Bryan Ferry
Going
beyond Roxy Music
article
by James Truman
Spin
magazine May 1985
(συνέντευξη πριν την κυκλοφορία
του προσωπικού του άλμπουμ “Boys and Girls” )
ΜΟΥΣΙΚΗ
Bryan Ferry, Spin
magazine May 1985
When Bryan Ferry first
launched the group early in 1972, Roxy Music came through as a brilliantly
conceived, genuinely original new-age sensation—which like all new-age
sensations, and especially British new-age sensations, seemed destined to
flourish and fade with the cycle of fashion it set in motion.
But Roxy Music
lasted; it was built to last. Reaching beyond their inspired-amateur
beginnings, they got even better. In the process, they quickly jumped from
being a contender to becoming the competition—something hard to get past
without looking at, referring to, borrowing from.
Although the
group's first records didn’t make much impact in America, their influence
clearly did. Elegantly played out in early Talking Heads,
brazenly piliered by The Cars,
it still rebounds through the work of a whole bunch of other minor-leaguers.
And as for Britain—well, one might take a roll call, working backwards from Duran Duran, an efficient if rather
vacuous junior high version of mid-period Roxy.
Whether Ferry
takes this as flattery or rude insolence (and he'll go with either, depending
on the weather) isn’t the point, The points that Roxy Music progressed, and
stayed interesting, by expanding their early work rather than by reacting to
new market trends, as Bowie did.
This may be a
tribute to Ferry’s vision, but it has, made things complicated, hard to read.
In fact, complicated in stereo: From one channel, richocheting back and forth
in perfect time warp, there’s been a steady stream of Roxy soundalikes, a
persistent overture to a familiar refrain; from the other channel, the real
thing, also throwing out echoes of another time and place. It's still a Roxy
world out there.
An even
greater problem, however was that, even at the beginning, it was hard to grasp
exactly what Roxy Music actually was. No one could claim that Bryan Ferry
invented rock, or for that matter art-rock, avant-pop or new-age blues and
balladry. Nor was he the first, pop entertainer to understand irony, camp or
nostalgia. The vocabulary already existed. However, by rearranging the syntax
he succeeded in broadening its scope, and he drastically reshaped its meaning.
With one ear turned to rock and blues, the other to the avant-garde, and with
both eyes tracking the giant sprawl of twentieth-century popular culture,
Ferry’s songwriting brilliantly played one off against the other.
The swirling,
atonal drone of “In Every Dream Home a Heartache,”
a love song sung to an inflatable sex doll, lent the lyrics, a grim foreboding
even as it shaded them with irony. “2.H.B.,” a blue mood framed by cocktail
lounge piano, paid a campy tribute to Humphrey Bogart at the very same time as
it choked on the sob in Ferry’s throat.
You could go
on; to the rock 'n' roll love song which made the girl’s car number plate into
its chorus, to Ferry crooning a smoke-curled lyric while the band veered off in
the direction of the Shirelles
. . . at a time when the consensus idea of art-rock lay in schlock versions of
nineteenth century classical music, here was strange stuff indeed. That Ferry
made it all sound straightforward and sincere put him beyond strange: probably
a genius, possibly a madman . . . an enigma at least.
“Perhaps a
natural oddball,” he suggests, from the far corner of the room, to which he has
temporarily retired. One quickly learns that the next hardest thing to pinning
Ferry down to do an interview is pinning him down while actually doing the
interview. Surprisingly shy, scrupulously polite, he fields questions by
nervously pacing up and down the floor, as though he'd mislaid the answers and
was feverishly searching for them. If the walls were to evaporate, you'd sense
that he'd quite happily disappear, too.
His last
interview, on British television last year (1984), settled this beyond
question. Stipulating that it take place on a favorite beach, close to his old
hometown, Ferry began at a slow amble, progressed to a brisker stroll with each
question, and, by the end, had interviewer, cameraman and sound crew jogging at
his heels as he took off into an approaching North Sea mist—which suggests at
least a slightly eccentric sense of humor.
“Actually, I
just don’t enjoy interviews,” he says. “The whole thing of talking about my
work has always made me feel uneasy or embarrassed, as if I didn’t want to talk
about it with myself, never mind anyone else. It’s perhaps just an
old-fashioned romantic notion of inspiration coming from somewhere I don’t
really understand, and being superstitious about trying to analyze it.”
An analysis
of the oddball might easily begin in Newcastle, an industrial city in the north
of England, where, in 1945, Bryan Ferry was born. Although poor, his parents
stressed education and after high school helped him into art college. In that,
he was superficially no different from thousands of others; British art
colleges being a kind of traditional safety net for working-class teenagers. To
many, they've been a means of access into fashion and music; to many, many
more, they offer the only possible creative interlude between high school and a
career as a truck driver.
But, Ferry
was serious about becoming an artist, and the college he attended was actually
the Fine Art Department of Newcastle University, headed by Richard Hamilton,
then Britain’s foremost avant-garde artist. He was also serious about American
R&B and soul music, even fronting a couple of local, part-time pub bands
who knocked out cover versions of Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding.
“At that
stage it was just a matter of wanting to make my mark somehow, of feeling that I
had some kind of talent to offer,” he says, passing by the tape recorder on
another lap of the room. “Having started thinking that it would be as a
painter, it took several years, in my usual roundabout, dreamy kind of way, to
transfer that to being a musician.” It also took a move to London where, among
other things, Ferry supported himself by teaching art to a class of teenage
girls. His method was to bring a record player, crank up the Motown, and let
them get on with it.
On the
lookout for musicians to help him perform the songs he'd begun writing, he met
a classically trained oboist-turned-rock-saxophonist by the name of Andy Mackay, who in turn introduced him to an old
college friend, a dedicated non-musician with an interest in electronics and a
passport to prove he really was called Brian Peter
George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno.
Somewhere
along the line they also recruited guitarist Phil
Manzanera and drummer Paul Thompson.
They already had a bass player who, like all Roxy Music bass players, didn’t last
long.
Around the
peripheries, other figures appeared: Anthony Price, a young, wonderfully
innovative London fashion designer; Mark Fenwick, heir to a chain of British
department stores and a partner in a go-ahead new management company called
E.G.; and publicist Simon Puxley, an eccentrically brilliant Ph.D. whose press
releases, at their best, were absolutely incomprehensible. Which is to say
there was a concept of sorts: an experimental rock group, dressed to kill,
backed up by sound business sense and prone to third-degree eccentricity.
Canny enough
to recognize the band’s weakness— performing—Mark Fenwick kept their early
appearances low-key, waiting till they put out a record before launching them
in earnest.
The ploy
worked, because the record was terrific. First released in June 1972, “Roxy Music” (album) is still a
revelation—an extraordinary synthesis of fractured rock 'n’ roll and wild
experimentation. Like the early Velvet Underground, which it occasionally recalled,
the sophistication of ideas transcended their sometimes-shaky execution.
At the same
time the cleverness of Roxy's presentation not only transcended rock-biz hype,
but subtly reversed its rules. Rather than use image as packaging, they made it
a central part of the content, a celebration of its meaning. And those outfits!
Post-dated Fifties Rocker in ‘72, Glam Smoothie in '73, White Tuxedoed Crooner
in '74, Pampas Cowboy alternating with American G.l. in '75—together a shopping
list of early '70s style, which Ferry either took so seriously he had to be
joking, or so light-heartedly he could only be serious. Ambivalence was always
part of the picture. So, too, was the curious, double-edged irony of Roxy
Music, which on the one hand seemed intent on distancing itself from it’s
subject matter, as if placing everything in quotation marks, while on the other
hand making clear that it all really mattered. And even when it didn’t matter
it mattered, so to speak.
There's a popular story about a young art
student who, asked to write about an important work of contemporary art,
produced a thesis on Bryan Ferry, (We're not sure if he passed, but he changed
his name to Adam Ant and did OK anyway.)
The point being that the British obsession
with style, interpreted by foreigners, as a decadent silliness, is, to
the British, a very serious business. There are at least two good reasons for
this, Firstly, style is one of the few things the British are still good at;
and secondly, it is one of the very few things which can, even temporarily,
lift the barriers of class.
In a society as rigidly class-bound as
Britain, style is an important weapon, almost a political act. To look better,
to dress sharper, than the ruling class is the only way to gate-crash a party
to which one would rarely, if ever, be properly invited.
From the Teddy Boys in the ‘50s to Mods in
the ‘60s, this impulse has been a primary force behind British youth culture.
In that respect, the strongest memory of Roxy's early audience doesn't revolve
around the celebrity art crowd, the professional hipsters, the international
thrill-seekers; it consists of the many more provincial working-class teenagers
who, within days of a Roxy tour kicking off, had perfectly duplicated the New
Look, parading it shamelessly, in celebration not just of Ferry but of
themselves.
“I always loved that,” he enthuses, slowing
down a trace. “That whole thing of glamorous lifestyles . . . it was something
which had always attracted me as a boy. Not necessarily posh lifestyles, just
things that were more interesting than where I came from. I resented so much
the idea of being born into a certain caste and having to stay in that bracket
forever. It became a very strong motive, to win that freedom of movement which
would allow me to experience different kinds of life, to have the opportunity
to change.”
Along with David Bowie, Roxy Music institutionalized the idea of
audience-as-star, even if their methods and motives were subtly
different. Where Ferry, beneath the playfulness, embraced role-playing as
though his life depended on it, Bowie changed persona as his career demanded it—to
spruce up each new chapter of his work-in-progress.
The difference was perhaps less apparent in
Europe, where the two have always run neck-and-neck, than in America, where the
heavy metal-pop-plus-makeup of Ziggy Stardust—an astute combination of the
commercial and the controversial— quickly realized Bowie's stadium-sized ambitions.
Roxy Music, meanwhile, were playing
bottom-of-the-bill to Jethro Tull. “There were just no compatible acts in America
to package them with,” recalls Mark Fenwick. “The tour was a disaster. The
record industry didn’t know what to make of the group, and with a couple of
exceptions (notably Cleveland’s WMMS) radio wouldn't touch us."" It
would take another three years, and the Top 30 success of “Love Is the
Drug,” before Roxy broke through in any substantial way.
As for the Bowie issue, Ferry is evasive,
thinks it bad form to discuss it. All the same, it's not hard to see that he's
less impressed with Bowie's music than with his, sales figures, and wouldn't
lose sleep if those took a nosedive. Neither is it hard to figure out that
Bowie's interest runs the other way.
In 1973, shortly after Ferry announced plans
for These Foolish Things, an
album of arch cover versions of his favorite oldies, Bowie packed his bags for
Paris, made a record in two weeks, and rush-released it on his return, The
result was Pinups . . . an album of
his favorite oldies.
“He phoned me up one day to tell me he'd
finished it,” Ferry recalls. “I'm not sure what he expected me to say. I think I
said ‘Oh.’ ”
Since then they haven't exactly been tennis
partners, although Bowie periodically crosses the gap by quizzing
Ferry’s friends on his future plans and, hitting right below the belt, by using
Ferry’s tailor in London. Which might also explain why he approached Ferry to
appear in his “Jazzin’ For Blue Jean” video—as the debonair smoothie who mocks
the Bowie-character’s attempt to turn himself into a lady-killer. The
invitation wasn’t taken too seriously. Bowie settled for using a Ferry
lookalike.
For all that, there’s no question that Bowie
better anticipated the advent of punk rock in 1977. Just before it broke he
moved to West Berlin, to live an ascetic life and make avowedly uncommercial
art records with (irony!) Brian Eno. Credibility-wise this was unbeatable; it
guaranteed him safe passage through the revolution.
Ferry couldn't have appeared more out of
step if he'd planned it. Having disbanded Roxy Music the previous year
("I felt I had to grow up musically"), 1977 found him living in a
famously expensive Swiss hotel and recording with a bunch of super-slick
session musicians.
At the same time, his name had become a
fixture in British society gossip columns. Taken together, these three were as
precise a contravention of The Spirit of '77 as was humanly possible. In actual
fact, the gossip columns had been a nagging issue for several years, ever since
Ferry had started to live out his theatrical interest in glamorous lifestyles
in the real world. In fairness, he'd never promised that he wouldn't. But to
those who thought they‘d made the journey with him, only to find themselves stranded
back in a duller world, it felt like a betrayal.
And in 1977 it all rebounded badly. When the
same gossip columns informed him and the rest of the interested world that his
model girlfriend Jerry Hall had left him for Mick Jagger, Ferry began to
appear not merely a snob, but a loser as well. The punks turned on him with a
vengeance. Or, more exactly, with the vengeance of rebellious teenagers finally
leaving home. Punk rock's emphasis on musical amateurism, on style (now messing
up instead of dressing up) and on turning its audience into part of the show
exhibited more than a few hereditary ties to early Roxy
Music.
Ferry’s Swiss record, “The
Bride Stripped Bare”, (album 1978, 5th solo album), was a
commercial disaster; not merely because the punks didn’t like it—it was pretty
nondescript anyway. Its failure—his first—hurt him badly. Punk, he says, didn’t.
“I think I vaguely enjoyed the fact that it
was so different from what I was doing. I suppose had I been philosophical I
might have rolled around in the grass tearing my hair out! ‘Oh no! Some new people have actually made records!’ But I don’t
think I really minded at all. It was more difficult when later waves came along
and my early style of music was resurrected. I could recognize people writing
songs in the same way, using the same reference points and so forth. Sometimes
you felt they were a little too clone-like, but that's the way it goes.
Ultimately, it just made me more determined to be myself.”
In late 1978, Ferry re-formed Roxy Music
with Andy Mackay, Phil
Manzanera and a soon-to-disappear Paul
Thompson. It was no secret that, on a personal level, the group didn’t
especially like one another. It was no secret that the group hadn't much liked
each other for years. Eno’s sudden departure
in 1973, after the “For Your
Pleasure” album, exposed the existence of rivalries, or at least
different perceptions of democracy. While the others wanted equal partnership,
Ferry saw the group as a vehicle for his ideas, which was how it had started
and, in the event, continued. He also claims the squabbling was inspirational.
“Being quite a competitive person, it always suited me to be in that kind of
situation, where I had other talents to fight, as it were. A lot of my best
work came from that, the urge to improve upon something which someone else had
played or suggested.”
Over the next two years, the remodeled Roxy Music
put out two big-selling albums, “Manifesto”
(1979, 6th studio album) and “Flesh and
Blood” (1980, 7th studio album). Both offered beautifully played, immaculately
crafted Roxy songs, picking up from where “Siren”,
the last group album, had left off in 1975. But as a wandering sage was heard
to remark, great pop records lay a minefield around the future. From a group
which had once sold you not just a record, but an alternative option lifestyle,
there seemed to be a dimension missing. Specifically, the dimension of context:
neither record displayed their former flair for seizing a moment so perfectly
that it became exclusively theirs.
Oddly enough, the next album overcame this
problem by ignoring it completely. Rather than trying to repackage Roxy's early
hysteria, “Avalon” (1982, 8th
studio album) refined it into a shimmering, hallucinatory stillness, floating
free of time, place or fashion. Selling more than three million copies, it
became their most successful album and, definitively, their last.
“When it was finished I knew there would
never be another,” says Ferry. “It nearly didn’t get made at all. It just got
to be too much agony, dealing with personality conflicts all the time. As I
said, it used to be good for my work, but I thought it just got to the wrong
side of being right. To keep it together just as a business name didn’t seem a
good enough reason.”
Accordingly, he has spent the past 18 months
recording Avalon's sequel, flitting restlessly back and forth between London
and New York, “It gets harder every time, in terms of finding that speed and
energy of youth. It’s something that's very difficult to explain, especially to
younger people, because when you're young and you have that enthusiasm and
ambition you don’t ever imagine not having it. I still respect what I do as
art, I'm afraid, which is why I wait so long for that genuine enthusiasm to
come, otherwise the work wouldn't mean anything.
“Also, I really do want to sound different
from other people, and from my previous work. Unfortunately, it means that you
do spend 18 months making a record, because you think of an idea and then have
to go beyond it, and then go beyond that until it gets to the point where you
think you're happy with it. Then you think ‘Have I gone too far?’ I never reach
the point where I think my records are completely perfect. Usually I just get
exhausted and reluctantly let go of them, which is where a deadline helps.”
Only this time it didn’t. Originally scheduled for release last November, the
album got put back to January, then February, then March and now is set for
early April. At press-time it lacked only a title and a final mix of one song,
which means it should certainly be ready before Christmas.
To make sense of this is to understand that
indecision is Ferry’s way of getting things done. The late-breaking,
against-the-odds masterpiece of his post-Siren career, the new album extends a
patchwork of eerie, fragile tensions: a music whose energy comes not from
resolving contradictions, but from leaving them subtly unresolved.
Of course Ferry is inconsolable on the
matter. It’s 3 A.M. in his New York hotel room. There’s an advance copy of Jerry Hall’s forthcoming literary memoirs on
the table. “I just wish Jerry wouldn't exaggerate so much,” he sighs. There's
also a new mix of a song playing on the sound system. Pacing up and down the
room, he picks up on a detail he doesn’t like. It's enough: he's off into one
of his famously quixotic monologues which, typically, begins with a meditation
on the small detail, spoken to no one in particular, blossoms into plans to
junk the whole record and finishes in a decision to sell his house and worldly
possessions and go live in a cottage on the beach.
Ferry is a hard character to define. Smart,
funny, charming, animated when he's off-duty; morbid drifts of insecurity and
self-doubt seem to occupy most of his working moments. On another day, in
another context, I’d asked him if he thought it was disillusioning to live out
one’s fantasies,
“ I think the corny truth of the matter is
that you find you can't buy happiness,” he says. “When you're young, you think
‘I want to be rich and go on a yacht,’ and then when you do you find you’re
still the same, still carrying around the same general luggage. I don’t think
your mind changes, and your heart certainly doesn’t change. Having lived in
various places, and having known various groups of people, I’ve found that I
don’t really fit in with any of them. It’s a strange dawning, because you've
always imagined that one day you're suddenly going to fit in somewhere and
become a happy person. Not that I'm miserable or anything.”
Perhaps the best way to make sense of this
is to remember that through the years, the costume changes, the ups and downs
of his career, Ferry has maintained at least one steady persona. It’s that of
the classic romantic, the hero as striver and sufferer, in a world where true
love comes hand-in-hand with certain betrayal, where every perfect evening ends
up as a table for one, and where every victory has disaster built in.
Which would seem to explain a lot, except
that these days Ferry’s own personal life is less prone to disaster. When not
working, he lives a quiet, deliberately low-key life in the British countryside
with Lucy, his wife of three years, and Otis (after Redding), his son of two.
It appears a more cheerful and ordered existence than his writing would
indicate.
“That's
true,” he grins. “But don’t forget, I have a very good memory.”
James Truman, “Painted Words, Tanted Love”, Spin magazine May 1985, pp. 48-51.
[το album του Bryan Ferry που αναφέρεται στο άρθρο είναι το “Boys and Girls”. To έκτο κατά σειράν σόλο άμπουμ του.
Κυκλοφόρησε στις 3 Ιουνίου 1985.]
ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΟΓΡΑΦΟΣ
[ ανάρτηση 18 Μαρτίου 2024 :
Bryan Ferry
Going beyond Roxy Music
article by James Truman
Spin magazine May 1985
ΜΟΥΣΙΚΗ ]
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