in ‘Strictly Confidential’ – there is never a time when we hear the line “Before I die I’ll write this letter” that we do not think that the narrator is a woman – a man singing the song in the voice of a woman, to be exact (and not the sound of a “dying insect” as Kevin Orton over at Soundblab rather humorously hears it). Nothing we can offer in court as evidence, of course, but that “odd vocal styling” and “swooning, crooning, yelped, panted, whispered” intonation is otherness personified – ghostly, a shimmering alien beauty indeed.

The mapping of the cult of celebrity’s darker side as it segues into the suicide letter in ‘Strictly Confidential’ was first noted in ‘Beauty Queen Part 3‘ and is worth repeating here: “The haunting image of soul ships passing by, not touching, no communication possible, shows our narrator haunted and alone – in front of a flickering television set, perhaps – for he is himself on those magazine covers now – locked in a solo trip into the unknown. A faint icy-echo in the vocal is introduced at the top of the line gliding so far (4.10) to emphasize the point, sounding like cold death itself and beyond the experience of us mere mortals (the eye cannot follow). The final question is stunningly posited as he looks towards his own future – Where do they go? We’ll never know” – (BQ Part 3).

The answer to “where do they go?” was all too obvious – the public and Bryan Ferry were aware by the early 70s of the crippled fates of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield – ‘Virginia Plain’ told us as much – and as a connoisseur of Hollywood folklore Ferry would know the story of Hollywood actress Peg Entwistle, the woman who gained notoriety after she jumped to her death from atop the “H” on the Hollywoodland sign at the age of 24. Yet it is the the great Beauty Queen herself – Marilyn Monroe – who is the perfect subject for any writer wishing to express or reach for an emotional coherence that is beyond their reach. Ferry was struggling with voices at his heels in the track ‘Strictly Confidential’, and his song-writing worked hard to present the fears brought on by fickle fame, aging, ambition, of expressing doubt and projecting an internalized agony akin to madness. Perhaps this is why Ferry loved and kept returning to Marilyn Monroe in his work – physical attractiveness and iconic status was a factor to be sure – just ask Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer – but also because Monroe was a reader, writer, fighter, leader, a singular force working within and against the fame-making machine. The Goddess of Love stood for and represented a warning for those that would follow her, those “clutching at straws” in anticipation of fame’s fickle food.

Studying under pop art guru Richard Hamilton, a young Bryan Ferry would have been captivated by Hamilton’s My Marilyn oil on canvas painting, and also acutely aware and admiring of Andy Warhol‘s famous images of Marilyn Monroe. In the months following Monroe’s death, Warhol used a publicity photograph of the actress from the 1953 film Niagara to create more than twenty silkscreen paintings of her, such as the Marilyn Diptych, 1962 (T03093). According to the Tate Gallery, Warhol found in Monroe “a fusion of two of his consistent themes: death and the cult of celebrity.” The interrogation of the cult of celebrity begins on FYP with ‘Beauty Queen‘, segueing into ‘Strictly Confidential‘ before expanding out towards Warholian replications into the hard rocker ‘Editions of You’. Under the influence of Richard Hamilton – who had sent Ferry friend and co-student Mark Lancaster to New York to study with Warhol – Ferry absorbed the principles of of Warhol’s and Hamilton’s work – with emphasis on the formal strategies of Hamilton’s My Marilyn. For Hamilton, the guru of artistic distance, emotional objectivity and found objects, My Marilyn was a rare personal piece – the inclusion of “My” in the title points to a need to separate his own version of Monroe from Warhol’s, but also, tragically, it also has a marked meaning: Hamilton’s young wife had been killed in an auto accident in 1962, the same year as Marilyn’s death.

The screenprint is composed of a series of the final photographs of Marilyn Monroe taken by George Barris over a three-day period weeks before her death. What is striking is that Marilyn marked up the negatives and sent them to Barris herself, composing the lay-out and final selections. Hamilton wrote of the process in his Collected Words: “M.M. [Marilyn Monroe] demanded that the results of the photographic sessions be submitted to her for vetting before publication. She made indications, brutally and beautifully in conflict with the image, or on proofs and transparencies to give approval or reject, or suggestions for retouching that might make it acceptable.” (p.65.).

For Hamilton, the Barris photographs – later called The Last Photoshoot – were akin to a suicide note written to a mass audience by the actress, her editing an example of her mental state, Hamilton explaining her psychology in the following way: “there is a fortuitous narcissism to be seen for the negating cross is also the childish symbol for a kiss; but the violent obliteration of her own image has a self-destructive implication that made her death all the more poignant.” Hamilton shows us that the symbols used by Marilyn (crosses and tick) were not just as an approval or a rejection but a demand for communication, approval, artistic acceptance, an act of self-destruction hitting back at everything she had already made and achieved but was trying to repair.

Sequencing is important in For Your Pleasure: the imagery in previous track ‘Beauty Queen’ is Ferry’s re-telling of the Cult of Celebrity, drawing heavily from the scenes of Marilyn’s final sunset beach photographs as orchestrated by his art guru Richard Hamilton in one of the teacher’s most personal works: the image references the same beach setting (life’s patterns drawn in sand); the all-important photographic image (treasure so rare); the glamour girl (the gold number/summer lover of fun); the wind unable to erase the memory of your face. In the end, like his solo tribute to Monroe some 30 years later, Ferry – the ultimate Hollywood devotee – admits to his female idol that All of my hope and my inspiration/I drew from you. ‘Beauty Queen‘ exists as the haunted sister song to My Marilyn, before turning into the woman crying for help in ‘Strictly Confidential‘: the woman who yearns for release (will it be sunny then I wonder); questions life’s choices (Marking the time spent on our journey/There isn’t much we have to show) and wonders now in these final hours if the desire for fame and wealth was worth it (Counting the cost in money only/Strikes me as funny don’t you know). Ferry would continue to document fame’s alienating impacts – the next track on the album, ‘Editions of You’, being an homage to magazine replication and the need for artistic transcendence – interrogating the landscape, questioning the cost of the need to be loved by strangers. The story continues on For Your Pleasure in ever increasing sinister overtones, digging deeper into the psyche of its composer with each successive track, for here every dream home holds a heartache and every Hollywood lagoon shields a bogus man.

Credits:
Marilyn Monroe, a personally marked-up shot taken from The Last Photoshoot; MM + MM 45rpm + BF 45rpm of MM; New York Mirror announcing MM death; the old Hollywood sign in need of repair in 1978 (before Alice Cooper and others kicked in the funds for a new sign); Richard Hamilton‘s My Marilyn, 1964; signed George Barris photo, MM Last Photoshoot (beach shot); My Marilyn, alternate; Richard Hamilton, self portrait.

Titbits

The original photos considered for this entry were enigmatic and haunting: a series of transparency slides found by US photographer Meagan Abell in a box of vintage photographs in Richmond, Virginia in 2015. The setting is 50s/60s California: the model and photographer unknown. Abell set the internet alight with her search to find the owner and attain more details. Alas, the mystery remains today. Look West my friends, and tell us, what do you see. http://www.meaganabellphotography.com/

June 29, 2018
by roxymusicsongs 2 Comments

Strictly Confidential – Part 1

Strictly Confidential (Ferry) 1973

It’s awful to think that that’s your high spot, only your second year of doing anything
Bryan Ferry on The Second Roxy Music Album, For Your Pleasure.

Written in that most melancholy of the keys, D minor – suitable for lamentations, dirges and requiems – ‘Strictly Confidential‘ is a dark and brooding piece, pure Gothic in its structure, epistolary in its form (a written letter), and revealing a depth of understanding of depression in its poetry and presentation. Musically, Phil Manzanera plays on the edge of controlled hysteria and Andy Mackay contributes saxophone atmospherics worthy of a Gothic novel. This song of encroaching suicide and death is a curious entry in the Roxy Music canon, sometimes undervalued among listeners who liken it to ‘Psalm‘ or ‘Bogus Man‘ – so faithful to form that it palls after a few listens. For others – we here included – believe it contains some of the band’s best work. So be it, ‘Strictly Confidential’ plays wonderfully in the context of the album, relief coming next in the form of the energy rocker ‘Editions of You.’ Superbly sequenced, For Your Pleasure flows through its night journey, often navigating dangerous terrain, often settling on melancholic despair, but always told with musical exuberance and lyrical honesty.

‘Strictly Confidential’ belongs to the sequence of five songs on the first side of For Your Pleasure that had been tightened and honed by Ferry during a self-imposed exile at the remote Derbyshire cottage of Roxy machine designer Nick de Ville (Rigby) before the recording of the album. It is significant to consider that Jane Austen‘s novel Pride and Prejudice is situated in the same Derbyshire hills, and the surrounding wild moorlands were also the location for other classics of English Gothic literature such as Emily Bronte‘s Wuthering Heights, (albeit an hour or so up the road). We can imagine the Implied Author Bryan Ferry preparing himself for the solitude needed to pen ‘Strictly Confidential‘ ‘Beauty Queen‘ and ‘In Every Dream Home, A Heartache’. “I was just sort of on my own in this cottage for a few days” Ferry recalled, “I had no other life.” (Buckley). By doing so the singer/song-writer wrote the songs that would form the backbone of what many consider the peak Roxy Music recording, the dank cottage and creepy moorlands haunting his terror-filled, nightmare-driven writing. “Bad dreams in the night,” Kate Bush sang on the Gothic Wuthering Heights, a title that could have easily substituted for FYP should it have been needed.

The overall lyrical darkness of For Your Pleasure can be explained by the situation Ferry found himself in during early 1973. It made sense to create an album that could stand as the twin or doppelganger of the first record – the dark backing to the sunny possibilities of Roxy Music. The idea fit nicely with the interrogation of glamour, the seduction at once scintillating and inviting (Open up exclusive doors oh wow!) yet also over-powering and ultimately destructive (Solo trips to the stars in the sky/Where do they go? We’ll never know). And so the key forces in Ferry’s writing came to the fore: the push and pull of the drive for stardom and its fearful correlative – the anxiety that comes with the “clutching at straws” and a deep suspicion that fame – while offering a certain kind of life-after-death – actually leaves the mortal realm littered with carnage: Last Picture show drive-ins abandoned, left to mummify in the desert; famous stars dead before their 30s (teenage rebel of the week); and the chilling observation that the greatest of humanity’s art works have subjects built on misery (Lolita, Guernica), that, in the Roxy universe, utilize the universal energy of The Strand, the greatest product failure in the history of British advertising.

The journey we have been mapping with the Roxy Music story can be summarized across the first three records and non-album singles:

I. (Roxy Music/’Virginia Plain‘): The dream and drive for Fame. The mask is donned for the first time. Become someone else. Many possible futures.

II. (‘Pyjamarama‘/For Your Pleasure): Fame arrives. The effects, shocking. Audiences love you (UK). Promoters hate you (US). You arrive at your Hollywood Promised Land and experience disillusionment. The ambitious mask architected at University is attaching itself firmly to the surface of your skin, like fingernails digging into flesh. There is fear and uncertainty about future outcomes. Decisions are made.

III. (Stranded): Roxy mania. The mask settles, inseparable from your own skin now. Human relationships fail. All that remains is art and aesthetics, the striving for the perfection of art. You reach for another cognac, stranded.

So For Your Pleasure becomes a novel of masks and scenarios that explore anxieties and concerns – the subconscious trying to determine a solution or path forward to a problem. ‘Strictly Confidential’ is a song of suicide and death, but at its core it tackles the theme the importance of communication, a gift, it has been said, that women possess innately. All the better then, that this suicide letter may, against all expectations, have been penned by a woman.

I. English Gothic

As part of the song cycle of For Your Pleasure, ‘Strictly Confidential’ and final track ‘For Your Pleasure’ share common themes. In ‘SC’ communication is the gift we “must not lose“; in ‘FYP’ the words we use “tumble” and break up, “gravel hard and loose“. Both songs point to the possibilities of the morning, the possibility of escape from the bad dream, the insightful “magical moment” (‘SC’) and the end to the things you “worried about last night” (‘FYP’). The nightmare is temporary then, and death will not come. Not in FYP. And not in ‘Strictly Confidential’. If, as the Floyd told us the same year, “hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way” (‘Time‘) then The Second Roxy Music Album presents depression and melancholy as internal struggle, as a form of competing voices, as paranoid schizophrenia, and even though death will not come, there is no certainty the troubles will be resolved by morning. Is there no key?

‘Strictly Confidential’ is a performance piece, presented like a narrative poem or play, with characters written for actors to play a part. Indeed, the third cut on FYP may be the most “acted” narrative Ferry has written – ‘If There is Something‘ a close second – in an album full of wonderful performances and roles invented and presented (‘The Bogus Man‘/’Dream Home‘/’For Your Pleasure‘). The lyric opens dramatically, pulling in the listener: Before I die I’ll write this letter – and continues, packed full of information:

Before I die I’ll write this letter
Here are the secrets you must know
Until the cloak of evening shadow
Changes to mantle of the dawn
Will it be sunny then I wonder?
Rolling and turning
How can I sleep?
Hold on till morning
What if I fall?

The set-up closely involves the reader in an act of intimacy and trust that is the hallmark of Roxy Music’s relationship to its audience. The letter/envelope is addressed formally and in confidence to one person: for our eyes only (Strictly Confidential); we are told this a confession, the “last” words of the narrator (Before I die I’ll write this letter); and we are presented with the prospect of learning personal, possibly illicit information (here are the secrets you must know). In a novel, this is the kind of opening paragraph hook the reader loves. The hook is further sunk as the atmospherics continue with the Gothic setting faithfully adhered to musically by Roxy Music as Ferry evokes a quivering ghostly vocal (before I di-e I write this le-tte-r). The vocal is so wispy thin and fragile it is intriguing to think perhaps the story is being presented from the woman’s point of view; the word selection later is more selective and considered, and even suggests a more sophisticated emotional awareness. This sensibility is backed by the Andy Mackay‘s sombre saxophone signalling the beginning of the piece, utilizing a tone and message similar to John Coltrane’s intro to A Love Supreme, appropriately titled “Acknowledgement“. There is some beautiful work here by Mackay, as he overlays oboe and sax in a manner similar to the minimalist approach – a technique later adopted by Brian Eno and Philip Glass (Glassworks) – and a perfect introduction to this song of sorrow.

The imagery in the first stanza is pure Gothic, and Ferry uses the form and atmospherics of two exemplary models of epistolary literature, the horror classics Frankenstein and Dracula. Epistolary narratives – those that use letters to tell their story – date at least as early as the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC – 18 AD) and by the 19th century were the form favoured by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, early Jane Austin, and Bram Stoker. Dracula in particular is a good read, the entire novel is epistolary, written as diary and journal entries, letters and telegrams, all of which give the reader the perspectives from different characters, an aspect that is important in the the schizophrenic track ‘Strictly Confidential’. Dracula moves from romance to ensnarement and isolation, to hauntings in the house of vampire victim Lucy, in Whitby, England, only a few short hours away from Ferry’s cottage stay in Derbyshire.

Word-choice in the song is literary high-style, which is formal, suited to a version of old-time story-telling favoured by the Gothic classics. Take the lines Until the cloak of evening shadow/Changes to mantle of the dawn. Both ‘Cloak of Evening Shadow‘ and ‘Mantle of the Dawn‘ could be titles for Game of Thrones episodes, so you get the picture about the kind of atmospherics Ferry was seeking to achieve: this is the stuff of castles, cloaks, daggers at dawn, ghosts at midnight. In fact, Ferry sets the two words back-to-back in the stanza: cloak=overcoat/nighttime; mantle=overcoat/morning. Look up ‘mantle’ (Dictionary) and you learn ‘mantle’ is the more authoritative of the two, as in they decided to “place the mantle of authority on younger shoulders.” Compare this to placing the “cloak of authority” on those younger shoulders and you see it doesn’t quite carry the same weight. Why is this important? – well, in terms of narrative poetry, mantle of the dawn thereby gains the upper-hand over cloak of evening shadow. The narrator of the story – the one who chooses the words to tell the tale – is telling us that seeing the sun rise is more important than the finality of midnight suicide – Will it be sunny then I wonder?/Hold on til morning. There is energy against the finality of death baked into the stanza: the suicide note is a letter of torment, representing the haunting of the mind, rather than delivering on the ghastly promise of suicide (“before I die”). There is the suggestion that the author writes this letter each evening as a form of repeated therapy – as a means to survive – rather than as a confession to another person. The writer is both author and the recipient – and we witness this struggle – as they write this letter, Strictly Confidential, to themselves in the desperate hope that they will make it to morning. Every night is a small death, without finality, doomed to repeat. Is there no light here?

Mental illness, and schizophrenia in particular, was a considerable theme in Ferry‘s work with Roxy Music, most notably in Manifesto (1979), with its themes of double-schizophrenia (Williams) and a song dedicated to the subject, ‘Still Falls the Rain’, which Ferry introduces at a Manchester 1979 concert as being “for anyone still interested in schizophrenia.” Ferry’s introduction is telling for it suggests the public’s interest in the subject of schizophrenia had passed by the end of the decade, even if it had not in the singer/songwriter’s mind. Winding back 1979 to 1973 we can see that schizophrenia was one of pop music’s hot topics – primarily because musical giants such as Brian Wilson and Syd Barrett had become ill with the condition, and their unfortunate melt-down had been recorded in two high-profile music paper articles (Wilson the subject of several, notably the Washington Post; Barret by Nick Kent: Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd: The Cracked Ballad of Syd Barrett, New Musical Express, 13 April 1974). The general public was intrigued by how people with elevated status and wealth could succumb to schizophrenia (people were even succumbing to Quadrophenia, a disorder presumably directed at people with four ears. Thanks Pete, our senses will never be the same). Yet schizophrenia does not imply a “split personality” or multiple personalities per se, but is rather a mental disorder characterized by “abnormal social behavior and failure to understand reality” (Wiki). The key in this regard is this the relationship to reality – for instance, if one hears voices in the night that shouldn’t be there, there are only two key (general) causes: an unhealthy mind or ghosts. Okay, there is another one – drugs.

In the early-to-mid 70s there was an increased awareness of schizophrenia due to the come-down of 60s drug culture, Brian Wilson and Syd Barret being two of the prime examples. Yet it was David Bowie that took on the subject of schizophrenia and mental illness in a spectacular fashion, writing on the issues of sanity, family history, and drug-taking (“‘Paranoid schizophrenia runs in my family, on my mother’s side. Sometimes when I’m drunk or stoned, I can almost feel it in me”). Years later Bowie’s brother Terry took his own life by placing his head on an active railway track (loosely referenced in Jump They Say). Terrible. For Bowie, then, the concern about mental illness and depression was real, and informed his writing from The Man Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory, through Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs, and Station to Station were he was pushing the limits of insanity. (And it must be said, the insanity/drug part has been used as a hook by many journalists – “the horror, the horror” – but the actual stories of Bowie’s cocaine psychosis are terrifying (see: Doggett). By the mid-to-late 70s Bowie was trying desperately to get a grip on reality (Low) and say goodbye finally to his inner scary monsters. This is the subject of ‘Ashes to Ashes‘, the masterpiece wherein Bowie reaches back and, in the vast darkness of inner space, navigates his way back to reality and human contact: The shrieking of nothing is killing/…/Want to come down right now. Though character-making is financially rewarding (I’m stuck with a valuable friend) Bowie ends the song by putting a (metaphoric) bullet in Major Tom’s head: one flash of light/one non-smoking pistol, effectively killing the 70s and his own personal demons. Indeed, a few short years later Bowie’s next invitation was healthy and life-affirming: Let’s Dance. This was not the zeitgeist of the early 70s however, when artists such as David Bowie and Bryan Ferry were articulating their experience of new-found fame, an experience that had the potential to remove them from the possibility of communication and meaningful human contact forever.

There have been periods in my life when I have been so closeted in my own world that I would no longer relate to anybody. And I do love communication. – David Bowie, 1996

I like to be private. But in my songs I share myself. The ideas resonate more when you’re disturbed – Bryan Ferry, 2015

II. Truth is the Seed

The struggle for a grasp on reality continues in the second verse as the narrator is trapped in sleepless torment (rolling and turning). A key device used by Gothic writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Bronte is to present the narrator’s haunted state of mind as the physical place or location they inhabit. Witness how Ferry follows this convention by setting up internal thought processes as a physical journey, mapping the highs and lows of the mind via the Gothic, vampiric countryside:

Over the hills and down the valleys
Soaring aloft and far below
Lying on stony ground the fragments
Truth is the seed we try to sow

Hills, valleys, soaring above and below – here Ferry paints a picture of the mind outside itself, dissociated, looking down at itself from above. If truth is the seed that must be sown then it will struggle on this “stony ground” with only “fragments” of a mind to make sense of it all. The fourth stanza continues the struggle, and it is the matter of communication – or the difficulty of it – that is pressed front and center:

Tongue tied the thread of conversation
Weighing the words one tries to use
Nevertheless communication
This is the gift you must not lose

“Tongue tied” is problem of verbal communication, not written, for the written prose in the song has been poetic and vivid, populated with hills and valleys and Shakespearian mantles of the dawn. The narrator’s concern is actually their verbal skills – words are tongue-tied and do not come easily (“weighing the words one tries to use”). Much as been said about Bryan Ferry‘s shyness (see Buckley‘s biography), with the singer being at odds with the rock world. In interviews – a verbal medium after all – Ferry can sound hesitant, calculating, articulating each point just so, trying to apply the same exactitude we find in his song-writing (for Roxy interviews in see John O’ Brien’s excellent online Roxy resource http://www.vivaroxymusic.com/articles.php). In conversation Ferry tries to answer the questions honestly – to a fault perhaps – but at the start of his career he did not have the verbal acuity or warmth of band mate Brian Eno – and Eno could (would) never have written the words to ‘Strictly Confidential‘ or ‘Mother of Pearl‘.

It is interesting then to consider the circumstances of ‘Strictly Confidential’s composition: remote surroundings in the Gothic countryside; tormented by artistic anxieties and audience expectations; the opportunity to analyze the highs and lows of the previous year and the maddening gaps in personality we all play in our heads at night. Indeed, ‘Strictly’ may be the most personal song Ferry has ever written – unless the singer has a proclivity for inflatable dolls and ‘Dream Home‘ is actually a confession.

The sequencing of For Your Pleasure arguably presents the internal and external problems Ferry was grappling with as he arrived at Air Studios to record the second album with Roxy Music – band direction, leadership, ambition, even barely concealed doubt (‘Bogus Man‘). By the final track ‘For Your Pleasure‘ Ferry will make it to the end of the album feeling lighter, ready to wake up soon and fight. But first he has to make it past these early stages and deal with his inner demons. What if I fall?

III. Haunting Me Always

Haunting me always are the voices
(Tell us are you ready now?)
Sometimes I wonder if they’re real
(Ready to receive you now)
Or is it my own imagination?
(Have you any more to say?)
Guilt is a wound that’s hard to heal
(It’s the cross you have to bear)
Could it be evil thoughts become me?
(Tell us what you’re thinking now)
Some things are better left unsaid

In 2006 Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson gave an interview where he discussed his mental health difficulties and how he deals with his condition. A powerful interview (literally, titled Brian Wilson – A Powerful Interview) the frank discussion had Wilson clarify that his experiences went far beyond simple depression and drug use to a “mental condition called schizo affective disorder, which involves ongoing hallucinations and other distortions of reality.” Consider for a moment the context of ‘Strictly Confidential’ (Haunting me always are the voices) and the following description of Wilson’s condition:

[Interviewer] Cooper: How old were you when the voices started?

Wilson: About 25.

Friedman: When did you start getting treatment?

Wilson: Not until I was about 40, believe it or not. A lot of times people don’t get help as early as they should.

Cooper: Has treatment made your life easier?

Wilson: A little bit. It has made my symptoms bearable so I don’t have to go screaming down the street yelling, “Leave me alone, leave me alone,” and that kind of thing.

Friedman: Does anything else accompany the voices?

Wilson: Yes, I get intense fear, too. It comes and goes. You get the feeling and it goes away.

Cooper: What has depression been like for you?

Wilson: Well my depression goes pretty low, pretty deep. I get depressed to the point where I can’t do anything—I can’t even write songs, which is my passion.

Cooper: Is there anything that brings it on? Anything that seems to make the depression hit harder?

Wilson: I dread the derogatory voices I hear during the afternoon. They say things like, “You are going to die soon,” and I have to deal with those negative thoughts. But it’s not as bad as it used to be. When I’m on stage, I try to combat the voices by singing really loud. When I’m not on stage, I play my instruments all day, making music for people. Also, I kiss my wife and kiss my kids. I try to use love as much as possible.

“I try to use love as much as possible.” A beautiful sentiment from a troubled but gifted man. Brian Wilson has written much original and thoughtful pop music – Surf’s Up is multi-layered and powerful – the line A choke of grief hard hardened/I heard the word/Wonderful thing/A children’s song (2.54-4.11) provokes the very choke of grief it describes, such is the power of the music. The description of the schizo affective disorder in the above interview is heartbreaking and so is Ferry’s capture of the condition in ‘Strictly Confidential’. Here Ferry utilizes a narrative structure that dramatizes this grim and terrifying condition, presenting a play of voices in nocturnal call and response:

Haunting me always are the voices – the journey moves from observing the mind from above to being in the house alone at night – the Gothic convention of expressionism evoking voices from each room, and from within each corner of the mind (an experience akin to “intense fear” – Wilson).

(Tell us are you ready now?) – the first appearance of the ghost/interior monologue. Are you ready now … move with us toward suicide and death.

Sometimes I wonder if they’re real – there is now a dual dialog at play: the narrator identifies the mind’s haunting, while the “fragmented” schizophrenic mind observes the experience from above, wondering if the voices are “real.” This is the slipping in-and-out of voices and characters, like a play, with different narrative sensibilities and impressions.

(Ready to receive you now) – the voices are impatient, urging. “I dread the derogatory voices…They say things like, ‘You are going to die soon'” (Wilson).

Or is it my own imagination? – the writer’s mind splits open again and reveals further the questioning voice of the artist – the Implied Author Bryan Ferry, perhaps – as the probing analysis ponders how and why the creative imagination can create such swirling nightmares, the process of art-making a form of madness (see: Vincent van Gogh; Syd Barrett, Vegetable Man). Here the author of the letter repeats the central question of ‘Virginia Plain’: What’s real and make believe?

(Have you any more to say?) – the theme of verbal communication returns, as if to rub salt in the wound – or, like a spiralling nightmare, the voices further expose personal weakness.

Guilt is a wound that’s hard to heal – the most literal line in the song and one that feels out-of-place with the rest of the piece. The author suggests the source of the torment is grief, but does the schizophrenic condition require a justification in order to terrorize the mind? If the song nudges us in the direction of identifying the source of guilt, then we have no choice to indulge in a close biographical reading, for the line demands an answer to the question – what are you actually guilty of? Here’s one hypothesis: Bryan Ferry was formulating a change to the Roxy Music line-up during the writing of For Your Pleasure and the album is in part a dramatization of how he felt about it. The singer’s frustration with Brian Eno‘s high profile would be coming into focus at this point, with Eno shooting from the hip during interviews in an flamboyant and often disingenuous fashion. “My next venture is going to be moon rockets, because I know nothing about them” (Sounds, Oct 72). Here’s how the music papers saw it: “In France, Roxy became known as ‘Eno’s band’ and, in America, Warner Brothers published a hand-out claiming that Eno wrote and sang several of the numbers on For Your Pleasure. For a man who is as proud of his work as Bryan Ferry, this sort of distortion must have been highly distressing.” Rolling and turning/How can I sleep?

(It’s the cross you have to bear) – after the split with Brian Eno July 1973 – four months after For Your Pleasure was released – Ferry told the New Musical Express his decision regarding the direction of the group had been explained to its members in the following fashion: “Either Roxy doesn’t exist anymore or else it re-defines itself in my terms” (Stump, 97). Years later Ferry sounded guilty about the split – “In an ideal world I wish that Brian would have stayed” – while conceding that he had ruthlessly “froze him out.” This ignores the fact that Eno had had enough of being in a rock band, but it seems in Ferry’s nature to second-guess himself on decisions and direction even years later (It’s the cross you have to bear).

And what of the changes that had already occurred within Roxy Music: the mental health deterioration and loss of founding band member Graham Simpson: “The last words Bryan said to me where ‘get well and come back’ – but I never did….” (Graham Simpson, interview). An unavoidable sacking from the group Graham founded, and an obvious impact to the sensitive friend and band leader Ferry. Sadness and guilt produced ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond‘ for the founding members of Pink Floyd after Syd Barrett was let go (Threatened by shadows at night, and exposed in the light). Can the same be said of ‘Strictly Confidential‘ for Roxy Music?

Could it be evil thoughts become me? – another potential title for For Your Pleasure, and the crux of the track ‘Strictly Confidential’. No matter what your reading is of the song – a suicide attempt; a struggle for mental health; guilt over band relations or a doomed love affair – frankly, the love affair theory being the least interesting, considering the power of Pyjamarama and Beauty Queen on the subject – the question “could it be evil thoughts become me?” feels close to the bone. The key is that the narrator has already had the evil thoughts (“could it be”), and even though “guilt is the wound that’s hard to heal” this writer posits that his core nature is ruthlessness and, moreover, there is pleasure in the thought of it. Getting closer to the truth perhaps, and the source of the song’s torment..

(Tell us what you’re thinking now) – the voices have been persistent: are you ready now? Have you more to say? Time’s almost up… Yet the voices sound uncertain, like they are losing momentum in the argument.

Some things are better left unsaid – at the conclusion of this powerful call-and-response stanza the writer denies the voices their prize, rejecting the call for death. And it may be a light-bulb moment for Ferry as well: after wracking himself over his verbal nervousness and essential shyness (Tongue tied the thread of conversation), he matures during the night’s torment and recognizes that verbal acuity or worrying about personality failings may not be the answer – some things are better left unsaid. You do not have access to all my inner feelings; communication is important but not saying something can have as much power. I deny you, my voice, my listener, my reader, the deepest part of myself. This is the gift.

V. Magical Moment

Magical moment
The spell it is breaking
There is no light here
Is there no key?

The conclusion of the piece has the moment of enlightenment shine through after a difficult and torment-filled night. Denying the voices their prize is a “magical moment” as the schizophrenic disorder recedes just as daylight appears, the “spell it is breaking.”

The final chilling note however is that this letter will need to be written again tomorrow night, a reminder that the struggle for health is ongoing and diligence and fortitude is needed for those who are affected by illness, addiction, rifts in reality and everyday life. Reality may be the answer, but the pain is continual and depression can be a life-long affliction. There is no light here/Is there no key?

Paranoid schizophrenic, definitely… They seem to make the best entertainers.
– John Wetton on Bryan Ferry, quoted in Buckley, 2004.

Credits

A really interesting modern take on a classic Greta Garbo photograph “Mata Hari” by C.S. Bull, 1931. The original is right, while the contemporary artist version is left; Venetian music mask; West Bridgford Gothic church under water; Andy Mackay; Bowie and Bryan, 1979; historical letter, USA; Brian Wilson; Syd Barrett; Bryan Ferry; below, Syd Barrett: his art and personal artifacts go to auction after his death in 2006.

Titbits

http://www.sydbarrett.com/life/

In a way this entry is dedicated to Syd Barrett, founding member of the Pink Floyd, but that sounds rather noble and self-centered when you consider the trauma of mental illness and the impact that has on those afflicted by it. Suffice to say, Syd had family and financial support, and his life by all accounts was lived peacefully in Cambridge, sans the occasional dolt fan that would knock on his door and harass him. It is nice to know the band ensured he received his royalties, and he was protected by his family. There is a lovely site run by his sister that hits all the right notes in being respectful and preserving Syd’s eccentricity without glamorizing his condition and way of life.

http://bryanferry.com/graham-simpson-1943-2012/

Graham Simpson was one of the co-founders of Roxy Music, and played bass guitar on the seminal first album before leaving in 1972. Bryan Ferry has said of him, “He was one of the most interesting people I ever worked with. He was crucial to my development as a musician, and in those early years he was a pillar of strength and inspiration. He was a great character…think Jack Kerouac and ‘On The Road’. I liked Graham, and Roxy Music would never have happened without him” (quote). We spoke of Graham’s work in the entry for ‘Bitter’s End’, highlighting in particular ‘Sea Breezes‘ as a key bass track on the album.

Next: Strictly Confidential – Part 2: American Gothic and Marilyn Monroe; Phil Manzanera articulates guitar torment; locating gender and “voice” in SC; Roxy machine photographer Karl Stoecker profile.

May 28, 2018
by roxymusicsongs 6 Comments

Beauty Queen: Cover Art – Part 2

So the first album was a great success and people thought it worked incredibly well, this glamour image with the music and so on. So when we finished the music for the second record For Your Pleasure, I turned to Antony and said – what do we do now?

Bryan Ferry, interview, 2013

It is often said that the devil gets the best lines, and in the case of the content and cover design for Roxy Music’s acclaimed second album For Your Pleasure, we are provided the dark mirror backing to the pink glamorous shine of Roxy Music. In each successive Roxy album there is a song that contains a hint of the material on the next album – ‘Chance Meeting‘ foreshadows the sinister tone of FYP, for example – and so too with the cover art: there could be only one answer to the high-tone sparkling glitz of Roxy Music – flip the image and you have the dark side of glamour, the serpentine sleekness that would inhabit so many Roxy songs, and like any city nightscape, For Your Pleasure is a journey into night that sparkles just as brightly as its day-time antecedent.

Glamour and camp were essential to the Roxy Music aesthetic – two concepts that had little currency in the rock and pop world in the early 70s. The glamour of 1940s and 50s Hollywood iconography was replaced by a “back-to-roots” movement in the 60s, with jeans, knitted beanies, hemp necklaces, patched bell-bottoms and ‘authenticity’ of expression replacing the more careful and self-conscious trends of an earlier generation’s wide-brimmed hats, elegant skirt suits, cocktail jewel embellishments (check out Amanda Lear wearing the same wrist bracelet embellishment on the FYP cover – absolutely divine daahlink!). It all makes sense of course – coming out of the melt-down of the Second World War, the 40s and 50s were marked by poverty, with materials and goods expensive and hard to come by, so wearing these clothes was special and a statement of absolute glamour that could only be replicated by that one “posh frock” worn as you made your way to the local Rialto or Regal or Roxy cinema (replete with posh seat coverings and velvet curtains).

The jeans and knitted-beanies movement – though very colorful – was a generational acknowledgement that access to goods and services had eased as a result of global stabilization and the birth of modern consumer culture. In this regard, the styles of their parents were old hat, exclusionary and elitist and to be summarily distrusted and swiftly dispatched to the dust-bin (presumably by a moustache-wearing Paul McCartney). We see a reaction to the 60s zeitgeist a few short years later with a shift back to self-consciousness and style – of which Roxy Music were an important and influential driver in Europe – and then back-to-basics again with the punks of ’76/77, a time of which Roxy were not a band anymore and Bryan Ferry was prime target for the We Hate Pretentious Gits (WHPG) brigade. Then back again in the 80s (good timing for Flesh & Blood/Avalon) and so on and so forth. The net result then was Roxy’s desire to “reach for something new” was focused on re-engaging the past in order to (re)create the present, and provide sign-posts to new possible futures. Re-enter the bright tinsel of glamour and the radical impact the Roxy Music album covers had on the zeitgeist of 1972/73. It was like a breath of fresh air – or, as Ferry explained when asked the question “If you could go back in time, where would you go?” replied – “New York in the 50s: cocktails at the Algonquin, Charlie Parker at Birdland and dancing at El Morocco.” Now, that’s glamour in a nutshell.

We noted previously (BQ PT3) that the term “Glamour” has origins tracing back to Scotland circa 1720, meaning “magic, enchantment”, a variant of Scottish “gra am1 marye” (Etymonline). Vampires “glam” their victims by putting them under a mental spell or compulsion, presumably making it easier for the archfiend to render his victims powerless to seduction (and possible, nae probable, death). So, there are two very interesting aspects of this word glamour when it comes to analyzing Roxy Music: one comes from the bright side of the catwalk, where the glitz and dazzle is so awe-inspiring we look away, too much for one day. And one comes from the dark side side of the catwalk – witches or vampires casting spells, used to influence the actions, thoughts and memories of their victims.

The answer to the question “what do we do now?” is answered in full by the cover art of For Your Pleasure, delivered to Island Records by the talented and fresh-faced members of the Roxy ‘machine’. Bryan Ferry took the lead with fashion designer Antony Price (BQ Cover Art P1) and both had a lot of fun with the 2nd album, punning the hell out of night-time dalliances and eager to send subversive fun to the many thousands of kids who snapped up the record (reaching #4, charting for 27 weeks). The pun presented on the cover is a play on a fashion show “cat-walk”, that long stroll so beloved of the jet-set, where models strut their stuff while showcasing a roll-call of increasingly extravagant outfits, mouths curled with attitude, eyes glazed against a panacea of detachment and boredom, looking down at their rich patrons with contempt while ignoring the rest of us in the cheap seats, the Great Unworthy. Presenting this time round a vision worlds apart from the pink-wrapped chocolate box confectionery of Roxy’s previous cover star, Kari-Ann, the money shot of FYP is not a replication of 40s magazine glamour, but of 40s film noir (“dark film”), the other side of the glamour coin, shining just as bright but carrying an invitation to the seedy underbelly of life, as Amanda Lear leads a black panther across the simulated Las Vegas back-lot, that favoured place where movie mafia types engage in murky dealings as luxury cars drive in with cash and drive out with a dead body (or two) protruding from the trunk. Note: the guy smiling on the back cover is almost certainly about to get his (trick, or treat?). But more of that anon.

For the audiences of early 1973 it would have been a Big Deal to see 60s fashion model and party girl Amanda Lear on the cover of For Your Pleasure in such a ravishing pose, the promise of a bit of slap & tickle sheathed in a strapless black evening dress and velvet gloves, all balanced on a pair of impossibly high-heeled stilettos. Lear was clearly on Ferry’s mind when recording the album, for she opens proceedings as the subject matter of ‘Pajamarama‘ and closes it with the photo-session for the LP cover. In the blog entry for PJ we looked at Lear’s back-story and her influence on the lyrics of the second Roxy Music single: “They say you have a secret life,” Ferry sang, mischievously alluding to the controversy surrounding Lear’s sexual identity and the supposed sex-change operation which “Made sacrifice your key to paradise.” He was poking fun at the hype of course, deconstructing expectations, for Lear was genuine star-material and knew how to play the game, having become an in-demand 60s glamour model in the same vein as ‘Virginia Plain”s very own Baby Jane Holzer. (Note Ferry’s continued obsession with the glamour gals of his youth – Holzer, Lear, Marilyn Monroe, weaved so tightly into his own starry-eyed quest for fame). Amanda was a great choice for femme fatale for she was a collector of men, starting (publicly) with Brian Jones (see: Rolling Stones Miss Amanda Jones) before moving on to glam Gods Bryan Ferry and David Bowie. Lear’s 70s pedigree was confirmed when she hooked up with the famous surrealist painter Salvador Dali and became the sole focal point for the now famous Dali-edited edition of Paris Vogue (December 1971). In the magazine Lear models some hard-hitting early-Dali shock art as she poses for the lens of celebrated 60s photographer David Bailey in such shots as St. Lucy and Jesus Christ tied by chains of pearls to a silver cross (below and here).

A Guardian newspaper article perhaps summed up the allure of Amanda Lear best: ‘Lear’s background remains a mystery. She has variously let it be known that her mother was English or French or Vietnamese or Chinese, and that her father was English, Russian, French or Indonesian. She may have been born in Hanoi in 1939, or Hong Kong in either 1941 or 1946. Once she said she was from Transylvania. And to this day, it is a matter of conjecture as to whether she was born a “boy or a girl”.’ (See: Bowie, ‘Rebel Rebel‘). Mysterious origins, the secret wife of a famous painter, a recipient of a sex-change operation, Lear has never confirmed these details, although she was happy to trade on the notoriety they generated. ‘It makes me mysterious and interesting,’ she said. ‘There is nothing the pop world loves more than a way-out freak.’ (Guardian). Perfect then, for the cover of The Second Roxy Music Album.

One of the things I think we’ve offered … is a fairly glamorous image. One that is manufacturing, or catering to, a kind of dream consciousness in the same way that Hollywood and the whole film did twenty years ago
BF, quoted in Stump, (p.77).

Introducing The Cast: ‘For Your Pleasure’ (1973)

I. The Vamp
Based on the film noirs of the 40s – Murder My Sweet, Double Indemnity, Gilda – For Your Pleasure utilizes classic film noir narrative both on the cover and within the song sequence put down on record. The cover sleeve – now a part of historical pop iconography (BQ P2) – is striking on many levels: the mise-en-scene is gritty noir, presenting dark dealings against a backdrop of urban city nude nightlife – the Vegas lights shimmer and cut a deep swath across the scene, reflecting against the stained-wet asphalt and the black laminate of the Vamp’s leather dress (the cover was originally laminated, increasing the dark glamour effect). We are left with the impression of Gothic cinema, dreamland, laughter in the dark. The Vamp halts and strikes a “pose” worthy of a fashion show reel – I am here, I am now, you are not worthy. Like all glam poses the female body is exaggerated, so bent out of shape it carries with it the force of Marcel Duchamp‘s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, Amanda Lear’s body is contorted to emphasize line, form, hip, a narrow waist. There is the tweak, the push of the pelvic line towards the skyline and the unfolding story: The Panther, The Dupe, The Driver, The Lost Souls.

Unlike the other Roxy albums – each complete with its own femme fatal back-story (BQ Cover Art P1) – the Vamp on For Your Pleasure does not look directly at the camera in the same manner as, say, the models do in Siren or Country Life. This time the gaze is furtive, cast down, looking, yes, but in an subtle exchange of glances, the power is transferred to the fearsome black panther. The Vamp is the lure, the seducer, but she is also the betrayer, and now she has you where she wants you: the Panther has you in his sights, locked and loaded.

II. The Black Panther

The Black Panther is a spiritual and literary symbol used throughout the ages: as an ancient and powerful spirit guide, the panther signifies darkness, death and, sometimes, rebirth (Spirit Animal). Death accompanies the Vamp as she searches for victims, the Dupes, whom she seduces, draining their energy for her own demands. The Vamp leads Death on a thin chain, ready to unleash its power when the moment is right.

At the heart of For Your Pleasure is a subconscious fear of the power of seduction, the pull and consequence of glamour and wealth, its consequences for the self and society. Utilizing the tools of glamour, Ferry composes the narrative and Roxy provide the dense musical soundtrack to this epic of covert confession, paranoid fame, sexual obsession and death.

III. The Dupe
The subject of this Roxy cover starts out as it must as it fulfills the key demands of glamour – as seduction. We are seduced by the striking sleeve imagery and the promise of good music inside. This 2nd album seduction is carefully planned and executed by Ferry and the members of the Roxy Machine – Antony Price, Nicolas De Ville, Karl Stoecker. Excluding band members Eno, Mackay, Manzanera and Thompson from the sleeve concept, design and execution, Ferry asserts his total control and vision on the Roxy “state of mind” and begins to break with the all-for-one group concept, with Eno in particular noting that he would have preferred “a nice unpretentious unglamorous picture of the band” for the covers, “wearing false beards and denims and standing around a tree with ‘Support Ecology’ on the back of the sleeve.” Funny, yes, but tongue-in-cheek when one considers that Roxy were a band that touted glamour and style as its modis operandi, and weren’t going to undercut all the dosh spent on expensive cologne. The damage of Ferry’s uniformity of vision and control would gradually reveal itself over the the years (gaining traction in ’74), but on FYP the vision is sublime, economical and of lasting impact.

The viewer is attracted to the sleeve because we like the subliminal danger of it all, the open invitation, the exaggerated female postering, the sleek glossy darkness promising kink and adventure. As we gaze and anticipate the music inside (surely worthwhile, judging book by the cover) we are irretrievably drawn into the moment – like Siren, we are seduced by the record, for this is the siren’s song – the music inside the sleeve – the presentation of rock and cinema and as escapist illusion, packing a seduction so sweet and irresistible it laps “both body and soul in a fatal lethargy, the forerunner of death and corruption” (Walter Copland Perry). There is no other way to say it – you’ve been Glammed boy! – Amanda has got your attention and the combination of captivating art work and nocturnal musical adventure has got you hooked – you are under the spell. You may have fallen for another band, hero, lover, but this may be the first time the process of entrapment has been written into the very fabric of your story.

For Your Pleasure not only observes the themes and codes of the film noir universe but plonks us right into the heart of it, the seduction hard to escape. (I first listened to this record over 40 years ago, and I am, obviously, still hooked). Beauty is a double-edged sword, fulfilling a basic human need, indicating health, vibrancy, potency, the survival of the species while also containing the opposite – a falsehood, an illusion – for as the proverb says: “Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting.” For Your Pleasure is a modern re-telling of The Picture of Dorian Gray with its sly warnings about the aristocrat’s hedonistic worldview: that beauty and sensual fulfillment are the only things worth pursuing in life. What is absolutely stunning is that Bryan Ferry in ’72/73 was able to intuit this as a young man as he himself entered into a world of exclusivity and pleasure, aware of these forces as early as 1972 (‘Virginia Plain‘), and yet he stumbled, losing ground in the mid-70s, the mask now inseparable from the tender mortal flesh, himself seduced by the stimuli he once intuited as a corrupting force.

IV: The Driver
One of the more underrated aspects of Bryan Ferry’s public persona is his sense of humor. And so with the back-cover of For Your Pleasure as we recognize (now famously) the car-obsessed rock God Ferry dressed up as the chauffeur, the driver, cabbie, the gopher. Here Ferry encodes the iconography of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, one of Hollywood’s greatest film noirs, a portrait of early Los Angeles that highlights tinsel town’s decay and demise during the change from silent film to talkies (“I am big, it’s the pictures that got small!”). Ferry harnesses the spirit of Erich Von Stroheim wearing the chauffeur uniform as Erich undertakes Norma Demond’s sordid bidding (chimp funeral and all). Erich himself was a film star and an avant garde, visionary director and so the echoes ripple both in the movie and on the album sleeve. Dark, deep, wonderful.

Standing aside a black Lincoln Continental, the grinning Ferry is at once the serf of the piece (it is the back cover after all) but he is also placed in the “driving seat”, fulfilling the role of author/God in our FYP movie, a conceit also used by suspense king Alfred Hitchcock, placing himself in his own films. The singer/song-writer is director and puppeteer, pulling the strings, poking fun at his cast’s public personas, enjoying the early 70s fascination with the “freak show” all pop audiences love (Bowie/Roxy/Eno/Lou Reed) for these guys and gals – collected outsiders and miscreants of the 1960s – now come to the center stage as their audiences thrill to the illicitness of it all, marveling at the sexual ambiguity of Amanda Lear; the bisexual, homosexual riffing of Ferry’s own sexual identify underscored by fashion designer and friend Antony Price‘s comment that the Roxy star was essentially “gay in every respect – sensibility, style, taste, humour – except for between the sheets” (Reynolds, 352). This was camp on a scale not seen in pop music before, with identity and role-playing a critical component in this early postmodern mashup of playing with-and-against audience expectations.

The key themes of film noir are familiar tropes in the Roxy Music body of songs, familiar to those who have followed Ferry’s lyrical writing over the years. Check out the Top 6 noir themes as identified by Rules of Film Noir and see how effortlessly they relate to The Driver’s key concerns:

How existential crises affect the main character(‘Virgina Plain’/Strictly Confidential‘)
The perverse joy of self-destructive acts (‘In Every Dream Home, a Heartache‘)
Feminine betrayal in one form or another (‘Chance Meeting‘/’Ladytron‘)
Sexual thrills come with a cost, but are worth it(‘Mother of Pearl‘)
The impossibility of escaping one’s character or fate(‘Beauty Queen‘)
A universe of moral ambiguity, where good often loses to evil (‘Do the Strand‘/ ‘The Bogus Man‘)

The question of The Driver’s fate however is not directly answered – we do not know for example, if he is about to get his (sex) or is he merely going to drive the Vamp to her next victim/Dupe (the next victim being, presumably, the poor chap or Roxy girl buying the next album). Or, is he going to join The Lost Souls in their eternal pit of damnation..

V. The Lost Souls

You’ve been lead to this place: seduced by the cover; enticed by the music and the glamorous imagery. The Vamp lures you. The Panther locks you in its deadly embrace. The Driver has seen it before, and smiles, ready to be of service. He steps around to open the door for you, right this way.. And inside what do you find – but all those who have come before you, seduced by the glamour, the music, and the imagery of pop and rock. The band are all fans. And victims. The inner sleeve contains the ensnared members of Roxy posing like lost souls inside the limo: Bryan Ferry echoes Elvis with his tilted ankle. Andy Mackay glams Bo Diddley. Paul Thompson does not even play guitar. Does not matter. We all play guitar now in this music spirit world, fan and artist in the end reduced to the same role. Seduced, smitten, happy at last, we all inhabit this record. And we always will.

Postscript

If it’s been taken too far, well, I geddit, I really do. As they say in the best film noirs, the temptation was irresistible. But really, it doesn’t matter, not in the Grand Scheme of things. Besides, I have a confession to make. Please forgive me:

i lied

Credits

For Your Pleasure cover: Bryan Ferry – art direction & cover art concept; Karl Stoecker – photography; Nicholas Deville – art direction, photography; CCS – artwork; Antony Price – clothing/wardrobe, make-up; Smile – hair stylist; Amanda Lear – cover star; Witches and Demons, unknown; FYP outake; Amanda Lear in the Dali-edited edition of Paris Vogue (December 1971) and a Daily Mail caption from the 70s; Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye; noir Queen Lauren Bacall; Marcel Duchamp‘s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2; a groovy Panther drawing, author unknown; a guy screaming on the internet (aren’t we all); clips Sunset Blvd; BF as The Driver; the complete FYP sleeve; and “I Lied” – tracking down the artist. It’s just too good.

April 30, 2018
by roxymusicsongs Leave a comment

Beauty Queen: Cover Art – Part 1

Beauty Queen
Beauty Queen (Live, 74)
Beauty Queen – Part 1
Beauty Queen – Part 2
Beauty Queen – Part 3
Antony Price – Show Reel

I saw her heading to the table
Well, a tall walking big black cat
– The Hollies, ‘Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress‘ (1972).

In Ferry’s vision – and as brought to a pinnacle of achievement on ‘For Your Pleasure’ – the entire repertoire of artistic influence and inspiration was there to be referenced in the creation of a new musical and stylistic form, as vivacious as it was sophisticated.
– Michael Bracewell, bryanferry.com (2010).

The Bracewell quote is hyperbole (perhaps), but there is little doubt that Ferry was on to something new and exciting in early 1973, both visually and lyrically, with the music of Roxy Music the critical and essential reason for getting involved in the first place. It is a given that Ferry had conceived Roxy Music as an escapist vehicle for himself – Northern small town kid trapped in working-class constraints of environment and thought (“My parents are the nicest people you could possibly meet, but they’re not in the least bit intellectual”) and in doing so released a younger generation of boys and girls who were stuck in exactly the same rut: a revolution was afoot, if only for weekend living.

As a vehicle of escape Roxy Music were successful on both fronts – for Ferry personally, the band’s success meant he could enjoy and explore new possibilities in the arts, travel, relationships, and pour that experience into his writing, which was developing at a rapid pace. Favoring a form of meta-analysis that internalized external experience through the prism of film, fashion, and painting, Roxy were not only conceived an Art Project, their composition strategy was to produce each song as an art work, that “vivacious” and “sophisticated” new stylistic musical form that Michael Bracewell speaks of in his gushing analysis above. And for the audience there was gold aplenty – that we were able to find our own way through the vehicle of Roxy Music was a key component of the band’s success: marking your own time travel while listening to classics such as ‘Beauty Queen‘ or ‘Dance Away‘ is time well spent (in our humble opinion).

Pop music is all about the sound – good music comes at you physically, you feel it most keenly in the body. When Etta James sings the first line of ‘At Last‘ the sound is heard by the ears and brain but felt by the heart. ‘Great Balls of Fire‘ is so aptly named it must must have been titled on purpose. (“Ass! It’s about GOD.” – Jerry Lee). You crave to hear the sound again and so you put on the record and start a conversation with yourself. You are all chatter, thoughts rolling above the surface – this artist is so good; that bass line incredible; I wish I could be him; is it Saturday yet? And you move toward the voice, and you want to know more about that person. Why are they singing? What are they singing? I like the sound of that voice. Did he just say zzzzzzzubb. Maybe. The cover is brilliant! And then you are hooked, and you want to know more about this world.

And then you are into the story, the Rock n’ Roll story, the Roxy Music story, composed and constructed, the telling of narratives past and future, and in the case of Roxy – the narrative of fantasy and style, quality and extravagant tastes. “Or, if you like, the lifestyles of the very rich,” as writer Richard Williams succinctly put it in the Roxy Music Story. Roxy appeal to youth in the same way that an early James Bond movie, say, Goldfinger, does, where the men are as suave with the ladies as the cut of their tux is immaculate, and the women are glamorous, all-powerful, mysterious and, unfailingly, deadly. Roxy create a narrative of escapist glamour that serves as subject and form and in doing so appeal to the snob in all of us. Yet this modis operandi would be tedious (as the Bond films become) if it weren’t for the incredible tension in the music and presentation, the abject weirdness of the pop sound that Mackay, Eno, Manzanera and Ferry create.

What captivates the body and mind with Roxy is the visceral impact and the tension inherent in the tunes – ‘Beauty Queen’, for example, is awash in layered synth that draws the listener in, but is cold to the touch – and Paul Thompson’s drumming is the bedrock that pulls the sound back into the body, supporting the instrumentation as it changes key, tempo, mood. “I found that interesting,” Bryan Ferry said of the abrupt changes and surprises in Roxy’s playing, “the band was perfect for that; they were game for anything” (BF, 2018). There’s more credit now given by the leader to the classic Roxy Music sound of ’72-’79. The narrative is being re-told and you and I are here to give it credence, to give it the gravitas needed as we continue to absorb its sound and power.

I. The Performance of Style

Between 8 February – 12 May 2013, the Tate Gallery Liverpool hosted an exhibition celebrating Glam, the visually extravagant pop style that exploded across Britain during the years 1971–5. High glam artists – Roxy, Bowie – were represented extensively and dominated such events as ‘Glamology‘, ‘Glamorama!’ ‘Glam Time‘ (for the toddlers) ‘Glam! 21st Century Factory‘ and even ‘Glam! 21st Century Factory – THE PREQUEL‘. Needless to say I would have given my right eye to have seen it, The Tate being a watermark of quality control and content. The title of the book published to support the three month exhibition was called The Performance of Style, and in this title is perhaps the best description of the Roxy Music approach ever put down on paper. The performance of style is a perfect description of the band’s art-rock manifesto for it covers the stylistic triad the band became famous for: i) Recorded music; ii) Live Performances; and iii) Stylistic Packaging. Few recording artists embody the fusion between music and art as completely and comfortably as Roxy Music, and Ferry in particular continues to describe himself as a “successful artist” rather than as a conventional rock star.

It is interesting to note that in America “Glam” was called “Glitter” and this difference points to the reason why it took Roxy until at least 1975 (‘Love is the Drug‘) to gain a following in the US. “Glitter rock” merely identifies one aspect of the Glam universe – the dressing up part – and neglects the notion of “glamour”, that self-conscious construction of lighting, mood, make-up, historical awareness of style in order to achieve impact and affect. Roxy started selling records in America when the band had smoothed out the edges, reduced the masks and uniforms to (albeit brilliant) dancable disco. The same was true of David Bowie, his first American hit (same year as ‘Love is the Drug’, 1975) required a new look/character in the form of the white soul boy of Young Americans. No androgyny, no space cowboys, no knowing winks at the camera. With an audience keen to experience something new, Glam in the UK was able to represent a wider range of artists, including those termed “Low Glam” – Sweet, Slade, the Glitter Band – and those termed “High Glam” – Roxy, Bowie, and (perhaps) Marc Bolan. The difference was contained in the variance between the “simple rock and roll revivalism of figures like Alvin Stardust and the complex art rock of Roxy Music” (Wiki).

Yet Roxy were even miles ahead even in this category, for not even Bowie himself can lay claim to the High Glam Crown: think for a moment of the Bowie album covers of early 70s – Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs – all representations of a personality (“character”) at a moment in time. Brilliant. Groundbreaking. But not a consistent representation of the Glam ideals, not in the same way that Roxy Music wrote and designed it. The influence, mechanics, and effect of Glamour and style was Roxy’s subject, whereas Bowie’s subject was himself, resulting in fractured expressions of personality (characters) that pushed fashion and sexual boundaries. Yes, Ziggy Stardust was a self-aware, even mocking tribute to musical and performance history, but compare the album covers of Ziggy with Roxy Music and you’ll spot the difference: Bowie’s Ziggy is a starman rent boy, slightly unkempt and dangerous, ready to rock, whereas Roxy’s take is all encoded style, a glamour doll caught by the flash of the camera mid-pose, purposely architected by referencing (and modernizing) 40s and 50s magazine cover styles. Both teasing, escapist fair of course – Bowie’s pose says you can rent me but you can’t buy me, while Roxy’s pose says you want me but you can’t have me – fantasies for young men and women, ready to take home, should you wish to buy the album for the pricely sum of £1.99.

The three-pronged approach to the performance of style was primarily felt at the musical level – Eno, Manzanera, Mackay, Ferry and Paul Thompson were writing and performing beyond standard rock, creating past/future/present postmodern epics in the form of Roxy Music/’Virginia Plain’/’Pyjamarama’, and the masterpiece being recorded, For Your Pleasure. The artistic branch of the strategy was delivered with a keen art-school avant-garde sensibility, executed to the highest standard by three of the band’s prime movers, Eno, Mackay, and Ferry (Ambient/No Pussyfooting/Oblique Strategies/Peter Schmidt/ ‘Electronic Music’/Dada-like disorganization/The White Album/Warhol/Richard Hamilton). And if this wasn’t enough, the final leg of this three-legged stool was defined by the work conceived and executed by the four members that sat outside of the band, a group of hungry young designers and artists who collaborated with Bryan Ferry to devise and deliver an enduring creative legacy and a new form of audience engagement that executed under the auspices of what came to be known as “the Roxy Machine”: fashion designer and image maker Antony Price; photographer Karl Stoecker; art director Nicholas Deville; and public relations literary libertine Simon Puxley.

The ‘Roxy Machine’ – from left, Price, Deville, Ferry, Stoecker, Puxley, (1973).

II. Antony Price: ‘One thing we share is an ideal of beauty’

I was inspired of course by Hollywood, as was Anthony, but we always like to think we were making something new out of it
– Bryan Ferry & Antony Price interview, 2013

When Gianni Versace was murdered outside his Miami mansion in July 1997, it was Roxy Music’s image maker and fashion designer Antony Price that was tipped to take over the billion dollar business (the job eventually went to Versace’s sister Donatella). The two fashion designers had much in common – successful artists with a craftsman’s eye and talent to mold fabric into something wearable and exciting, embodying the artisan’s ability to work with the tools of their trade – pencil, thimble, pin, machine and thread. Fashion artists like Versace and Antony Price make people feel good in their skin, fashioning and engineering clothes that contour and support the human body, while emphasizing the dramatic nature of their creations, mingling street style and high fashion with a heavy sexual element, reflecting what Stephen Gundle called in his book Glamour: A History “the mysterious and magical arts of glamorous transformation”. Versace though, emphasized a cheap sleaziness in the clothes (at a cost few could afford) and lived in almost obscene Roman opulence, setting a new bar for grotesque displays of wealth and celebrity (it’s no coincidence prima donna pal Elton John was a bud). In contrast, with classic British reserve, Price “shied away from the public stage” preferring to let his clothes speak for himself – when visiting his studio in 1994, the writer Chrissy Lley observed Price’s gentleness and love of nature –

Antony Price likes birds…his studio resounds to their high-pitched shrieks and swooping cries. On the first floor he works at his drawing board, flanked by papier-mache torsos and fabric samples, overlooking a central showroom with aviaries at each end. Inside the cages brilliantly coloured birds flicker to and fro, while at ground level two hulking cats prowl and lash their tails with desire and frustration. It would be an oversimplification to liken the birds to his glamorous clients and the cats to predatory males, but the image undeniably springs to mind.

And Bryan Ferry’s opinion of the man is the sort of tribute anyone would be proud to have as a legacy:

He is one of the most remarkably gifted people I have ever met, and an authority on a bewildering range of subjects. He is a master craftsman – quite rare in this day and age – and has quietly exerted an enormous influence on so many people. Although most of his work has been associated with urban nightlife, he is surprisingly a man of nature, an expert on exotic plants and rare birds and the niceties of human behaviour. To those who know him he is a constant source of amusement. In times of adversity, an incredibly loyal friend. (2008).

The biography reads that Antony Price studied at Bradford School of Art and then at the Royal College of Art, graduating with a distinction in 1968 and was immediately employed as menswear designer for a fashion cult label – The Rolling Stones were his first customers, with Jagger wearing his button trousers on the infamous ‘Gimme Shelter’ tour. The scene that Price had plugged into and was a deep part of, was loosely referred to as the ‘Notting Hill crowd’, David Hockney, Ossie Clark, Brian Morris. Price admits that he was a rising star behind Ossie Clark (the fashion hero of the swinging sixties), and he met future Roxy Music models Kari-Ann Mueller and Amanda Lear and future Roxy Machine photographer Karl Stoecker through the Notting Hill connection. The scene was bustling and inter-connected. The mood of the designers and artists was open and flamboyant, and crucially, they did not carry with them the hangover of the 60s into the 1970s the way other art forms did (such as rock music). This new generation of fashion aesthetes, Michael Bracewell points out, would be defined by the “strength of their work ethic as much as the flamboyance of their somewhat camp, almost quaintly English hedonism” (279).

Anthony Price muse Juliet Mann described the main draw for working hard was that it provided (paradoxically) an opportunity to indulge in game-playing, principally, escapism and glamour, a critically important concept to the young designers – “Oh dressing up!” Mann noted years later, “Dressing up! Always! Really, any excuse”:

At this time for us fashion and pop were all part of the same thing – although the fashion seemed more important. What you looked like was very carefully planned. There was a real love of Hollywood glamour, which was very important to Antony. For instance, I remember having a red wig and a blonde wig. The idea was to look like Rita Heyworth – a very film star idea. But importantly, even with all the glamour things that were going on, I always worked a 9-to-5 job as well! (Bracewell, p.279)

The idea of Glamour as a quality that you participate in even as a member of the 9-5 working crowd is an important idea, and we’ll come back to it. For Antony Price, the first company he worked for after graduating from The Royal College (“in menswear – unheard of at the time”) was fashion house Stirling Cooper (Mad Men fans will notice Don Draper’s agency has the same name, one letter changed) and that by all accounts Price was a dynamo at the company, designing men’s trousers, coats, waistcoats which drew “on sexual fetishism for their impact” (AP). Bryan Ferry was part of of the scene, and his introduction to the artists, designers and fashion innovators left him thrilled to be part of a new breed of ‘in-crowd’: “The first night I ever spent in London was in David Hockney‘s studio in Powis Terrace. I remember thinking that this was just fabulous: it seemed enormous to me, and I just remember sleeping in this huge studio…” (Bracewell, 277).

Price and Ferry met through the same circles at a nightclub enjoyed by the Notting Hill in-crowd, as Price recalls: “Bryan wanted me to do his album cover…he was secretive and artistic, yet he didn’t dress particularly outrageously. When we did shoots, it would be half the pictures with the band in their own clothes, and half in mine. Bryan always wanted to have another option, but he always liked mine in the end. All this business about me manipulating his image is nonsense. No one bossed or pushed; he’d asked everyone’s opinion. He was the batsman, I was the bowler” (SHOWstudio).

III. Roxy Music as a ‘State of Mind’

I thought, and still think, that pop music isn’t primarily about making music in any traditional sense of the word. It’s about creating new, imaginary worlds and inviting people to try them out
– Brian Eno, interview, 2007

Where I came from, Newcastle, is a rough part of the world with no possibility for anything but escape
– Bryan Ferry, interview, 1982

The critical concept to which Roxy Music subscribed was that they were to be styled and presented “above all, as a state of mind.” This quote from Ferry in 1975 accurately describes the group’s surround sound approach to pop presentation, consumer marketing and a new kind of conceptual imagination at work. The kicker was that the invitation was extended to the audience – you too could partake in this “imaginary world” if you worked to aspire to the codes of conduct. Good taste was paramount, as was intelligence and elegance. If you read or listen to interviews with fans of the band – Steve Jones, John Taylor, Siouxsie Sue – the common theme is that Roxy were a “cut-above”, infinitely more stylish and clever than their counter-parts. “The world we are talking about was a world obsessed with things clever,” noted Anthony Price, “and with spotting things clever.” Intelligence mixed with elegance, the appeal of engaging with the Roxy universe and in exchange being offered a role yourself, the paradoxical appeal of being a part of the in-crowd, of being in a club that, for once, would actually have you as a member.

Audience engagement and participation was essential to the Roxy Music aesthetic as it was to Glam in general. As the young fan Ruth says to her partner during a Roxy Music dance session “Think Roxy girl… I’m gonna be Bryan!” (Flashbacks). This identification was in part due to the invitation to dress up and follow the codes and performance of style so carefully laid out by their heroes. Gimme your hands! Glam idol Bowie spouts to his audience during ‘Rock N’ Roll Suicide’ (I’ll help you with the pain/You’re not alone/Just turn on with me, and you’re not alone/Gimme your hands, ’cause you’re wonderful). And as Roxy became the 1973 rock icons of note (“Roxy Mania!”) with Bryan Ferry‘s tuxedo becoming a signifier of intelligence, grace, and exclusivity, and it was in this regard that Antony Price‘s image and fashion design input was critical to the band’s success and the imaginary world that was being created, for he had his finger on the impulse of the band’s appeal: “Women are not aware of Roxy Music in the way that men are. It’s a man’s band. It’s always been a man’s band. And he (Ferry) is a man’s idol; the young men have always admired him, he’s what they aspire to, to have taste like that, to be in the rock business but still have taste and credibility, which is very thin on the ground in the rock business, darling, let’s face it.”

The extent to which the listener is drawn to the Roxy “state of mind” is dependent on his or her musical interest and tolerance for Aspiration and Drive as a key Roxy Music sub-text. Speaking very plainly and bluntly to Michael Bracewell in 2007, Ferry gave an honest precis of the Roxy state of mind, the aspiration and search for perfection that successfully merged the desires of the singer/writer with those of his fans/collaborators:

When you got old enough to have a girlfriend, or to go on a date, the only thing you did was take her to the pictures. But that was in the high street of Washington, where there were two cinemas – which were bigger, and had proper velveteen seats rather than benches. One was called the Regal, and the other the Ritz. None of them are there now. When I went to university I would go to the cinema club, which is where I became aware of cinema classics and film-as-art – all that kind of thing. Up until then it was film-as-entertainment. That was all you did – you didn’t have television. We were very poor, you see… So I think it’s fair to say that Roxy Music, from my point of view, would be the reverse of this background.

Greil Marcus in his book on Elvis Presley summarized this as the drive to “to lift yourself up, to escape the life you were born to, to escape the poverty… the strictures of a life that you were raised to accept as fate, to make yourself a new person not only in the eyes of the world, but finally in your own eyes too.” Roxy’s primary subject is the effect and impact of glamour, but it is equally keen to interrogate the need for glamour and transformation. The need for escapist glamour was particularly pronounced in the UK Northern towns in the 70s, the same towns that Ferry had been raised in, and therefore understood intuitively the needs and aspirations of the listeners and fan base. Having myself been partly raised in the coal mining areas of Kirkcaldy & Glenrothes (Fife, Scotland), the following observation by music critic Simon Reynolds rings true:

There’s a reason why Roxy Music’s most fervent fan bases were in industrial cities in the North of England – Sheffield, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle itself. Especially in the seventies, when industry was still relatively strong but brutalist housing estates and shopping schemes had replaced the old terraced communities and corner shops, these cities were the parts of the UK where the hunger for [a] ‘splash of light’ arched fiercest – Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and its Legacy (341).

In the same year 1973, Bryan Ferry would release a solo album the cover of which had a static beef-cake shot that advertised clearly and succinctly this is a solo record, and he is the sole star of the show. The Roxy Music covers on the other hand were conceived on a grander scale, intended to represent a lifestyle, a zeitgeist, a state of mind: architected as escapist cinema, directed, scripted, set-designed, and costumed to be full of life, stylized, pulled from the front page of a movie magazine. There is movement in all the shots, intrusion, discovery, even judgement and morality. Consider Kari-Ann Muller on the cover of Roxy Music, extravagantly posed, caught by the flash of camera bulb and looking straight at you – you, taking the picture, interrupting the scene, voyeuristically gazing at all that accentuated, off-centered, cheesy glamour. Stranded – come rescue, if you dare, the damsel in distress (post-plane crash, this vamp will eat you alive). Or stumble down the back lanes of Country Life, the women once again caught in your headlights, blinded, taken off-guard, lack of clothing necessitating – dependent on your instincts – interrogation or rescue. And Siren – unable to resist the song of the sirens, you have purchased The Fifth Roxy Music Album, and now you have stumbled upon a new narrative, as the Siren sets you in her sights and snakes across the rocks towards you.

All of these subjects look directly at you dear reader, they stare into your eyes as you take the picture, rescue the damsel, stumble into dodgy goings-on in the countryside, or quake in fear before the siren ensnares you. In each of these short-stories the viewer inhabits the role of the protagonist, photographer, intruder, historian, and, quite possibly, victim. 19th century English poet and writer Walter Copland Perry had this to say about the song of the Siren, the temptress:

Their song, though irresistibly sweet, was no less sad than sweet, and lapped both body and soul in a fatal lethargy, the forerunner of death and corruption.

III. The For Your Pleasure cover

– Bryan Ferry, interview, 2013

Next: Beauty Queen: Cover Art – Part 2

Credits

Femme fatale Ava Gardener; Roxy Music fan pen drawing; Brian Eno by Karl Stoecker; Rita Heyworth/Kari-Ann Muller; the Roxy Machine in 1973; Antony Price collage, SHOWstudio; coffee shop Balans in Miami beach, close to where photographer Karl Stoecker’s work is on “indefinite display”; Northern town collage, Glenrothes Town Center, Fife Scotland/early 70s UK street scene; Siren/Stranded/Country Life (the Roxy Machine, 75, 73, 74); Mermaid/Rescue/Two Girls: Harry Clarke’s Illustrations for Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1919)

A song-by-song analysis of the lyrics and music of Roxy Music and the solo work of Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, Andy Mackay and Phil Manzanera in the 1970s

Category Archives: For Your Pleasure