{"id":218494,"date":"2026-10-28T18:45:28","date_gmt":"2026-10-28T17:45:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/siteproxy.ruqli.workers.dev:443\/https\/recordcollectormag.com\/?p=218494"},"modified":"2026-10-28T18:49:45","modified_gmt":"2026-10-28T17:49:45","slug":"roxy-music-for-your-pleasure-super-deluxe-edition-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/siteproxy.ruqli.workers.dev:443\/https\/recordcollectormag.com\/reviews\/roxy-music-for-your-pleasure-super-deluxe-edition-review","title":{"rendered":"Roxy Music | For Your Pleasure: Super Deluxe Edition | Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

Few images are so freighted with romantic myth-making than that of the secluded artist working feverishly away at their next masterpiece. So picture Bryan Ferry in a remote Derbyshire cottage in the autumn of 1972, covering sheets of paper with his looping script and committing song ideas to a tape recorder, as upcoming tour dates force a deadline on penning new material for Roxy Music<\/strong>\u2019s second album. Picture, too, a band that thought nothing of crediting temporary bassist John Porter as \u201cguest artiste\u201d, and which numbered in their ranks a flamboyant synth wizard going only as \u201cEno\u201d, whose sartorial preferences leaned towards designs that would require the ornate tailfeathers of the Australian lyrebird. Self-mythologising and romanticism was always part of the deal with Roxy Music Mk I, which makes the release of work-in-progress recordings such as Ferry\u2019s demos and band rehearsals at AIR Studios a calculated risk: could lifting the veil diminish the impact of the finished work?<\/p>\n\n

Absolutely not. Writing for this super-deluxe edition\u2019s hefty book, which features essays, original lyric sheets, cover-shoot outtakes and a period timeline, Damien Love ranks For Your Pleasure<\/strong> among the \u201cgreatest second albums\u201d. But let\u2019s call it what it is: one of the greatest albums of all time. And, in an era when AI tools are forcing us to reckon with notions of creativity \u2013 from what it means to perform a creative act, to who retains ownership of the results, and what can even rightly be regarded as \u201cart\u201d \u2013 the value here lies not only in allowing for a deeper understanding of how this bar-raising record came to be, but also in reminding us that it\u2019s entirely possible for a group of human beings to assemble in a room and pull something so wantonly strange and otherworldly from their own brains. Making good on the promise of Roxy\u2019s debut album, For Your Pleasure<\/strong> was both a hit and an artistic triumph, going to No 4 in the UK charts around the same time that Pink Floyd launched The Dark Side Of The Moon<\/em>, David Bowie unshackled Aladdin Sane<\/em> and Led Zeppelin opened the doors to Houses Of The Holy<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n

An air of reverence hangs over the demos included here, their intimacy underscored when a poorly timed phone call interrupts Ferry, at home in his London flat, as he tests the contours of the shimmering ballad Beauty Queen<\/em>. The brrring of a landline may sound all too commonplace against Ferry\u2019s yearning croon, but the incident becomes almost perfectly Roxy when the singer picks up the receiver and discovers there\u2019s no one there. Dadaist prank or discreet haunting? Certainly, Ferry seems capable of tapping into other realms: an instrumental sketch of For Your Pleasure<\/strong>\u2019s eventual centrepiece, In Every Dream Home A Heartache<\/em>, finds him winding a wraithlike guitar line around haunted-house Farfisa to anxiety-inducing effect. Whether fashioning a prototype Editions Of You<\/em> or pounding through a rough\u2019n\u2019ready Do The Strand<\/em>, Ferry had the frameworks of five new songs that would make up Side One of the album \u2013 against a trio of earlier tunes to round the record off \u2013 by the time recording sessions started, in January 1973. Without knowing that their frontman would soon use Dream Home as a vehicle for commenting on dead-eyed consumerism through a tale of infatuation with a blow-up doll, Roxy took his request for a \u201cpsychedelic\u201d ending and handed him back something positively orgasmic. There\u2019s no such release in a 12-minute jam on The Bogus Man<\/em>, however, throughout which Andy Mackay\u2019s lung-busting sax goes toe-to-toe with Eno\u2019s mechanical synth bleeps amid an unhinged take on what, in its finished guise, maintained some poise amid the madness. It\u2019s as if someone had decided that the day\u2019s challenge was to find a meeting point between Germany\u2019s \u201cKosmische Musik\u201d and early-70s Miles Davis.<\/p>\n\n

Not that Roxy couldn\u2019t harness the power of a pure pop song; it\u2019s just that they couldn\u2019t help themselves from deconstructing the notion of \u201cpop music\u201d as they did so. Drummer Paul Thompson roughhouses the band through Editions Of You<\/em>, the song\u2019s cyclical structure all but sending the group spinning off its own axis; Eno and guitarist Phil Manzanera, in particular, propel Roxy forward half a decade, into the new wave. Elsewhere, helping the album stake its claim to another \u201call-timer\u201d status \u2013 that of the greatest-ever opening tracks \u2013 Do The Strand<\/em> manages to be art-pop manifesto, postmodern dance tune and scenester call to arms all at once, and that\u2019s before you unpack the reference points that Simon Puxley, the band\u2019s then publicist, identified in the lyrics, in an unseriously serious track-by-track breakdown written at the time of For Your Pleasure<\/strong>\u2019s release.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cRhododendron\/Is a nice flower\u201d may be one of the more unusual non sequiturs you\u2019ll hear in a song, but don\u2019t be fooled by this aesthete\u2019s outburst. Roxy were, indeed, trading in \u201cStrand power\u201d. Ferry\u2019s tremulous falsetto delivery of the album\u2019s title track, as heard on a November 1972 Peel Session, would prove to be short-lived, and live performances from the era underscore what a formidable outfit Roxy had become. Across the in-concert footage included on this set\u2019s DVD, Eno, Manzanera and Mackay routinely battle for the place of chief disruptor: Manzanera throws out dextrous solos and proto-punk thrash with equal ease; Eno uses everything from tape loops and a mini joystick to warp sound in real time; and Mackay, all wayward skronk and avant-pop interjections, is visibly unable to supress a smile at the sheer audacity of it all. For his part, moving from side to centre-stage, Ferry grows increasingly assured as a frontman, using his face as much as any other part of his body to shapeshift with the requirements of each song. Meanwhile, Thompson\u2019s drumming provides the rock-solid foundation that keeps the whole unlikely experiment from falling apart. And everyone looks nothing short of badass all the time.<\/p>\n\n

More glamorous than \u201cglam\u201d, finding the darkness among the glitter, yet radiating beauty and the pure joy of creation, For Your Pleasure<\/strong> remains as beguilingly confounding today as it was 53 years ago. Eight months after its release, Eno would be gone, Ferry would have launched his parallel solo career, and Roxy would have introduced their Mk II incarnation with their third album, Stranded<\/em>. In exposing the inner workings of the group at a pivotal moment, this is the real-deal box set For Your Pleasure<\/strong> deserves. Every dream home should have one.<\/p>\n\n

Jason Draper<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t