Kimono My House

The Maels wanted Roy Wood to produce, but he was unavailable, and Muff Winwood took the job. Ron Mael swapped his Wurlitzer for an RMI Electra-Piano 300 played through an Echoplex, which produced the shimmer on the single. The sax-like sound at the end of Equator is a Mellotron. Ron later told The Guardian that they recorded it during the energy crisis and were warned that a vinyl shortage might keep it from coming out.

The cover idea was Ron's, taken from a Second World War Japanese propaganda photograph in Life. It was shot by Karl Stoecker and styled by Nick de Ville, with Michi Hirota and Kuniko Okamura of the Red Buddha Theatre as models. The album reached number four in the UK and went Gold in September 1974. Ian MacDonald in NME called it an instant classic whose songs sounded like standards. Rolling Stone's 2020 list put it at 476, and Morrissey has said he wrote to NME about it at fifteen.