When Roxy Music released Pyjamarama in March 1973, it arrived as a standalone single between their debut and their second album, climbing to number 10 on the UK chart. More than fifty years later, an unreleased acoustic tape has emerged from the vaults, stripping the track down to Bryan Ferry singing over an acoustic guitar. It represents the earliest known recording of the song, offering an unusual perspective on a band whose early work was celebrated for dense studio arrangements.
The recording captures Ferry working through an instrument that was completely foreign to him. Following a demanding touring schedule after the release of the band's first album, the singer pulled away from the noise and rented a quiet cottage in the Derbyshire Dales. He spent three or four days alone in the countryside with the explicit goal of writing material for their second record, For Your Pleasure. Packed into the cottage were keyboards, an amplifier, recording equipment, paper, and a guitar. Ferry later remembered that solitary stay, noting that those few days in Derbyshire proved crucial to creating the album.
The guitar had only entered the equation through the practical intervention of Phil Manzanera. Ferry had made it clear that he wanted to wear a guitar, a prospect that initially made the guitarist hesitant. To help him find a way forward, Manzanera introduced Ferry to an alternate tuning that allowed chords to be fretted using just a single finger. Ferry put the simple shortcut to work immediately, bypassing any lack of formal technique on the instrument to write a full song around it.
Alongside the bare Pyjamarama demo, the band has unearthed another piece of history from that same month. For decades, the BBC archives lacked footage of Roxy Music performing the song on Top of the Pops. The broadcast was missing until it turned up recently in a collection of tapes preserved by Roger Hill, a mobile disco DJ. The recovered clip provides a visual counterpart to the solitary writing session, showing the finished single as it was presented to British television viewers in March 1973.
Both archival items serve to preview the Super Deluxe edition of For Your Pleasure, which will be released on November 6 through UMR/Island EMI. First announced in August alongside an unreleased 1971 recording of Grey Lagoons, the four disc set spans three CDs and a DVD. The collection gathers rehearsal recordings, songwriting demos, outtakes from AIR Studios, BBC radio sessions, instrumentals, and live concert and television recordings from 1972 and 1973. Among the work in progress tracks are early keyboard and piano sketches for Do The Strand, Beauty Queen, Editions Of You, and the title track, along with several unfinished passes at In Every Dream Home A Heartache and tapes documenting Brian Eno at work.
The box set will also be issued on double vinyl, two CD formats, digital services, Blu-ray, and Dolby Atmos. For Your Pleasure holds a distinctive place in Roxy Music history, standing as the final studio album to feature Eno before his departure from the lineup. While Ferry, Manzanera, Andy Mackay, and Paul Thompson would reunite in 2022 for their 50th anniversary tour after a decade apart, these early tapes focus on the moment the sound was still taking shape, when a single finger on a tuned guitar in Derbyshire helped set the band on its course.
