A Pyjamarama Top of the Pops 1973 performance, long assumed lost, has resurfaced from the most unexpected of sources: the private collection of mobile disco DJ Roger Hill. Roxy Music shared the footage on 2 October, pairing it with the first public release of the song’s original demo, as the two recordings preview the expanded editions of For Your Pleasure, due 6 November via UMR/Island EMI.
The television performance had been absent from the BBC archive, making Hill’s preservation of it the only reason it survived at all. The film is now streaming on the band’s official YouTube channel, and will appear on the DVD included with the forthcoming 3CD+DVD Super Deluxe Edition of the album.
The demo that began with one finger
The accompanying demo, titled ‘Pyjamarama, guitar & vocal’, is the first recording of the song, with Bryan Ferry singing and playing acoustic guitar. It carried a particular significance within the band’s creative history: it marked the first time Ferry had written a song on the instrument. Guitarist Phil Manzanera helped by showing him an open tuning that allowed him to fret chords with a single finger.
‘The whole of “Pyjamarama” is just sliding between four positions on open-tuned guitar,’ Manzanera recalled. The elegance of that solution, however, created problems at the next stage. The open tuning left the strings with reduced tension, making it difficult to keep the guitar in pitch as Ferry added solos and overdubs during the studio recording.
The demo belongs to a wider body of home recordings Ferry made on cassette, some captured during a songwriting retreat to a remote Derbyshire cottage owned by his friend Nick de Ville. With touring commitments running alongside preparations for the second album, Ferry spent several days there working alone, bringing keyboards, a guitar, recording equipment, and writing materials. The image of Ferry in that Derbyshire isolation (sketching out what would become one of the band’s better-loved early singles) lends the demo a particular intimacy that the finished record, for all its studio polish, couldn’t quite replicate.
For Your Pleasure: what the Super Deluxe Edition contains
Originally released on 23 March 1973, For Your Pleasure was Roxy Music’s second studio album and the last to feature Brian Eno. The Super Deluxe Edition gathers the original album, remastered by Bob Ludwig, alongside demos, rehearsals, AIR Studios outtakes, live sessions, singles, and instrumentals. Its DVD draws together television and concert performances from 1972 to 1973, and a 116-page book includes new interviews, essays, unpublished photographs, and Ferry’s own work-in-progress lyric notes.
The Pyjamarama Top of the Pops 1973 footage joins material issued in August: a previously unheard 1971 ‘Grey Lagoons’ demo, recorded before the band’s debut album. Both releases suggest a methodical approach to the expanded edition’s sequencing, releasing individual discoveries ahead of the full package rather than holding everything back for the box set announcement alone.
Alongside the Super Deluxe set, the November release suite includes a 2CD hardcover digibook, double vinyl on black or exclusive blue pearl vinyl, and digital editions. An exclusive Blu-ray, available through SuperDeluxeEdition.com, features new Atmos, 5.1, and stereo mixes, with additional 5.1 mixes by Steven Wilson. The breadth of that audio programme underlines how seriously this reissue is treating a record that has long deserved the full archival treatment: fifty years on from that Pyjamarama Top of the Pops broadcast, the infrastructure around For Your Pleasure is finally being given room to breathe.
The Super Deluxe Edition of For Your Pleasure is released 6 November via UMR/Island EMI.
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