Track of the Week: Roxy Music: For Your Pleasure (1973)
Roxy Music sounded like no one before them. They ransacked and pillaged popular culture, mixing the avant-garde with the kitsch, chewing up and spitting out musical and lyrical cliches into a new, warped and twisted yet riotously fun concoction, pioneering what would become glam-rock. All this was driven by the tensions between Brian Ferry, ice-cool sci-fi would-be 50's crooner, and Brian Eno, synthesiser innovator with a career of wild sonic experimentation ahead of him. Such conflict ensured that this line-up of the band would not last long, with Eno soon growing bored with the limitations of the Roxy format and Ferry wanting to take the music in a more conventional direction, and, sure enough, after the band's second album Eno departed for his solo career. On reflection, perhaps this was for the best, as the early experimental Roxy utterly nailed their style on these two albums. 'For Your Pleasure' is the closing and title track on the second album, and, some 30 years later, despite the myriad of glam-rock and post-punk bands taking their musical cues from Roxy, it still sounds utterly weird and alien.
The song opens with an austere, tribal tom-tom rhythm, before the band enters, with Ferry singing one of his more cryptic lyrics. After each quite short verse, the band pauses, and we are left with an ominous silence, before the tom-toms lead us back into the next line. This happens four times, once without even any lyrics, before the band adopts a different tune for the next three verses, interspersed with the same pauses. The instruments are all treated by Eno, changing the length and decay of the sounds more and more as the song continues, creating uneasy wobbles and strange echoes. Ferry's lyrics are the usual string of garbled cliches, with dark horses hiding and night stars shining brightly, seemingly meaningless. Sung in an emotionally wracked, quivering voice, the way the lyric's very meaninglessness contrasts with the over-riding dark intensity of the music becomes sinister - just what is he on about? As the music becomes more and more warped by Eno's tape effects, Ferry's wish 'I hope thing's will turn out right' seems more and more futile. Then everything stops, and Ferry sings in a very low voice right near the bottom of his register, slow and deliberately, almost unaccompanied apart from the occasional stray piano note from Eno, 'Old man / Through every step I change / You watch me walk away / Tara....' A chorus of multi-tracked vocals take up the refrain, endlessly repeating 'Tara' over and over again, with absolutely no hint of emotion in their voices. The rest of the band enters, replete with dramatic rolling tom-toms as guitarist Phil Manzanera quietly playing a sinister solo in the background. Eno's tape effects mutate and distort the sound, transforming the music into a violent whirlpool of noise that eventually swallows everything. As the song finishes we are left the swirling tape effects, sounding like a fleet of helicopters, whilst the amassed vocals stop saying words and are transformed into a heavenly choir. An old woman's voice comes out of nowhere and whispers, 'Don't ask why.' And the song fades out. It sounds like the end of the world, both terrifying and strangely uplifting. But is this a suggestion of life beyond the grave or just a hymn to the end of everything? The music firmly refuses to give any answers.
The song is very much a starting point for Eno's later ambient and sound manipulation experiments that he would pursue in his later years, and, in its sinister atmosphere, perhaps a direct precedent for the more sinister and far-our Associates songs. It was certainly important in incorporating the use of tape effects into popular music, and as such it provided a starting point for future experiments in electronic music, from Cabaret Voltaire to This Heat and onwards. This song terrified me when I first heard it as an impressionable 11 year old, and it still does till this day. I would dearly like to know what the song is about, but I guess that would kind of be missing the point - the song's apocalyptic power and haunting beauty is an end in itself. As the disembodied voice at the end says, 'Don't ask why.'
The song opens with an austere, tribal tom-tom rhythm, before the band enters, with Ferry singing one of his more cryptic lyrics. After each quite short verse, the band pauses, and we are left with an ominous silence, before the tom-toms lead us back into the next line. This happens four times, once without even any lyrics, before the band adopts a different tune for the next three verses, interspersed with the same pauses. The instruments are all treated by Eno, changing the length and decay of the sounds more and more as the song continues, creating uneasy wobbles and strange echoes. Ferry's lyrics are the usual string of garbled cliches, with dark horses hiding and night stars shining brightly, seemingly meaningless. Sung in an emotionally wracked, quivering voice, the way the lyric's very meaninglessness contrasts with the over-riding dark intensity of the music becomes sinister - just what is he on about? As the music becomes more and more warped by Eno's tape effects, Ferry's wish 'I hope thing's will turn out right' seems more and more futile. Then everything stops, and Ferry sings in a very low voice right near the bottom of his register, slow and deliberately, almost unaccompanied apart from the occasional stray piano note from Eno, 'Old man / Through every step I change / You watch me walk away / Tara....' A chorus of multi-tracked vocals take up the refrain, endlessly repeating 'Tara' over and over again, with absolutely no hint of emotion in their voices. The rest of the band enters, replete with dramatic rolling tom-toms as guitarist Phil Manzanera quietly playing a sinister solo in the background. Eno's tape effects mutate and distort the sound, transforming the music into a violent whirlpool of noise that eventually swallows everything. As the song finishes we are left the swirling tape effects, sounding like a fleet of helicopters, whilst the amassed vocals stop saying words and are transformed into a heavenly choir. An old woman's voice comes out of nowhere and whispers, 'Don't ask why.' And the song fades out. It sounds like the end of the world, both terrifying and strangely uplifting. But is this a suggestion of life beyond the grave or just a hymn to the end of everything? The music firmly refuses to give any answers.
The song is very much a starting point for Eno's later ambient and sound manipulation experiments that he would pursue in his later years, and, in its sinister atmosphere, perhaps a direct precedent for the more sinister and far-our Associates songs. It was certainly important in incorporating the use of tape effects into popular music, and as such it provided a starting point for future experiments in electronic music, from Cabaret Voltaire to This Heat and onwards. This song terrified me when I first heard it as an impressionable 11 year old, and it still does till this day. I would dearly like to know what the song is about, but I guess that would kind of be missing the point - the song's apocalyptic power and haunting beauty is an end in itself. As the disembodied voice at the end says, 'Don't ask why.'
posted by Jonathan Thornton at 1:43 pm
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