- Do The Strand
- Beauty Queen
- Strictly Confidential
- Editions Of You
- In Every Dream Home A Heartache
- The Bogus Man
- Grey Lagoons
- For Your Pleasure
The Beautiful Abyss
With their second album, For Your Pleasure (1973), Roxy Music didn’t just refine their art - they shattered their own reflection and assembled something darker, stranger, and infinitely more alluring. If their debut had the thrill of invention, this one has the chill of obsession. It is an album steeped in artifice, desire, and alienation - an immaculate fever dream where glamour turns introspective and pleasure becomes both promise and threat.
Bryan Ferry, by now a master of self-mythology, glides through the record like a man serenading his own fantasies. His voice - part seducer, part confessor - teeters between irony and sincerity, making every gesture feel like both performance and revelation. Around him, Roxy Music sound like no other band on Earth. The precision of Phil Manzanera’s guitar, Andy Mackay’s saxophone theatrics, and Paul Thompson’s crisp drumming coexist with Brian Eno’s mercurial electronics - textures that hum, shimmer, and occasionally implode. Together they create a sound world that is both cinematic and claustrophobic, full of tension and elegance.
Where the debut dazzled with its collage of styles, For Your Pleasure feels sculpted and deliberate. It’s a nocturnal album, one that glows softly under artificial light. The band seems to have discovered that style can be substance - that performance itself can convey emotion as deeply as confession. The music suggests movement through empty cities at midnight, through corridors of mirrors, through the loneliness that lies beneath the shimmer of fame.
This is also the record where Roxy’s paradox becomes most pronounced: decadence as discipline, irony as empathy, detachment as passion. Ferry and Eno pull in opposite directions - the former yearning for romance, the latter fascinated by abstraction - and it is in this creative friction that the album finds its enduring power. The result is art pop at its most sublime: polished, self-aware, but charged with real human ache.
For Your Pleasure closes the door on the naive thrill of the debut and opens one into a more mature and enigmatic space. It’s an album about transformation, about what happens when fantasy becomes identity and beauty begins to blur into something uncanny. Many decades later, it still sounds impossibly modern - proof that Roxy Music weren’t chasing the future; they were inventing it.
Bryan Ferry, by now a master of self-mythology, glides through the record like a man serenading his own fantasies. His voice - part seducer, part confessor - teeters between irony and sincerity, making every gesture feel like both performance and revelation. Around him, Roxy Music sound like no other band on Earth. The precision of Phil Manzanera’s guitar, Andy Mackay’s saxophone theatrics, and Paul Thompson’s crisp drumming coexist with Brian Eno’s mercurial electronics - textures that hum, shimmer, and occasionally implode. Together they create a sound world that is both cinematic and claustrophobic, full of tension and elegance.
Where the debut dazzled with its collage of styles, For Your Pleasure feels sculpted and deliberate. It’s a nocturnal album, one that glows softly under artificial light. The band seems to have discovered that style can be substance - that performance itself can convey emotion as deeply as confession. The music suggests movement through empty cities at midnight, through corridors of mirrors, through the loneliness that lies beneath the shimmer of fame.
This is also the record where Roxy’s paradox becomes most pronounced: decadence as discipline, irony as empathy, detachment as passion. Ferry and Eno pull in opposite directions - the former yearning for romance, the latter fascinated by abstraction - and it is in this creative friction that the album finds its enduring power. The result is art pop at its most sublime: polished, self-aware, but charged with real human ache.
For Your Pleasure closes the door on the naive thrill of the debut and opens one into a more mature and enigmatic space. It’s an album about transformation, about what happens when fantasy becomes identity and beauty begins to blur into something uncanny. Many decades later, it still sounds impossibly modern - proof that Roxy Music weren’t chasing the future; they were inventing it.
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My personal view:
For Your Pleasure was their last to feature synthesizer and sound specialist Brian Eno, who would later gain acclaim as a solo artist and producer. For their sophomore effort, Roxy Music pulled out all the stops, delivering one of the most experimental records of the seventies full of tape loops and other musical gimmicks - and that for a band who appeared on Top of the Pops..... The hit single Do The Strand and Ferry's surreal love song to a blow up doll In Every Dream Home A Heartache are the highlights, but the complete album is brilliant - possibly my favourite from their discography.