Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure Reissue Surfaces Rare 1972 BBC Footage

A 1972 television performance of ‘For Your Pleasure’ has surfaced on YouTube for the first time, arriving as Roxy Music prepare to release the For Your Pleasure reissue on 6 November 2026 via UMR/Virgin, according to SuperDeluxeEdition. The footage, shot for the BBC variety programme Full House on 25 November 1972, predates the album’s original release by four months and presents the band in a mode that is equal parts unsettling and magnetic.

What the 1972 Full House Performance Reveals

There is something instructive about watching Roxy Music perform the title track of an album that did not yet exist. The Full House clip captures the band at a specific hinge point: the moment between the commercial breakthrough of their debut and the more deliberate, conceptually darker statement they were building. The performance of ‘For Your Pleasure’ on that BBC stage already carries the hallmarks of the finished record, the chilly elegance, the theatrical restraint, the sense that what you are watching is as considered as it is spontaneous.

That the footage has taken this long to reach YouTube is itself a small index of how much Roxy Music material has remained in archive vaults. Its release now, in the lead-up to the anniversary edition, is clearly deliberate: a piece of promotional archaeology that also happens to be genuinely absorbing.

Inside the For Your Pleasure Reissue Packages

The For Your Pleasure reissue arrives in several configurations. The headline set is a 3CD and DVD box, with an SDE-exclusive Blu-ray also available. Alongside those sits a 2CD edition and 2LP vinyl versions, one of which is a limited Blue Pearl pressing.

The depth of the archival content is where the reissue makes its strongest case. The second disc, according to SuperDeluxeEdition, contains 20 unheard songwriting sketches recorded at home by Bryan Ferry, alongside band rehearsals and studio outtakes newly mastered by John Webber at AIR Studios. That kind of material, the private, pre-production working notes of a songwriter, rarely makes it into official release programmes, and its inclusion here gives serious listeners a chance to trace the compositional thinking behind one of British rock’s more architecturally complex albums.

The third CD, again per SuperDeluxeEdition, is filled with live sessions, singles and instrumentals, and includes 14 previously unheard recordings. Add to that the 116-page hardback book containing new essays, rare photography and previously unseen images, and the package begins to resemble a genuine act of scholarship rather than a routine anniversary cash-in. The 3CD and DVD version also draws on TV and live performances from 1972 and 1973, placing the album back inside its original moment with some precision.

The Album’s Place in the Roxy Music Story

For Your Pleasure, released on 23 March 1973, was the second Roxy Music album and the last to feature co-founder Brian Eno, who went on to work as a producer, composer and recording artist. His departure after this record is one of those cleanly documented ruptures in British music history: two distinct creative visions, briefly and productively aligned, then pulling in opposite directions. What is left behind is an album that in retrospect sounds like a thesis statement, about what pop music could borrow from art-school thinking, about glamour as conceptual strategy, about eeriness as an aesthetic position.

Writing in a 2019 retrospective at Pitchfork, critic Rob Tannenbaum argued that among their British rock peers, Roxy Music ‘most directly translated the radical, emancipating ideas of art-school into pop music. And For Your Pleasure, released in 1973, is their most art-school album, as well as their greatest.’ Whether or not you share that ranking, the claim that this record sits at the centre of what the band was doing (intellectually, sonically, conceptually) is difficult to argue with.

Its reputation has not softened with time. Glam-rock and art-rock histories still return to it as a primary text, and the sustained interest from listeners who came to it decades after its original release suggests it carries rather more than period appeal.

The For Your Pleasure reissue is available to pre-order now via Virgin EMI, with the full suite of formats, including the SDE-exclusive Blu-ray edition and the standard 2CD digibook, all scheduled for release on 6 November 2026.