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Pleasure Forever were a somewhat obscure, pretentious band that existed from about 1998 to about 2003. They played arty, damaged rock with artwork and lyrics that were filled with strange allusions to drugs, murder, the zodiac, infinity, orgies and the number 3. For a while I was totally obsessed with them.
The three members of Pleasure Forever used to be in a band with Sonny Kay called The VSS (Sonny was previously singer with Angel Hair, now owner of GSL and singer of Year Future). The VSS were associated with the Gravity records scene in California in the mid-nineties. They played what would probably then be called “emo” but has no relation to what we now understand the term to mean. They were influenced by post-punk bands like PiL and were notable for using a Roland Juno 6 keyboard that Andrew Rothbard played while simultaneously playing his bass during live shows. Their abrasive, short songs and unique style didn’t endear them to most, but it was the keyboards that really annoyed the die-hard punks who attended their small shows. People shouted “Depeche Mode!” between the songs. Years later their sound could be heard in bands like the Locust for example, or just about anyone who dared to use keyboard in punk bands afterwards.
Sonny Kay parted ways with the rest of the group after a number of singles and one album. A few tracks written at the end of The VSS’s short career featured a more stretched out, hypnotic vibe and it was this sound that the remaining members decided to pursue with their next band.
Slaves were made up of Dave Clifford (drums), Josh Hugues (guitar) and Andrew Rothbard (keyboards, vocals). The band was originally going to be a side project, but when The VSS fell apart it became their main concern. The name - always without the definitive article - was meant to convey the idea of the audience being emotional slaves to music, about the artists trying to “control all the aspects of the environment that you’re in.”
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They released one album as Slaves - The Devil’s Pleasures - a collection of two singles. It was filled with obtuse references to Charles Manson, the signs of the zodiac and the 23rd of January. The artwork was as dense as the lyrics. The front cover was a translucent sheet with the band name and a collage of rectangles printed on it. Behind that was the slip cover with a choice of images. One side has the band crammed together looking at the camera, Rothbard in a black boa and Clifford wearing a Nazi-esque armband with the symbol and image of his star sign, Scorpio. The other side had a grey skull resting on white cloth. It was angled so the face looked diagonally upwards, as if in ecstasy, and made visable the hole that the spinal chord fits into. The back cover has two photos. One is an orange tinted shot of a woman’s breast, the other the left leg of a blow-up doll with a veiny blue dildo sticking out.
“I like to fuck, you know. I think that should be expressed in music”– Andrew Rothbard
Dropping the name Slaves, because people kept calling them the Slaves and confusing the meaning to be something to do with S&M or race, they called themselves first The Devil’s Pleasures and then settled on Pleasure Forever. Building on the themes from the first album they created a total concept for the band based on indulgence. Their identity was complex. Firstly, there was their obsession with the number three. The three members had equal importance in the group. Instead of having the drum kit at the back, they performed in a line and Dave Clifford spoke as much as anyone else about the band in interviews, unusual for a drummer. Rothbard’s lyrics might well be about his own experiences, but they had a collage-like style, relying on particular phrases to evoke a mood or state of mind rather than any kind of story telling. Their attitude was described well in one of their logos: a small solid circle with three arrows coming out of it, all pointing to a larger circle outline.
Their first release as Pleasure Forever was the single for Goodnight. The single featured a photograph of a plastic anatomical model of the virgin mary split open from the chest, her plastic guts spewing out. A cover of a Germs song set the standard for cover versions of somewhat unexpected material.
![]()
Their live shows, while sparely attended, were unique performances. Rothbard sang gripping on to his microphone and playing a modular synth and a keyboard. Clifford would drum so energetically that his black slicked back hair would fall on his face like a devil lock. Hugues’ rock god poses - thrashing around with his white guitar – were made incongruous by his staid clothes and poker face. As noted, their stage set-up of performing in a line mirrored their aesthetic, but also their individual performances referenced their logo: coming from the same place, going in different directions and then ending up together as a larger whole.
Almost as soon as Goodnight was released came their first album. Pleasure Forever was unashamedly a concept album, released at a time before that idea had been made semi-acceptable by irony. From the cover, to the lyrics to the music, the central idea to the album was that of decadence.
“Here's to the decadents, the seekers of pleasure, emancipated (and often undone) by their own desires - who sought the precipice because the only way to know true life is to dance with death” - Pleasure Forever website, 2001
Even though now we’re used to the theme of decadence, bored of things like the burlesque revival, back in 2001 people were seriously talking about “the end of irony” and a band with a name like Pleasure Forever - who had songs about sex, drugs and indulgence – didn’t really fit with the times.
![]()
The cover to their self titled first album is striking. The band sit in front of a table filled with food, candles, knives and booze. Each member has a glass in his hand. Rothbard holds a bunch of fat grapes like an offering while wearing a blank look on his face. Behind them a party scene like out of some priceless oil painting rages. Girls, guys and members of the band are crowded together in strange poses like a tableau memory of a drunken party. A fist punches Hugues in the face, a sullen guy holds an old fashioned telephone to his face, two girls in dresses embrace, Clifford holds a knife in his gloved hand, Rothbard plays the piano with a fag hanging out of his mouth while looking sullenly up some girls skirt. On the left, two girls are climbing up a ladder out of the top of the album cover. The words “Pleasure Forever” have the sign for infinity sandwiched between them.
“In a lot of the reviews we’ve seen, people have said that we take ourselves really seriously. It seems bizarre to me. Just look at the cover of our album. It’s completely over the top.”- Josh Hugues
But that’s not all. Inside are two anonymous quotes from a book on orgies. A portion: “Perhaps ‘orgy’ is too big a word; there were just three of us. But as someone once said, infinity begins with the number 3”. The inlay has another picture of the band in front of their feast and shows Rothbard taking a cigarette out of his mouth with his fingers that are raised to signal the number three. The band are identified in the liner notes by their sign of the zodiac. The lyrics themselves are filled with references to drug fatigue (“Ran out of bullets kept on shooting”) and more cryptic references to Charlie Manson (“Rise rise rise rise rise rise”). The album is packed with imagery. Put the cd in your computer and it plays an arty video montage of the band performing.
Reviews were mixed to say the least. A lot of people hated the name. A lot of people hated the overblown proggishness of some of the songs. The lyrical themes and arty vibe didn’t endear them to people just beginning an obsession with the Strokes.
A year after Pleasure Forever was released the band moved from San Francisco to Portland and started writing songs for their next album. Alter came out in 2003.
“They were bleak and trying times for us ... a time that I thought none of us would escape with our lives (and there are a few I know who didn't) and that if somehow we'd be able to reclaim our innocence, it would cost us everything we had.” - Dave Clifford on writing songs for Alter.
Alter’s cover was so good it prompted one reviewer to say that if a band uses such imagery they should have better music. Perhaps this is a problem a lot people have with Pleasure Forever; they are seduced by the imagery but are ambivalent to the music. To be honest, I don’t know what they expect.
![]()
The cover for Alter is like a sequel to Pleasure Forever’s. The band members stand in a bare white room behind a red chair in the same order they sat in front of their feast. Sitting in the chair is a blanked-out figure, the white echoing censored crime scene photos, explicitly that of the Manson murders. The chair is ringed with red roses. On the back is the same scene, only the figure in the chair has vanished, and it’s the band who are blanked-out white.
“We wanted to make a record that sounded like a suicide note put to music, but something that could reach that level of despair and intensity – reach the abyss – and through its/our own will to endure, convey a sense of purpose.”– Dave Clifford on Alter
![]()
If Pleasure Forever was about hedonism for its own sake and staring at the abyss drunk and laughing, then Alter is being in that same place the morning after, still stuck with the same buzzing thoughts, but cool-headed and grim. The songs are less sprawling and Rothbard voice has the same vocal effect on every song. It makes him sound like he’s singing out of a radio.
As well as Manson, the band added two more infamous – and very different - American murders to their body of reference: the Zodiac Killer and the Columbine massacre. Like most of their references they give a flavour to the songs, rather than the song being “about” them. A listener to the song Wicked Shivering Columbine could be forgiven in thinking it was a reference to the flower, if the band hadn’t posed for a photo in front of Columbine High School on Halloween, 1999. Likewise, This Is the Zodiac Speaking’s only explicit reference is the title/chorus - the first line of a note from the killer to the San Francisco Police Department - and nothing more.
![]()
After releasing Alter Pleasure Forever seemed to go quiet. A band noted for their live performances stopped touring. There were a few confusing rumours about one member of the band quitting, sometimes two, leaving the remaining to continue on. In 2004 Rothbard said “Josh Hugues and I both left Pleasure Forever after our Spring 2003 tour… Dave has assured me that he will not continue to make music under the name Pleasure Forever”. And that was that.
In 2007 a compilation of some of their rare tracks was released. It featured a number of songs from comps – including a Slaves song from a Your Flesh compilation – and cover versions of songs by Black Flag, Abba and others, originally recorded for their aborted covers album. The album cover is a somewhat dull, if appropriate, picture of the Fantoff stave church in Bergen, the one Varg Vikernes allegedly burnt down. The title, Bodies Need Rest, acted as the official explanation for the break up.
Further and Misc.
Pleasure Forever on myspace
Interview with Pleasure Forever
Pleasure Forever subpop page (includes mp3s)
Old Pleasure Forever website
Video from Forever Pleasure
Basically Slaves/Pleasure Forever were reaching for something that most indie rock bands can’t be bothered to more than glance at. I think ultimately they failed, but their attempt at inventing their own grammar of references goes way beyond the name-dropping a lot of bands go in for.
After the band split up Dave Clifford and Josh Hugues joined other bands. Andrew Rothbard holed himself away for years recording for a project called Coast Ghost. He had a weird website that had hidden pages and links that led nowhere. He seemed to be keeping up the mysterious side of Pleasure Forever, but for a while was quiet. In 2006 the first of a planned (and apparently already recorded) five albums came out under the name Andrew Douglas Rothbard. Called Abandoned Meander it sounded sort of like a jangly psychedelic version of Pleasure Forever. If you were a dickhead you’d probably call it “freak folk”. It’s my favourite of all the post-Pleasure Forever work and you can download some mp3s here.
![]()
"Pleasure Forever: a declaration of will; an incantation of transcendence; a celebration of human desire, and the evisceration of excess.
Dionysus, Saradanapalus, Aleister Crowley, Nijinsky, Shiva, Cecil B. de Mille, Darby Crash, Heliogabalus, Caligula, Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, Erzebet Bathory, Nero, Antonin Artaud, Nico, Balinese trancers, Charles Manson, Kenneth Anger, Jim Morrison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Brian Jones, Elvis Presley, Anita Berber, Wilhelm Reich, Nikolai Gogol, Anton LaVey, Carl Panzram, the erotic explorers of Weimar Berlin, and on and on..."
*
p.s. Hey. A seemingly long lost, much missed d.l. of this blog named Oliver made this post some time back, and you can rediscover his offer of discovery today, if you like. Hi and thanks, Oliver, if you're out there! So, I was optimistic in thinking that I might be freed up enough by tomorrow to do the p.s. Instead, post-production work goes long and hard but very well. I'm going to shoot for doing the p.s. on Thursday, and we'll see. Have a good day.
"Songs about drugs and orgies made with
only guitar, piano, and drum’s”
Pleasure Forever were a somewhat obscure, pretentious band that existed from about 1998 to about 2003. They played arty, damaged rock with artwork and lyrics that were filled with strange allusions to drugs, murder, the zodiac, infinity, orgies and the number 3. For a while I was totally obsessed with them.
The three members of Pleasure Forever used to be in a band with Sonny Kay called The VSS (Sonny was previously singer with Angel Hair, now owner of GSL and singer of Year Future). The VSS were associated with the Gravity records scene in California in the mid-nineties. They played what would probably then be called “emo” but has no relation to what we now understand the term to mean. They were influenced by post-punk bands like PiL and were notable for using a Roland Juno 6 keyboard that Andrew Rothbard played while simultaneously playing his bass during live shows. Their abrasive, short songs and unique style didn’t endear them to most, but it was the keyboards that really annoyed the die-hard punks who attended their small shows. People shouted “Depeche Mode!” between the songs. Years later their sound could be heard in bands like the Locust for example, or just about anyone who dared to use keyboard in punk bands afterwards.
Sonny Kay parted ways with the rest of the group after a number of singles and one album. A few tracks written at the end of The VSS’s short career featured a more stretched out, hypnotic vibe and it was this sound that the remaining members decided to pursue with their next band.
Slaves were made up of Dave Clifford (drums), Josh Hugues (guitar) and Andrew Rothbard (keyboards, vocals). The band was originally going to be a side project, but when The VSS fell apart it became their main concern. The name - always without the definitive article - was meant to convey the idea of the audience being emotional slaves to music, about the artists trying to “control all the aspects of the environment that you’re in.”
They released one album as Slaves - The Devil’s Pleasures - a collection of two singles. It was filled with obtuse references to Charles Manson, the signs of the zodiac and the 23rd of January. The artwork was as dense as the lyrics. The front cover was a translucent sheet with the band name and a collage of rectangles printed on it. Behind that was the slip cover with a choice of images. One side has the band crammed together looking at the camera, Rothbard in a black boa and Clifford wearing a Nazi-esque armband with the symbol and image of his star sign, Scorpio. The other side had a grey skull resting on white cloth. It was angled so the face looked diagonally upwards, as if in ecstasy, and made visable the hole that the spinal chord fits into. The back cover has two photos. One is an orange tinted shot of a woman’s breast, the other the left leg of a blow-up doll with a veiny blue dildo sticking out.
“I like to fuck, you know. I think that should be expressed in music”– Andrew Rothbard
Dropping the name Slaves, because people kept calling them the Slaves and confusing the meaning to be something to do with S&M or race, they called themselves first The Devil’s Pleasures and then settled on Pleasure Forever. Building on the themes from the first album they created a total concept for the band based on indulgence. Their identity was complex. Firstly, there was their obsession with the number three. The three members had equal importance in the group. Instead of having the drum kit at the back, they performed in a line and Dave Clifford spoke as much as anyone else about the band in interviews, unusual for a drummer. Rothbard’s lyrics might well be about his own experiences, but they had a collage-like style, relying on particular phrases to evoke a mood or state of mind rather than any kind of story telling. Their attitude was described well in one of their logos: a small solid circle with three arrows coming out of it, all pointing to a larger circle outline.
Their first release as Pleasure Forever was the single for Goodnight. The single featured a photograph of a plastic anatomical model of the virgin mary split open from the chest, her plastic guts spewing out. A cover of a Germs song set the standard for cover versions of somewhat unexpected material.
Their live shows, while sparely attended, were unique performances. Rothbard sang gripping on to his microphone and playing a modular synth and a keyboard. Clifford would drum so energetically that his black slicked back hair would fall on his face like a devil lock. Hugues’ rock god poses - thrashing around with his white guitar – were made incongruous by his staid clothes and poker face. As noted, their stage set-up of performing in a line mirrored their aesthetic, but also their individual performances referenced their logo: coming from the same place, going in different directions and then ending up together as a larger whole.
Almost as soon as Goodnight was released came their first album. Pleasure Forever was unashamedly a concept album, released at a time before that idea had been made semi-acceptable by irony. From the cover, to the lyrics to the music, the central idea to the album was that of decadence.
“Here's to the decadents, the seekers of pleasure, emancipated (and often undone) by their own desires - who sought the precipice because the only way to know true life is to dance with death” - Pleasure Forever website, 2001
Even though now we’re used to the theme of decadence, bored of things like the burlesque revival, back in 2001 people were seriously talking about “the end of irony” and a band with a name like Pleasure Forever - who had songs about sex, drugs and indulgence – didn’t really fit with the times.
The cover to their self titled first album is striking. The band sit in front of a table filled with food, candles, knives and booze. Each member has a glass in his hand. Rothbard holds a bunch of fat grapes like an offering while wearing a blank look on his face. Behind them a party scene like out of some priceless oil painting rages. Girls, guys and members of the band are crowded together in strange poses like a tableau memory of a drunken party. A fist punches Hugues in the face, a sullen guy holds an old fashioned telephone to his face, two girls in dresses embrace, Clifford holds a knife in his gloved hand, Rothbard plays the piano with a fag hanging out of his mouth while looking sullenly up some girls skirt. On the left, two girls are climbing up a ladder out of the top of the album cover. The words “Pleasure Forever” have the sign for infinity sandwiched between them.
“In a lot of the reviews we’ve seen, people have said that we take ourselves really seriously. It seems bizarre to me. Just look at the cover of our album. It’s completely over the top.”- Josh Hugues
But that’s not all. Inside are two anonymous quotes from a book on orgies. A portion: “Perhaps ‘orgy’ is too big a word; there were just three of us. But as someone once said, infinity begins with the number 3”. The inlay has another picture of the band in front of their feast and shows Rothbard taking a cigarette out of his mouth with his fingers that are raised to signal the number three. The band are identified in the liner notes by their sign of the zodiac. The lyrics themselves are filled with references to drug fatigue (“Ran out of bullets kept on shooting”) and more cryptic references to Charlie Manson (“Rise rise rise rise rise rise”). The album is packed with imagery. Put the cd in your computer and it plays an arty video montage of the band performing.
Reviews were mixed to say the least. A lot of people hated the name. A lot of people hated the overblown proggishness of some of the songs. The lyrical themes and arty vibe didn’t endear them to people just beginning an obsession with the Strokes.
A year after Pleasure Forever was released the band moved from San Francisco to Portland and started writing songs for their next album. Alter came out in 2003.
“They were bleak and trying times for us ... a time that I thought none of us would escape with our lives (and there are a few I know who didn't) and that if somehow we'd be able to reclaim our innocence, it would cost us everything we had.” - Dave Clifford on writing songs for Alter.
Alter’s cover was so good it prompted one reviewer to say that if a band uses such imagery they should have better music. Perhaps this is a problem a lot people have with Pleasure Forever; they are seduced by the imagery but are ambivalent to the music. To be honest, I don’t know what they expect.
The cover for Alter is like a sequel to Pleasure Forever’s. The band members stand in a bare white room behind a red chair in the same order they sat in front of their feast. Sitting in the chair is a blanked-out figure, the white echoing censored crime scene photos, explicitly that of the Manson murders. The chair is ringed with red roses. On the back is the same scene, only the figure in the chair has vanished, and it’s the band who are blanked-out white.
“We wanted to make a record that sounded like a suicide note put to music, but something that could reach that level of despair and intensity – reach the abyss – and through its/our own will to endure, convey a sense of purpose.”– Dave Clifford on Alter
If Pleasure Forever was about hedonism for its own sake and staring at the abyss drunk and laughing, then Alter is being in that same place the morning after, still stuck with the same buzzing thoughts, but cool-headed and grim. The songs are less sprawling and Rothbard voice has the same vocal effect on every song. It makes him sound like he’s singing out of a radio.
As well as Manson, the band added two more infamous – and very different - American murders to their body of reference: the Zodiac Killer and the Columbine massacre. Like most of their references they give a flavour to the songs, rather than the song being “about” them. A listener to the song Wicked Shivering Columbine could be forgiven in thinking it was a reference to the flower, if the band hadn’t posed for a photo in front of Columbine High School on Halloween, 1999. Likewise, This Is the Zodiac Speaking’s only explicit reference is the title/chorus - the first line of a note from the killer to the San Francisco Police Department - and nothing more.
After releasing Alter Pleasure Forever seemed to go quiet. A band noted for their live performances stopped touring. There were a few confusing rumours about one member of the band quitting, sometimes two, leaving the remaining to continue on. In 2004 Rothbard said “Josh Hugues and I both left Pleasure Forever after our Spring 2003 tour… Dave has assured me that he will not continue to make music under the name Pleasure Forever”. And that was that.
In 2007 a compilation of some of their rare tracks was released. It featured a number of songs from comps – including a Slaves song from a Your Flesh compilation – and cover versions of songs by Black Flag, Abba and others, originally recorded for their aborted covers album. The album cover is a somewhat dull, if appropriate, picture of the Fantoff stave church in Bergen, the one Varg Vikernes allegedly burnt down. The title, Bodies Need Rest, acted as the official explanation for the break up.
Further and Misc.
Pleasure Forever on myspace
Interview with Pleasure Forever
Pleasure Forever subpop page (includes mp3s)
Old Pleasure Forever website
Video from Forever Pleasure
Basically Slaves/Pleasure Forever were reaching for something that most indie rock bands can’t be bothered to more than glance at. I think ultimately they failed, but their attempt at inventing their own grammar of references goes way beyond the name-dropping a lot of bands go in for.
After the band split up Dave Clifford and Josh Hugues joined other bands. Andrew Rothbard holed himself away for years recording for a project called Coast Ghost. He had a weird website that had hidden pages and links that led nowhere. He seemed to be keeping up the mysterious side of Pleasure Forever, but for a while was quiet. In 2006 the first of a planned (and apparently already recorded) five albums came out under the name Andrew Douglas Rothbard. Called Abandoned Meander it sounded sort of like a jangly psychedelic version of Pleasure Forever. If you were a dickhead you’d probably call it “freak folk”. It’s my favourite of all the post-Pleasure Forever work and you can download some mp3s here.
"Pleasure Forever: a declaration of will; an incantation of transcendence; a celebration of human desire, and the evisceration of excess.
Dionysus, Saradanapalus, Aleister Crowley, Nijinsky, Shiva, Cecil B. de Mille, Darby Crash, Heliogabalus, Caligula, Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, Erzebet Bathory, Nero, Antonin Artaud, Nico, Balinese trancers, Charles Manson, Kenneth Anger, Jim Morrison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Brian Jones, Elvis Presley, Anita Berber, Wilhelm Reich, Nikolai Gogol, Anton LaVey, Carl Panzram, the erotic explorers of Weimar Berlin, and on and on..."
*
p.s. Hey. A seemingly long lost, much missed d.l. of this blog named Oliver made this post some time back, and you can rediscover his offer of discovery today, if you like. Hi and thanks, Oliver, if you're out there! So, I was optimistic in thinking that I might be freed up enough by tomorrow to do the p.s. Instead, post-production work goes long and hard but very well. I'm going to shoot for doing the p.s. on Thursday, and we'll see. Have a good day.