Day 278.
Can................................Future Days   (1973)








This will be short and sweet, unlike side 2 of this album.  Track 3 was the only half decent number on the album in my humbles, the other three were over indulgent, self satisfying noise, in fact I'm sure on track 2 "Spray" the chap below chipped in with a virtuoso performance, I don't know if it should be called percussion or concussion.









Anyways this heap of shite wont be going in my collection.  



Bits & Bobs;

Wrote about this mob before (if interested)



A review, make of it what you will?


You know the story, a band has one album that completely crowds over everything they've done, and while their other material is just as special, it seems to sadly get pushed aside. On many experimental listeners' favourite album lists, you are likely to see Can's Tago Mago near the top, if not at the top. While Tago Mago is a perfectly superb album with an abundance of positive points, I've always held the criminally underrated Future Days in higher regards. Tago Mago is a crazy album, but not one that is easily accessible whatever the mood. Future Days trims the fat from Tago Mago and turns down the "out there" level that made the album so different into a psychedelic ambient flow.




Future Days' sound is nearer to Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk than their krautrock peers Faust, but still manages to display all the habits that krautrock bands seem to encompass. As you may have noticed, Future Days has only four tracks, making it very concise even though the songs are generally long. The relaxing nature and the hallucinogenic euphoria of the LP makes the album duration go in rather quickly. There is a downplay of guitar gain and solid drum patterns but the instrumental execution fits in nicely with the fragile, subtle nature that is present. Future Days is one song and a set of three structured jams. The one song here, "Moonshake", is a delightful take on psychedelic surf but while being one of Can's shortest songs, it is admittedly the worst track here.




The best song proceeds "Moonshake" in the form of "Bel Air", a 20 minute sprawl of exhilarating bliss. The first quarter of the track features quivers of gentle pulsating, eventually transforming into a jamfest of epic proportions. With several minutes of compulsive noodling, the track soon reverts back to the gentle pulsating heard before, except more intense. The track finishes itself off with some luscious Tago Mago style playing that closes the record off. The first two tracks don't manage to live up to "Bel Air" but accent interesting guitar tones and percussion. Title track "Future Days" is a faultless opener that eases the listener into the whole atmosphere the album embraces, featuring very original Jaki Liebezeit world percussion playing. But while "Future Days" comprehends original playing, "Spray" is clearly Jaki's best work on the album. He plays with a strong intensity that would make the song not be as effective if he was absent.




Future Days will sadly not be remembered quite as well as Tago Mago, but for some this may be a new discovery from the other end of the musical spectrum. Sure, it doesn't feature the dark, bleak atmosphere of the band's considered magnum opus, but it does have the will to groove and settle into a euphoric background. The prominence of keyboards also add to this band's forever expanding sound, as is the band's disinterest in rocking out. Future Days is an artistic triumph that the band would never manage to reach after this period. Let's be happy they made this before falling off the ladder.



Following Future Days, Suzuki got married to a Jehovah's Witness and left the band.


"Future Days is for me the best album I made with Can," vocalist Damo Suzuki has said. "Because it was very easy to quit from Can after that album. I wanted nothing from them after that. Musically, I was very satisfied."

Can were an eclectic band at the forefront of the Krautrock movement, combining avant-garde tendencies with rock trappings and funk-inflected rhythms.

 American visual artist and Can’s original vocalist Malcolm Mooney allegedly named the band as a sort of “can-do” mantra
    

"I named it Can because I can do it! I’m in Cologne and the band is starting to play every day. I can stand at this mic and I can make up lyrics—I can do this."

PatReilly wrote:

Jeez, the review you've copied had Moonshake as the worst of the four tracks on the Can album: it's the only one which comes close to being a proper tune. In fact, it is a decent wee song, the rest are just experimental jams.

 

Forgot to delete that bit, with you on "Moonshake" I fair enjoyed it, and no' over long to.

DAY 279.
Lou Reed......................................Berlin   (1973)








For starters have gotta tell ya the first playing of this album wasn't an easy ride, Lou Reed takes you into places that at times makes you feel uncomfortable and somewhat voyeuristic, and with his style of vocals fitting hand in glove, on this haunting but equally absorbing concept album.


I've played this album several times mostly reading the lyrics as it plays, I know this wont be everyones cup of tea but for me this album has grown more on me with every spin, anyone who has read my ramblings will know I've a soft spot for Reed, you know that he'll take you into a seedy, drug infested violent world with nothing sacred, but this in my humbles is the darkest offering I've heard from him.


If you are looking for something light to listen to, this aint it but if you want a very interesting album that draws the listener in emotionally this is your boy, some of the tracks really got me and even if you haven't been in the position of Jim and Caroline, you can somehow relate to it.


This album tells a story and although not an everyday one, a well written and executed one, I feel I shouldn't like this and but that's maybe beauty of it, every track had it's merits and as often said Reed's voice just jacks up the atmospheric background to his lyrics, "The Kids" and "The Bed are two of the most joyless Reed offerings I think I've ever heard yet, but find delicate and intense at the same time.


I would highly recommend you give this a listen, for as harrowing as the subject matter is this is in my humbles is a superb album.


This album will be going into my collection.



Does anyone else see a similarity here;










If no' a couple o' great tracks anyways!



Bits & Bobs
Have written about Mr Reed previously (if interested)



This how it went down in '73, from "Rolling Stone"


Lou Reed's Berlin is a disaster, taking the listener into a distorted and degenerate demimonde of paranoia, schizophrenia, degradation, pill-induced violence and suicide. There are certain records that are so patently offensive that one wishes to take some kind of physical vengeance on the artists that perpetrate them. Reed's only excuse for this kind of performance (which isn't really performed as much as spoken and shouted over Bob Ezrin's limp production) can only be that this was his last shot at a once-promising career. Goodbye, Lou.

How views change;


500 Greatest Albums of All Time


Rolling Stone's definitive list of the 500 greatest albums of all time


.By Rolling StoneMay 31, 2012



344. Lou Reed, 'Berlin'RCA, 1973


Reed followed up his breakthrough album, Transformer, with "my version of Hamlet." A bleak song cycle about an abusive, drug-fueled relationship, it's hugely ambitious but also one of the darker records ever made – slow, druggy and heavily orchestrated by producer Bob Ezrin.

Pricks!



"Berlin"


“Berlin”, the opening track of Lou Reed’s third solo studio album, introduces us to the album’s main characters, Jim and Caroline and also wakes an impression of the setting and the nature of their relationship.

"I’m writing these songs and a character appears in a song and then disappears forever. And we’d thought; “Why does he or she disappear forver? Why can’t they re-appear in the next song or the song after?” That was the basic idea."



"Lady Day"


“Lady Day” is told from Jim’s perspective. Jim is one of the three characters in Berlin (the others being Caroline and The Waterboy, who is probably an alter ego of Jim). Of all tracks, this one probably describes Caroline’s need for seeking out external validation the best. She’s drawn to the warm allure of a bar. It starts out innocently enough, as she goes in merely to sing, but by the second stanza, we see her exhibitionist side coming out, as “she climbed down off the bar”.



"Men Of Good Fortune"


“Men of Good Fortune” is about the unfair and unalterable differences between the rich and the poor. Although it’s somewhat disconnected from the album’s narrative, it remains a powerful song with a depressing but veracious message.



 "Caroline Says l"

Before eventually putting it on “Berlin,” Lou Reed had recorded many variants of this song with The Velvet Underground. It tells us about Caroline’s treatment of Jim and is again told from Jim’s perspective. Because of that, the song creates the illusion that Caroline is the evil-doer in their stormy relationship.
 Caroline Says II shows us another side of the story though. Still, Jim underlines (in this version) that he still loves her, whatever she does or says.



"How Does It Feel"


. In this song, Lou Reed describes his struggles with speed (presumably methamphetamine) addiction. The song’s titular question is a rhetorical one in which the Listener is asked “How do you think speed addiction feels?” Probably bad.



"Oh Jim"


 “Oh Jim” showcases a conversation between Jim and the other inmate besides Caroline-presumably the Waterboy. There’s some speculation on who the Waterboy is exactly; there’s theories that it is actually an alter ego of Jim. If that’s true, he’s actually talking to himself in this song.
 The first part of the song consist of Jim lecturing the Waterboy, and then suddenly, the music slows down as the Waterboy responses. This part is rewriting from the Velvet Underground's song “Oh, Gin”.



"Caroline Says ll"
 It is a re-write of "Stephanie Says," which Reed recorded with The Velvet Underground.The song is about the album’s female protagonist and her disintegrating relationship with the album’s male protagonist Jim.



"The Kids"


 “The Kids,” one of Berlin’s hardest-hitting tracks, was initially inspired by Lou’s then-wife, Bettye Kronstad, who had been taken by the state from her mother at the age of five. Reed’s co-opting of her childhood trauma for the sake of the record’s story disturbed Kronstad, whose relationship with Reed had already proved the basis for much of the album’s content.
 The children heard crying near the end of the track were actually producer Bob Ezrin’s kids. According to one urban legend, Ezrin had drawn out their reactions by telling them that their mother had been killed; this, of course, is completely untrue.



"The Bed"


This is the place where she lay her head
When she went to bed at night
And this is the place our children were conceived
Candles lit the room at night

And this is the place where she cut her wrists
That odd and fateful night
And I said, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, what a feeling
And I said, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, what a feeling


Chilling lyrics.



"Sad Song"



Staring at my picture book
She looks like Mary, Queen of Scots
She seemed very regal to me
Just goes to show how wrong you can be

I'm gonna stop wastin' my time
Somebody else would have broken both of her arms

Sad song, Sad song, Sad song, Sad song

The End.





 

I think we're back up to date now 

That Lou Reed album was pretty deadly, but you are right about the song structures of the two numbers posted above. Mind you, a lot of songs sound like other songs in parts.

One of my pals was right into Genesis, even shaving a patch on his head to look like Peter Gabriel at the time



As a result, I listened to them quite a bit, and went to see them once: great stage show, it has to be said.

That Selling England by the Pound was odd, in that it was released just a few weeks after their label put out Genesis Live, which was budget priced. I preferred that to the studio disc, mostly because I'd liked a few tunes on the previous albums, which, in my view, were far better than Selling England. I think Genesis were evolving into something else by 1973, although there were a few memorable songs on the next album too.

The American influence on this list maybe explains why Selling England is on it, while far superior earlier records like Foxtrot and Trespass missed out.

But they were becoming shit for me by the mid seventies. Finally, A/C, that's a wee bit snobbery from you talking down folk you think are snobs..................  

 

DAY 282.
John Martyn...................................Solid Air    (1973)










Rather than folk or jazz or blues, this album is instead a dusky alchemy of all three and represents  a career performance from Martyn who sings with wonderfully grizzled sincerity on this after hours classic.


Will do this and Marvin Gaye the night.

Last edited by arabchanter (18/5/2018 2:11 pm)

DAY 282.
John Martyn...................................Solid Air    (1973)









This is the first time I have listened to John Martyn, I'd heard of him but had this thing in my head telling me guitarist and his style was instrumentals, well I've got that wrong if this album is anything to go by. I also thought he was Scottish, but it seems he's English albeit, spending most of his formative years in the Queen's Park district of Glasgow, before heading down to London,one of his party pieces was to segue between broad Cockney and broad Glaswegian in the course of one sentence.


Anyways back to the album, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed it and think it may be a grower, it easily flirts between styles and genres, and Martyn vocal range can change at will, with what seems the minimum of effort.


I particularly enjoyed "Over the Hill," "Don't Want to Know," "May You Never" and especially liked "The Easy Blues" although none of the tracks were hard to listen to.


This album will be going on the subbies bench, as still not sure I would want to buy the vinyl, I need to play it a few more times then decide.



Bits & Bobs;
Martyn was born Iain David McGeachy in New Malden, Surrey in 1948, but grew up in the Queen's Park district of Glasgow. His parents, both light-opera singers, divorced when he was five, and he was brought up by his father, Tommy, and paternal grandmother, Janet. The household was a cultured and reasonably affluent one, and Martyn's boyhood interests included ornithology and the paintings of the French Impressionists. But his parents' divorce, cited by his biographer John Neil Munro as the source of "a deep dark hurt", had a lasting effect on him.


 Following his hero, the folk-guitar virtuoso Davy Graham, to London (Graham died in December 2008), the aspiring singer-songwriter left Shawlands Academy with decent qualifications but occasionally slept rough in Trafalgar Square while honing his live act on Soho's folk-cellar circuit. He signed to Island Records in 1967 aged 19 and would enjoy a long tenure at Chris Blackwell's exemplary imprint, his uncompromising, shape-shifting music taking in folk, jazz, funk, dub and more.





But it is for his 1973 masterpiece Solid Air that he will be remembered most. The influential album's sublime-sounding pastoral folk and jazz won admirers in Paul Weller and Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, not least for its spellbinding title track, which voiced touching concern for Martyn's friend and record label-mate, Nick Drake. A shy and vulnerable individual who was John Martyn's opposite in terms of temperament, Drake, English folk's tragic seer, would pass away 18 months later.



 Like him, Martyn had developed a masterful finger-picking technique on acoustic guitar, but the most celebrated aspect of his playing was his pioneering use of the Echoplex echo device, employed to mesmerising effect on his druggiest, most electric-sounding album, 1977's One World. Though scores of musicians, including Eric Clapton, delighted in working with Martyn, his most important musical foil was undoubtedly Pentangle's double-bassist, Danny Thompson. As 1975's Live at Leeds testifies, near telepathic interplay informed the pair's musical unions even when both players were roaring drunk.




Found this interview from '73, QI;


 John Martyn has made six albums, two with his wife Beverley, and after seven years he's just coming out into the sun. Critics in both Britain and America have been talking about him for a long time, and groups and singers record his songs – numbers like Would You Believe Me?, Bless The Weather, John the Baptist, Stormbringer and his signature tune Head And Heart.


Now, with his unmistakable vocal style and his increasingly extraordinary guitar technique, Martyn is beginning to reach the wider audience – and we can all sit back and watch him go.

 Recently returned from America, where he shared the bill on the recent Traffic tour, he bounced into a pub in Westbourne Park to tell me a thing or two – firstly about his last album, Solid Air, which reputedly took a long time to put together.


 "No, what happened was I did a lot of sessions with some very heavy super-starry people and didn't like it. I scrapped it, much to everyone's dismay. Consequently I left myself with about eight days in which to do the album – because the deal was that I had to have one to coincide with the American tour.

 "I'm not as pleased with it as I have been with previous ones, although vocally it was a step forward. I've never sung as good as on that record. But at the time I made it I was capable of singing even better – and playing better. It was all too rushed. The next one's going to be a lot heavier. There'll be more blowing on it from me. Previously, I've tended to let other people do most of the blowing. I mean, if you come out front when you're playing with good musicians, you're making an ego statement. My idea is that everyone, providing they're strong enough people, should impress their personality on the final sound."

 The last two albums have, on that level, been a record of the evolution of Martyn's interplay with string bassist Danny Thompson, a close and infinitely subtle relationship which reaches a peak on Solid Air with the final three minutes of I'd Rather Be the Devil.

 Says Martyn: "If you liked that, you'll really like the new album. I'm trying to get freer and less structured and Danny's the only cat I've found so far who can follow. I tend to play lead and rhythm and bass all together because of my background of solo experience in folk clubs, and musicians seem to find that hard to get into. Danny does it like second nature and it's been a gas to work with him."


 What about those folk clubs then?

 "I've moved out of them. I felt the whole movement restrictive. I mean,The Wild Rover is still unfortunately with us. The folk thing gets easily snookered and tends to run up its own ass a lot. Mentioning no names, most of the people who are being hailed today from the folk scene are playing bullshit, as far as I'm concerned. Traditional music is so strong, rhythmically and melodically, that I find electric instruments fight against the original values. They're there for dramatic effect. Like mutton dressed as lamb. The music's not meant for huge stages and loud volume. It's meant for intimate circumstances or small social settings. It's meant for your heart, not your head.

 "Very few people are trying to reach the heart these days. Even [John] McLaughlin fails 'cos he's trying to move the heart through the head – and that can't be done. But BB King, for example: he can be fucking boring, man, but he still plays those heart notes and when he's on his night he's going to blow your head off. Not many can do that these days. I tell you – I'm really hung up on heads and hearts."
 You think they're completely separate?
 "Yeah, I genuinely do. I mean, obviously they fuse together in your life, but they're two quite different things.
 "Say you see a photograph of a Biafran child with its bones sticking through its skin – you heart is what brings the tears to you eyes and makes you want to leave everything and to out there and feed that child. But your head says: Listen, man, there's millions of those and only one of you; stay here, do what you can, try and do it through the music, look after your own interests.

 "Initial reactions, to me, are heart reactions. I wouldn't trust head or heart finally, though. The closest I can get is that I use my head to temper the judgments of my heart. I feel strongly that there's a great dearth of heart everywhere right now. The drug culture has laid too heavy an emphasis on the expansion of the head. Sure, politics and practicality may prove your heart to be suspect at a given moment, but the power's still there.

 "Like, I'm married with two kids – and, quite literally, the most important things to me are my children's smile and my woman's love. The head is totally divorced from those. I suppose in some ways I'm a coward because I think that the more you think in today's society, the more you're gonna get fucked up. The point of my music is to pull people back to this heart thing. So many people have forgotten how important the heart is. Money's the root of the problem – the whole socio-economic thing. We've been conditioned to strive. We came out of school as so much economic cannon fodder. The heart was excluded from the start and we accepted it. We shouldn't, man, we just shouldn't take that shit.

 "It's all too easy for sensitive people to prostitute themselves in this society but pandering to the establishment is quite simply an evil choice. It's not good that someone like me should earn £250 a night when my father has to sweat his guts out for his £30 a week. But I'm not into bloody revolution, I'm interested in watching what's going on very carefully.

 "Bowie's a poseur, too. I don't think he's lived a quarter of the things he sings about and, to me, living it is crucial. Life is real. Life's in earnest. It isn't a play. People are real and they have hearts, whether they realize or not. It's no battle to get up there and sing whatever's in your head at the time, but it's a whole other scene to lay your heart on people. I want to be able to take my clothes off in front of everybody and say: 'See? I'm just like you'. That is the happening thing, not whatever bullshit the papers tell us. It's always been what's happening and it always will be."



"Solid Air"

This song of comfort and understanding to a depressed friend was dedicated to a close pal and label mate of Martyn's, Nick Drake. Drake died of an antidepressant overdose 18 months after Solid Air was released.


 
According to Martyn's ex-wife Beverley, the song is about Drake, but not exclusively so. She told Mojo magazine April 2013: "At the time I had mental health problems and was on anti-depressants. Make of that what you will."


 
Martyn recorded a live version of the song shortly after Nick Drake's death. Uncut magazine asked him if it was difficult singing that song in the aftermath of his passing. Martyn replied: "No, it was never difficult singing that people shuffle off their mortal coil left, right and center, don't they?"



"Over The Hill"
Martyn wrote this homecoming song on an early morning train back from London as he saw his house appear behind Hastings' East Hill.


 
Fairport Convention founding members Richard Thompson and Simon Nicol both played violin, autoharp and mandolin on this track with Thompson also contributing guitar.



"May You Never"

Originally released in November 1971 as a single in an early form, the song was re-recorded during the Solid Air sessions. The new version became something of a signature song for Martyn, as well as a staple of his live performances.


 
When Martyn re-recorded the song for Solid Air, he just couldn't nail a take that he was satisfied with. The night before producer John Wood was due to fly to New York to master the album, he was still waiting for the tape containing this tune. "It was by then nearly midnight," he recalled to Mojo magazine April 2013, "so I said to him, For Christ's sake, John, just go back down into the studio and play it again, and we'll record it. And he did, and it's great."

 
Eric Clapton covered this on his 1977 album Slowhand.

Marvin Gaye: that album showed how you could get away with explicit lyrics, to the extent it was almost  expected of black soul performers. Mind you, that album was quite funky, and I liked the guitar stuff so much I looked up the name of the player: David Tyrone Walker, who was involved with lots of artists of that time and since. And, in his seventies, he's now a big star in Japan.

John Martyn: I've always borderline liked some of his stuff, May You Never is a fantastic song, and I liked the experimental angle to a lot of his work. A whole album is hard work though, depending on your mood.

DAY 283.
Roxy Music......................................For Your Pleasure   (1973)









I remember the first time I listened to this album I was immediately struck with how different it was to anything I'd listened to, their debut album was a tad different, but this offering blew it out the water, I haven't listened to this album all the way through for a good twenty years, but still find, it draws this listener in almost hypnotically.


Now even though it's forty five years old, I think it would stand up well against most of todays artists, for me this still sounds as fresh as the the first time I heard it, absolute quality.


Favourite track?  Haven't got one, I love them all, but if I had to nitpick I've always thought "The Bogus Man" could have been a bit shorter (I really haven't changed in all these years)


Ferry's sumptuous vocals are always a given, and ably assisted by the power and genius of Eno, MacKay, Manzanera and Thompson, this album truly is worth the entrance fee, this will be added to my collection asap, and I highly recommend that you have this as part of your own collection in one form or another.




Bits & Pieces;

Already wrote about Roxy Music  (if interested)

Formed in 1970, these art college kids were always a bit different. Not content to deliver the big rock riffs of Led Zeppelin and Queen, they strove to establish a new sound, and a fresh approach to making music. Frontman and founder Bryan Ferry was an old-school crooner: a silver-tongued, tuxedo adorning Prince Charming with an eye for all things avant-garde. Joined by a gaggle of impeccable, yet somehow unlikely, musicians, their line-up was beyond solid.


 Setting them apart, however, was none other than the man with the Midas Touch, one Brian Eno, making his first steps in the world of music. Often seen sporting heavy eye makeup, long hair and a collection of feather boas, Eno could play no instruments. He’d had no formal training and no songwriting experience. What he did have, however, was a brilliant mind. A mind that saw the world through a kaleidoscopic lens, distorting all that was surely known and finding clarity in chaos, something that has paid dividends throughout his long and illustrious career. That and a Revox reel-to-reel tape machine.


 Though creative differences with Ferry would eventually lead to Eno’s departure, leaving the band to veer towards a more straightforward soft-rock sound, his experimentalist glaze can be found shimmering over their first two albums, 1972’s Roxy Music and 1973’s For Your Pleasure. The latter is generally considered to be their magnum opus, and features some of their most daring and memorable compositions.


 Frenetically swerving between high-octane stompers (‘Do The Strand’, ‘Editions Of You’, ‘Grey Lagoons’), smooth groovers (‘Beauty Queen’, ‘Bogus Man’), and chilling soundscapes (‘Strictly Confidential’, ‘For Your Pleasure’), Roxy display the full arsenal of their auditory assault. The pivotal track is ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’. Backed with a sinister rock organ and very little else, Ferry’s fragile monologue gradually unveils a disturbed man, deeply apathetic towards modern society’s materialistic obsessions. Opulent but empty, only one object evades his disdain: an inflatable doll, bought mail order. Upon the uttering of “Inflatable doll / Lover ungrateful / I blew up your body / But you blew my mind”, Phil Manzanera’s muscular guitar kicks in with a spiralling solo, backed with a thunderstorm of drums and Eno’s signature phase-shifting tape effects.


 As the eerie reverberations of the album’s progressive closer fade out and the heavy clouds begin to wither, it’s clear that this is an extraordinary album by a band way ahead of their time. Amid the frequent pace changes and ominous undercurrents, it’s far from an easy listen, though one that inspired a host of musicians. Inexplicable and at times impenetrable, the album ends with a fitting vocal contribution from Judi Dench: “You don’t ask / You don’t ask why”


 The band history of Roxy Music lends itself to a number of those “what if” scenarios historians and others alternately deplore or ponder. What if Robert Fripp had selected Bryan Ferry as King Crimson’s vocalist? Roxy may never have existed and, also, what would a Ferry/KC have sounded like? What if Eno hadn’t left Roxy after For Your Pleasure? How different would the ensuing albums sound? And—to reference a scene from This is Spinal Tap—what if For Your Pleasure cover had featured Amanda Lear on a leash held by Ferry instead of Lear walking a chained panther with Ferry looking on as a boyish chauffeur? To extend the Spinal Tap (il)logic, there’s such a fine line between clever/stupid and sexy/sexist. Yet, fine lines are one of the things For Your Pleasure about. It constantly shifts modes, tones, melodies, and boundaries—and rarely in the manner one might think.


For all the glitz and sexiness critics seem to have associated with Roxy and, especially, Ferry, For Your Pleasure, as a whole, is a rather dark, haunting album. The song “Beauty Queen,” for example, laments how the lovers “never could work out” and that even life’s patterns are drawn in sand. Moreover, despite bearing the label of artsy pop band, no single was released from For Your Pleasure, though the album rose as high as #4 on the UK charts. Lastly, it’s the only Roxy studio album that contains a nine-minute song, the end of which includes a Judi Dench voiceover.(The Bogus Man)


Roxy's earliest champions were, John Peel, who invited them to record a session for his show, Melody Maker's Richard Williams, who got the hype ball rolling, and management company EG, whose other clients included King Crimson and ELP, and who hitched Roxy up with Island Records, the leading progressive label of the era. At one point Ferry actually auditioned to be King Crimson's singer. And before Manzanera got the gig, the group's guitarist was David O'List, formerly of the Nice, the original prog band.


Like a lot of strong writing, much of For Your Pleasure musical power and achievement stem from its contradictions. The listener does indeed experience pleasure from the songs, even though the lyrics themselves hardly speak of it. Ferry’s usually conventional melodies are alternately complemented or foiled by Eno’s sonic experiments (it is unfortunate, though not surprising, the two found it impossible to continue working together). Even selecting Amanda Lear as the cover’s female sex symbol is misleading, given that she was born a male and spent time performing in various European transsexual clubs. The album also reveals a sense of humor, however macabre, as underscored by its love song for an inflatable sex doll (“I blew you up / but you blew my mind”).


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.


April Ashley, the transsexual who had once been George Jamieson, a Liverpudlian seaman, has long claimed she worked with Lear in the Fifties at Le Carrousel, a transvestite revue in Paris. In her book, April Ashley's Odyssey , she recalls a man named Alain Tapp, whose stage-name was Peki d'Oslo, later to become Amanda Lear. According to Ashley, Dali met Peki at Le Carrousel in 1959.


Lear developed a friendship with the Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones. It was through Jones, according to Lear, that she met Dali in 1965. He told her she had a 'beautiful skull'. Yet the story that followed Lear around London, is that two years earlier Dali had paid for her sex-change operation, which was carried out in Casablanca by Dr Bourou, who was at the cutting edge of transgender surgery.
She also appeared naked in Playboy, in a series of photographs designed to end the rumours,




"Do The Strand"


 
This was the opening track from Roxy Music's second album, For Your Pleasure. Frontman Bryan Ferry told The Mail on Sunday June 28, 2009: "I had long been a fan of Cole Porter and other songwriters from his era." He added that this song, "was an attempt to emulate that style of writing, with a lot of cultural references that I found interesting."


 
Brian Eno, who went on to become a very successful and influential producer, played synthesizer in Roxy Music, leaving after the For Your Pleasure album. One of the many groups he inspired was OMD, whose lead singer Andy McCluskey told us, "Apart from loving the first 2 Roxy Music albums, Eno was our hero because he taught how to make interesting music on ordinary instruments. We couldn't afford synths in the early days. He also championed music on cheap instruments. That's all we had."


"In Every Dreamhouse a Heartache"


Bryan Ferry said in the April 2007 Q Magazine that this is the track he is most proud of writing. He explains, "I had an artist friend who lent me a remote cottage up in Derbyshire. This came out of that trip. I remember getting into my Renault 4, loading up a cassette player, keyboards and pads of paper and pens, and driving up there with the express purpose of writing some songs. Life was so much simpler in 1973."



Brian Eno remarked that the eerie "The Bogus Man", with lyrics about a sexual stalker, displayed similarities with contemporary material by the krautrock band Can




 

 

For Your Pleasure: great album, but I was disappointed, for whatever reason, that Pyjamarama  wasn't on it.

Every track is exciting, and, as an aside, In Every Dream Home a Heartache was my choice for  singing on Stars in their Eyes at some point. I think my kids wrote to the programme, but the producers said no, unsurprisingly.

Weirdly, I thought Do the Strand and Editions of You had been singles, but it seems they weren't.

Last edited by PatReilly (20/5/2018 10:27 pm)

They maybe were thinking of becoming a scat band. Or hoping the album would get to number two.

The Feces!

DAY 285.
Herbie Hancock..................................Headhunters   (1973)









Hancock stripped away the exploratory jazz baggage of his hugely innovative, and hugely unprofitable, "Mwandishi Sextet,"  and enlisted Paul Jackson to play the role of Sly Stones finger popping bassist Larry Graham. It ended up nothing like Sly Stone, but did invent several genres of music.


Somewhere in the juddering, chromatic bassline of "Chameleon" is the DNA for electronic dance music. Tangled up in Herbie's modal improvisations on the Fender Rhodes are the first rumblings of smooth jazz, while enmeshed in Harvey Mason's crisp, razor-sharp breakbeats is the birth of techno, disco and drum 'n' bass.