Category Archives: Brian Ferry

First Record Album — Roxy Music

My First Album

Of all the glam bands in all the world, in platform shoes or high heels, Roxy music was and is my all-time favorite.  This album, “For Your Pleasure”, released by Island Records in 1973, was the band’s second and the last featuring Brian Eno.  The woman on the cover was lead singer and songwriter Brian Ferry’s girlfriend at the time, transsexual singer and model Amanda Lear.  Judi Dench’s voice can be heard at the end of the title track saying, “You don’t ask.  You don’t ask why.”

I bought the album with my own money at the WH Smith in Sloane Square and played it until the grooves wore out.  That copy is lost now–a casualty of a peripatetic childhood and young adulthood.  I may very well have left it in a taxi stuffed into one of the Bloomingdales bags I used to move apartments at a moment’s notice in New York in the early 80s.  More of that in the sequel to Chanel which will be coming your way sometime next year from Gallery Books.

Don’t forget, there’s one week left in my Goodreads Paperback Giveaway.  Enter Today!

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Posted by Wendy Lawless  Amanda Lear, Brian Eno, Brian Ferry, Chanel Bonfire, First Album, For Your Pleasure, Gallery Books, glam rock, Island Records, Judi Dench, Roxy Music, transsexuals, Wendy Lawless, WH Smith

Ending at Annabel’s

Annabel’s

 44 Berkeley Square, London


Our tour of Mother’s ’70s London art/society/music life ends this week, fittingly, at Annabel’s the members only nightclub and disco in the basement of the Clermont Club (a casino) where many of Mother’s evenings with Marian and Silvio and members of her ex-pat moms crew ended.  The club was founded in 1963 by Mark Birley and named after his then wife Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart.  It is fifty years old this year and apparently still going strong–drawing the likes of Lady Gaga, Tom Cruise and Brian Ferry just as it once drew Princess Anne, Frank Sinatra, Aristotle Onasis, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald and Tina Turner.  It was exactly the kind of place Mother loved and in London in the 70s being a beautiful young American divorcee with money and some talent was all it took to get her in.  The expat community was open to Mother in a way society in New York wasn’t and she really flourished there.
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Posted by Wendy Lawless  Annabel's, Brian Ferry, Chanel Bonfire, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Georgann Rea, Lady Gaga, Marian Montgomery, Mark Birley, Ray Charles, Silvio Narizzano, Tina Turner, Tom Cruise

For Your Pleasure

My first album.


Of all the glam bands in all the world, in platform shoes or high heels, Roxy Music was and is my all-time favorite.  This album, “For Your Pleasure”, released by Island Records in 1973, was the band’s second and the last featuring Brian Eno.  The woman on the cover was lead singer and songwriter Brian Ferry’s girlfriend at the time, transsexual singer and model Amanda Lear.  Judi Dench’s voice can be heard at the end of the title track saying, “You don’t ask.  You don’t ask why.”

I bought the album with my own money at the WH Smith in Sloane Square and played it until the grooves wore out.  That copy is lost now–a casualty of a peripatetic childhood and young adulthood.  I may very well have left it in a taxi stuffed into one of the Bloomingdales bags I used to move apartments at a moment’s notice in New York in the early 80s.  More of that in the sequel to Chanel which will be coming your way sometime next year from Gallery Books.

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Posted by Wendy Lawless  70s London, Amanda Lear, Brian Eno, Brian Ferry, Chanel Bonfire, Chanel Bonfire Sequel, For Your Pleasure, Island Records, Judi Dench, Roxy Music, Sloane Square, Wendy Lawless, WH Smith