In this song, Roxy Music frontman Bryan Ferry sings to his plastic fantastic lover, an inflatable doll that will float nicely in his new pool, part of a stately home he just acquired. Typical of Ferry's songwriting, it has a cinematic feel, with a lyric that lays out a series of images to form a strange story. There is no chorus.
First, we hear about the home, with Ferry using real estate argot like "bungalow ranch style." Then, we hear about the doll, his "disposable darling" that will be his companion. But in this dream home, there is also heartache. We're not sure why, and we know better than to ask this guy questions.
According to Ferry, this song was inspired by British artist
Richard Hamilton's collage called "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" Created in 1956, the magazine montage is considered by art historians to be one of the earliest works of pop art. Hamilton later taught Ferry fine art at Newcastle University in the '60s, with Hamilton going as far as to call Ferry his "greatest creation."
The first three minutes of this song find Ferry telling his story over a musical texture created with a VCS3 synthesizer, Farisa organ, and a touch of saxophone. After the line "But you blew my mind," the song becomes a rave-up, with drums, bass, and guitar entering the picture in a swirl of phase-shifted glory. The music slowly fades out at the four-minute mark, then returns after a long bout of silence – it's one of the lengthiest false endings in rock.
Ferry said in the April 2007 Q that this is the track he is most proud of writing. He explained: "I had an artist friend who lent me a remote carriage up in Derbyshire. This 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."
This song was originally twice as long before Ferry cut it back to five-and-a-half minutes. Ferry later included some leftover lyrics in his 2002 solo song "San Simeon." He explained to Uncut: "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."
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Looking for another song about an inflatable doll? Check out "
Be My Girl – Sally" by The Police.
For Your Pleasure producer Chris Thomas spoke to Roxy Music biographer David Buckley about the recording of this song: "That was one of the songs where we didn't know what was going on in the sense that we didn't know what the lyric was going to be. So we did the backing track as the sort of soundtrack, and then the idea was for this sort of psychedelic bit to happen at the end, but Bryan didn't tell us why. I mean he just said this is what he wanted. So we were just, y'know, flying blind."
This song concludes side one of Roxy Music's sophomore album
For Your Pleasure. In 2020,
Rolling Stone ranked the LP #351 on their "
500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list, stating: "The album's deeply weird centerpiece is 'In Every Dream Home a Heartache': Ferry sings a seductive ballad to an inflatable doll ['I blew up your body, but you blew my mind'], one of the creepiest love songs of all time."
British-French singer and actress Jane Birkin of "
Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus" fame covered this song with Ferry for her 2004 album
Rendez-vous.
American sludge-metal band Melvins also covered it with Dead Kennedys frontman
Jello Biafra for their 2013 album
Everybody Loves Sausages. Speaking to
SPIN, Melvins founding member
Buzz Osborne said of Biafra: "How he sings, it's just like Bryan Ferry. It's not that he's ripping him off, that's not fair. But he's clearly a huge fan of that. And do you think anybody that buys Dead Kennedy records knows that?"
"Western Homes" from American indie band Pavement's critically acclaimed 1995 album Wowee Zowee is based on this song. Pavement's Scott Kannberg told biographer Bryan Charles: "It's based on that. I really like the sound of it, I like the way it turned out. It's still one of my favorite songs that I've ever done. It's pretty weird. I don't think any of my other songs sounded that weird."
"In Every Dream Home a Heartache" plays over the cold open of Season 2, Episode 1 of the Netflix crime-thriller Mindhunter, directed by David Fincher. The song can also be heard in the background of the break-in scene in Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen starring Matthew McConaughey and Charlie Hunnam.
Roxy Music performed this song as part of their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. Duran Duran's Simon Le Bon and John Taylor inducted the band into the museum, with Le Bon referring to Ferry as "a psychedelic Sinatra crooning pop-art poetry over driving drums, saxophones, and oboes."