Investigation

Cover Stories
Roxy Music's covers would become as hotly anticipated as their records, and the theme of channelling vintage glamour would continue on 1973's For Your Pleasure, which featured French model Amanda Lear, again photographed by Karl Stoecker and styled by Nick De Ville, as 'a panther-woman getting out of a car', as Ferry described it at a Paris exhibition in 2013 [see below].

The cover of Roxy's third album, Stranded would be held up as an early example of 'porno chic'. Stoecker captures Playboy model Marilyn Coles in a soaking, semi-transparent red dress on the verge of revealing enough to have the LP taken off record store shelves for fear of corrupting the innocent.

The sleeve of 1974's Country Life would walk a similarly thin line, depicting two scantily clad German women (who Ferry met in a bar) supposedly caught concealing their modesty in the glare of car headlights. The aim was 'a country-house orgy atmosphere in a way that would just pass the board of censors', said photographer Eric Boman.

After Sirens (1975) took a less risqué approach, featuring Ferry's soon-to-be-paramour Jerry Hall covered in blue body paint crawling across rocks in Anglesey, North Wales, subsequent Roxy albums took a more sleek, stylish approach.

Yet even when a faceless individual appeared in a suit of medieval armour on the cover of 1982's Avalon, holding a falcon, it was still a beautiful model: Ferry's future wife Lucy Helmore.