Songfacts®:

• "Pyjamarama," Roxy frontman Bryan Ferry's first composition on the guitar, finds the sleep-deprived singer longing to be close to his elusive lover. Ferry was dating the French supermodel Amanda Lear, who appeared on the For Your Pleasure album cover as a femme fatale leading a black panther on a leash. Lear was an international sex symbol who socialized with artists and musicians, including surrealist painter Salvador Dalí and Rolling Stones founder Brian Jones, who allegedly wrote the band's song "Miss Amanda Jones" about her. (By the end of the decade, David Bowie would help launch her career as a best-selling disco singer.) Despite her notoriety, her background remained a mystery, which made her an ideal candidate for the song's enigmatic woman:
  
  They say you have a secret life
  Made sacrifice your key to paradise
• "Pyjamarama" was a non-album single hastily released to promote Roxy Music's second album, For Your Pleasure, after the band had wrapped up back-to-back tours of the UK and US. Their synth player, Brian Eno, was disappointed in the track, even after the single broke into the Top 10. "We should never have put it out as a single," Eno said in an interview with Sounds on April 28, 1973. "We did it in a rush after our American tour. We were still musically disorientated at that time. 'Do the Strand' would have been far better, but we hadn't recorded it at that time. We will never rush a single like that again."
  
  Eno left the band shortly after For Your Pleasure's release.
• This was re-released as a single in 1977 to promote the band's Greatest Hits album and is included on the track list. It features a slightly different mix from the 1973 original, with less of Eno's effects applied to Andy Mackay's saxophone part. Phil Manzanera's guitar solo at the end is also edited.
• The title is never mentioned in the lyrics.
• This song partly inspired the name of Bananarama, with the "Banana" bit coming from the British girl group's debut single, "Aie a Mwana." Keren Woodward explained in 2020's Really Saying Something: Sara & Keren – Our Bananarama Story that it was "a twist on the Roxy Music song 'Pyjamarama' mixed with bananas, as the single had a tropical feel. It sounded very catchy to all of us at the time, but obviously, we had no idea that it would last for as long as it has."
• This was one of the first Roxy Music songs produced by Chris Thomas, who had worked with the Beatles and Pink Floyd. John Anthony, who went on to produce Queen's self-titled album in 1973, is credited as co-producer.
• If the title looks odd, you're probably from the US, where "pyjamas" is typically spelled "pajamas."
• The line, "Take a sweet girl just like you/How nice if only we could Bill and Coo," is a reference to the 1948 live-action film Bill and Coo. Directed by Dean Riesner, the film is set in a fictional town named Chirpendale and features an all-animal cast. Shot in Trucolor, Bill and Coo received an Academy Honorary Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences "in which artistry and patience blended in a novel and entertaining use of the medium of motion pictures."
• "Pyjamarama" was the first song Roxy Music recorded at AIR Studios, with the band going on to record For Your Pleasure (1973), Stranded (1973), Country Life (1974), and Siren (1975) at the complex. Situated above the iconic Oxford Street in London, AIR Studios belonged to Beatles producer Sir George Martin and his business partner John Burgess.
• The British musician John Porter plays bass on "Pyjamarama." Porter was a member of The Gas Board, a band formed by Ferry at Newcastle University, and went on to produce for the likes of The Smiths, The Go-Go's, and B.B. King.
• "Pyjamarama" had some staying power, spending 12 weeks on the UK chart in 1973. It wasn't until the Manifesto cut "Dance Away," which remained on the chart for 14 weeks in the UK in 1979, that a Roxy Music song stayed for longer.