For Your Pleasure

My first time back at the local charity shop after the long lockdown early last year, I found copies of the self-titled Roxy Music and For Your Pleasure LPs there: "deluxe" 1977 re-presses rather than early '70s originals, but in great condition. The novelty of being in any kind of shop other than a supermarket for the first time in months meant that I gladly paid up the £25 combined asking price, where otherwise I might have baulked.

Being a "deluxe" copy means it retains the original issue's gatefold sleeve, with the fantastic photos of the band inside, where each of the five core members pose with a guitar. All of them look fabulous, especially Brian Eno, resplendent in blue eyeshadow, lipstick, an ostrich-feather-trimmed jacket, black flared trousers with silver spiderweb detailing and platform-soled boots. For Your Pleasure was released in March '73: four months later, Eno was out of the group.

My father was a great admirer of Roxy Music, although in his usual way he contented himself with a few familiar favourites rather than fully exploring their catalogue. Thus Country Life, the '77 Greatest Hits and the first Bryan Ferry solo album were imprinted on me in childhood, meaning I already knew 'Do The Strand' and 'Editions of You' very well. I'd meanwhile heard 'In Every Dream Home a Heartache' on occasion (which is probably my favourite track), but the remainder of it was all new to me.

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All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

In Heat

Having acquired the soubriquet "the walrus of love", Barry White thereafter became something of a figure of fun, something that misled me (and presumably others) into disregarding his music. Only within the last few years have I begun to pay it more attention. After picking up a copy of his '74 album Can't Get Enough last summer, which I loved, I sought out some of the music by his protegés Love Unlimited. From a Discogs seller I ordered well-used copies of Under the Influence of... ('73) and In Heat ('74) for only £6.25. The only unappealing thing about In Heat is its awful title. The songs and the singing are strong; the arrangements rich & warmly enveloping. As one would expect from White, the thematic focus is firmly fixed on amatory matters. The opening number 'Move Me No Mountain' (the only one on the record not written by White) offers a refreshing rebuttal to the kind of lyrical hyperbole in songs like 'Ain't No Mountain High E...

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

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