Passions: Roxy Music's For Your Pleasure

The original Roxy Music line-up Aidan Smith hasn't given up hope of seeing reform. Picture: Brian Cooke

I play For Your Pleasure on the anniversary of when I first bought it

It was what we now call a sliding doors moment. I entered Bruce’s Record Shop with the birthday money burning a hole in my pocket. Should I buy an album by one of many bands in jeans and cheesecloth shirts … or what about these guys in leopard print and steepling quiffs and giant fly specs and ostrich feathers and purple eyeliner and trousers dotted with Dalek-like dimples?

Often we fib about our first time. A cooler movie than the first visit to the cinema gets promoted from third or fourth. Same with a more scandalous book. And the first time you “did it” you were how young exactly? My first LP was Hey Hey We’re the Monkees! which was much played until it wasn’t, didn’t prompt me to save up for another record, didn’t spark a grand obsession, and it was some years before my second, which did these things, which I still play from start to finish on the anniversary of its purchase, and for these reasons plus the fact this one was bought without a parent present and therefore formative and daunting and exciting, is why For Your Pleasure by Roxy Music is what I prefer to call my real, true, proper first.

Never judge an album by its cover? I did that day. Not knowing much about music, the bedenimed brigade, invariably lounging on back porches, were mean and moody with long hair we were allowed to call “girlie” and, well, they just looked boring. The alternative was a glamorous woman posing wantonly, city lights pulsing behind her and … hang on, I nearly missed this, she was holding a panther on a lead.

Sleeve in hand, I approached the shop counter. Being brave enough to ask the intimidating staff for a listen was another rites-of-passage moment. And Roxy had me at side one, track one, opening line: “There’s a new sensation … ”

When I say they were my favourite band when such things mattered and would be confirmed in felt pen on schoolbags, many assume I mean later, smoother Roxy - I don’t. I preferred them when they were less wine-bar, more weird. Much of the weirdness was down to Brian Eno, and was he in fact a she and the cover-girl in drag?

Then I saw them play, Andy Mackay honking on an upside-down saxophone. I might have pretended to faint. I definitely tried to get the original line-up to reform, every time I interviewed Bryan Ferry and the rest. Still haven’t given up hope.

Aidan Smith is a journalist and columnist at The Scotsman