Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure

Amongst the albums considered influential to alternative music in the 1990's, one of the most overlooked is Roxy Music's second album For Your Pleasure.

Ferry, Eno et al combine to produce one of the most exhilarating insights into debauched suburban dystopia of the 1970's.

This small town glamour aesthetic is felt strongest on In Every Dream Home a Heartache, the stand out track half way through the album.  Bryan Ferry's paean to a plastic inflatable sex doll. 

"Immortal and life size; my breath is inside you"

There is something truly compelling and sinister about Ferry's delivery in this song.  Is the doll purely an object for sexual pleasure or does it represent something far more darker?  Does Ferry's "perfect companion" with "skin like vinyl" represent a lack of fulfillment in human relationships generally?

"I blew up your body; but you blew my mind"

In Every Dream Home a Heartache also provides one of the most dramatic endings of any Roxy Music song.  A multi layered song that deals with our own personal isolation in an unforgiving universe.

For Your Pleasure is far more than a one trick pony however. Whereas the likes of Strictly Confidential, The Bogus Man and the title track are amongst Roxy Music's most experimental work, Editions of You, Grey Lagoons and Do the Strand are up there with their easily accessible output. 

"One thing we share; is an ideal of beauty"

For Your Pleasure's influence on 90's alternative music was greatest on bands that may be considered "intellectual romantics".  Bands who dreamed of escape to the big city.  Searching for a twisted glamour and decadence as depicted by the cover image of For Your Pleasure.  Pulp and Suede were the most successful, yet the impact can also be found on bands with more modest success such as Strangelove, Denim and Marion.

"The memory of your face; deep in the night; plying very strange cargo"

Ferry approaches Beauty Queen with a nonchalant swagger clearly later imitated by Brett Anderson and Jarvis Cocker.  Along with David Bowie, early period Roxy Music is one of the first truly successful attempts in British popular music to perfect an image for beautiful losers and draw people to the outsider chic. 

Songs like In Every Dream Home a Heartache would not appear out of place on 90's albums like Dog Man Star, and like that more contemporary example, For Your Pleasure signified the untimely end of a successful musical association.

In both cases, fans were left wondering what might have been.  For our pleasure, we have to console ourselves with what is left.