Legendary British art rock group Roxy Music may best be known on these shores for the silky smooth Avalon, but across their eight studio albums they explored an expansive range of sounds and took on some bold musical journeys. One of the boldest was “In Every Dream Home a Heartache,” a cut from their second album For Your Pleasure in 1973. There’s already something unsettling about the music right from the start, but once the listener realizes frontman Bryan Ferry is singing to an inflatable doll it takes on an even creepier resonance.
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Setting an Eerie Stage
The song immediately opens with a subdued and brooding sounding Ferry intoning a monologue over cycling Farfisa organ, simple bass and guitar notes, and sax wafting almost subliminally into the background. The song does follow a standard pop/rock songwriting approach and features no chorus.
Open plan living
Bungalow ranch style
All of it’s comforts
Seem so essential
I bought you mail order
My plain wrapper baby
Your skin is like vinyl
The perfect companion
You float my new pool
De luxe and delightful
The song’s first three minutes continue in this weird, David Lynch-like vein, but once Ferry says, I blew up your body, but you blew my mind, the whole band crashes into a dissonant coda with near frantic drumming along with a somber guitar solo from Phil Manzanera. The song has a false ending as it fades out, only to unexpectedly fade in again five seconds later, heavily flanged to make it all feel like a strange acid trip.
What is Modern Life About?
“I must have been thinking a bit about [British artist] Richard [Hamilton], the consumer thing,” Ferry told Another Man magazine about writing the song in 2020. “Here’s a guy in the song who has everything and nothing. That’s a very tragic resonance throughout time, people who think they’re trying to get the world and they have nothing. I always wrote as a character. In some songs it rings more true to me, then there are others that are obviously me assuming a role. As an artist, you have to do that otherwise your horizons would be so limited. You have to expand your consciousness to become someone else, to become another ‘me.’”
Considered to be one of the earliest examples of pop, Hamilton’s aforementioned 1956 collage “Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes so Different, so Appealing?” includes images taken from different magazines of the time.
As SmartHistory.org described the artwork: “In this iconic collage by the British artist Richard Hamilton, created in 1956, a midcentury living room is filled to the brim with logos and cut-out images of consumer products. At center, a lampshade is emblazoned with the emblem for the auto manufacturer, Ford. The cover of a comic book hangs as ‘wall-art’ and a can of tinned ham sits on the coffee table, like a decorative vase. Found images and mass media artifacts are everywhere we look in this image—on the television, out the window, up the stairs, and on the floor.” And it was also noted how a bodybuilder husband and his semi-nude wife appear as objects amid all of this consumerist bric-a-brac.
What’s also interesting to note about Hamilton is that he was one of Ferry’s professors in college in the 1960s.
Art School Recollections
When asked about studying under Hamilton when he attended Newcastle University, Ferry told the Art Newspaper in 2010: “One was in awe of him because he was such a great artist. I have works of his but I acquired them later. I just loved his art and thought he was so intellectual, so interesting, and so cool, all the things I wanted to be. He really led by example, giving very interesting talks a few times a week, when he analysed what people had done. The rest of the time you had the impression he was up in his studio getting on with his own work, the Solomon Guggenheim pieces and also working on the The Large Glass [Hamilton’s 1965-66 reconstruction of Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-23]. He was a great man doing great art and we were just trying to be young apprentices, learning how to do it. Suddenly I was in this building with a load of other interesting artists. It was a fantastic time for me to grow up very fast. You sensed you were learning without it being forced on you.”
Photography and design have factored into Roxy Music and Ferry’s solo work across the decades, so it makes sense that Hamilton’s collage could have a strong visual impact on the singer that he would translate into music. The lyrics have a cinematic quality to them, and the song itself is perfect to listen to while submerged beneath headphones or perhaps sitting in a dimly lit room and letting one’s own imagination fill their head with images.
Remnants of a Surreal Dream
It turns out some of the leftover lyrics from “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” made it onto a song three decades later, specifically “San Simeon” from Ferry’s 2002 album Frantic. The singer once told Uncut magazine: “It’s either a return to ‘Dream Home’ or an extension of it. It’s more particularized. It’s about this place, San Simeon, the American newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s fairy-tale castle, which he built in California. And of course Orson Welles made one of his great movies, Citizen Kane, about the man and the house—which was called Xanadu in the film.”
One section that sounds like an echo of the earlier song is this:
Like a man with a broken dream
You never know
What might have been
Can you get that bird to sing
Tonight?
In the mood and in the dark
Can you mend that broken heart?
(One night Stand)
Can you get that bird to sing
Tonight?
Enduring Appeal
Roxy Music recorded many unique songs in their time, but “In Every Dream Home A Heartache” was certainly a psychedelic standout that was a staple of their sets and has been performed nearly 200 times by Ferry throughout his solo career. The group also played it as part of their induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019.
Given how consumerism is even stronger today in Western society than it was 50 years ago, not to mention the modern obsession with plastic surgery to change one’s looks, “In Every Dream Home A Heartache” takes on a renewed relevance today. The song has had a couple of media placements in recent years. First, it was selected for a commercial for Gucci’s Mémoire d’une Odeur fragrance starring Harry Styles that feels like a cult scene from the horror film Midsommar. (It doesn’t work.) Then it was featured in the opening to the second season of Netflix’s gripping serial killer series Mindhunter. (That makes more sense.)
Despite its dark, unsettling tone, the song seems to have come from a tranquil writing session. “I had an artist friend who lent me a remote carriage up in Derbyshire,” Ferry told Q magazine in 2007. “This [song] came out of that trip. I remember getting into my Renault 4, loading up a cassette player, keyboards, and pads of paper and pens, and driving up there with the express purpose of writing some songs. Life was so much simpler in 1973.”
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