For Your Pleasure

Recorded in February 1973 at AIR Studios in London, For Your Pleasure was the last Roxy Music album to feature Eno. It reached number 4 in the UK, stayed on the chart for 27 weeks and went Gold. In the US it reached number 193. Ferry wrote most of it in a two-week burst in early 1973, while Grey Lagoons and the title song dated from 1971. Rik Kenton left shortly before the sessions, and John Porter played bass on the album and the tour that followed, credited as a guest artiste. The label talked the band out of producing it alone, and Chris Thomas, whom Ferry had met at AIR, helped. Ferry applied his former tutor Richard Hamilton's idea of a painting as a mood board of clashing inspirations, and In Every Dream Home a Heartache, Ferry's song to a blow-up doll, nods to Hamilton's collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?

The sleeve shows the model Amanda Lear in a leather dress, leading a black panther on a leash, with Ferry in a chauffeur's uniform beside a limousine. Karl Stoecker took the photograph, and Rolling Stone and Billboard have both ranked it among the best album covers. Eno disliked the choice.

The band recorded In Every Dream Home a Heartache as a backing track before the lyrics existed, and Ferry asked for a psychedelic epilogue. The Bogus Man runs more than nine minutes on a metronome-like beat, with Mackay playing deliberately atonal saxophone, and Eno liked it enough to call it perhaps the most successful track. The closing title song is built at the mixing desk, with Eno and Thomas treating the studio as an instrument. It ends with repeated Well, how are you? samples from Chance Meeting and the actress Judi Dench saying You don't ask. You don't ask why.

Charles Shaar Murray of the NME called it a staggeringly fine piece of work that easily outstripped the first album, and Morrissey called it the only truly great British album. Pitchfork's Rob Tannenbaum wrote in 2019 that it was happily pretentious and self-involved, the point where glam and prog meet with the greatest success, and Tom Ewing in 2012 praised the tension between the two diverging creativities of Ferry and Eno. Ferry has named it his personal favorite of the albums.