The terms art-rock, glam and avant-pop couldn't adequately describe Roxy's curious amalgam of styles, and even the band wouldn't agree on where the experiment was going.
That tension eventually played out in the departure of synth player and supervisor of "electronic treatments" Brian Eno, but not before For Your Pleasure had captured on vinyl the genre-stretching contest between him and front man Bryan Ferry.
At one end of the rope we have Eno, the shimmering creature from Planet X whose synthetic drones, wild solos and edgy production instincts pull Roxy Music to the left.
At the other we have Ferry, the suave and vampish pop crooner whose strengthening skills as a songsmith drag the band back towards the centre.
It's a delicious conflict, one that Eno would eventually tire of, but on this album even Ferry is a risk-taker, toying with atonal vocals and making space for extended musical interludes.
Roxy fans will always fall into Eno-era or post-Eno-era camps and the former will revel in his influence on even the most accessible track here, Do The Strand, an ode to a dance fad that never was. Though the space-rock breakout section might pass as fairly standard today, nothing like it had been heard before.
In The Bogus Man, Eno leads Roxy into krautrock territory and in Editions Of You, he pushes past a muscular sax solo to bust out a freaky, tuneless synth solo.
But Ferry is also on his game. Beauty Queen is delivered with quivering intensity, and in In Every Dream Home A Heartache he expertly captures the detachment of the song's lonely, rubber-worshipping protagonist.
It all makes for fabulous theatre, in a Rocky Horror kind of way.
