Confessions of a crooner

He’s the original karmic chameleon. Bryan Ferry will forever be enshrined in rock dreams as the impossibly suave frontman of Roxy Music, whose early albums fused arts-lab aesthetics with visceral rock ‘n’ roll. He would go on to rival David Bowie as the most influential artist of the early ‘70s, providing a link between Warhol, the Velvets, glam and punk.
Throughout the late ‘70s Ferry maintained a double identity, cultivating the persona of lounge lizard, torch balladeer and interpretative singer on solo albums like These Foolish Things and The Bride Stripped Bare, while Roxy continued to enjoy a string of chart hits (‘Dance Away, ‘Oh Yeah’, ‘Jealous Guy’, ‘More Than This’), culminating in the designer soft-rock deluxe of 1982’s Avalon.
But behind the stylish playboy façade is a surprisingly reserved character ill at ease with the trappings of celebrity; a studio boffin whose perfectionism has led him to spend millions of pounds and years on end tweaking and polishing solo projects. Entire empires have risen and fallen between the release of albums such as Boys And Girls, Bete Noire and the 1930s-themed As Time Goes By (1999), but earlier this year, inspired by a return to the live circuit both as a solo artist and with the reformed Roxy (currently engaged in the ongoing process of recording a new album with Brian Eno), Ferry ditched the perfectionist inclinations and recorded Dylanesque, an album of Bob Dylan standards, in a week. He also pulled off a credible acting turn recently as a predatory john in Neil Jordan’s Breakfast On Pluto, not to mention making some widely condemned remarks about the aesthetics of Nazi architecture.
Here, in a revealing interview with Dave Fanning, he speaks about Roxy, Dylan, his son Otis’s march on the House Of Commons to protest the UK ban on hunting, and also recalls how he became James Bond for a day on a hijacked flight to Kenya in December, 2000.
Dave Fanning: You’ve covered Dylan before, on Frantic in 1992 and as far back as These Foolish Things in ’72, but a full album has been a long time coming. Is it an homage? Or is it that a lot of people can’t penetrate Bob himself and you’re going to help them?
Bryan Ferry: Maybe it’s a lot of things, but for me, the fact that I’m a singer, and always looking for fresh material to do…obviously I write my own songs from time to time, but not as frequently as I’d like, and when I did the first solo album in ’73, the first single was ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’, so that was the beginning of my association with the Dylan material. It occurred to me then, in the early ’70s, that there’s a whole album of songs I really like, and I thought, “One day I’ll do that,” and this is that day really.
You’ve said before that it’s almost like how Shakespeare can be done over a period of a few hundred years, the amount of different interpretations you can bring to it.
Yeah, you just try and bring a bit of yourself to it, in the sense that a jazz musician would take a classic song and do his own thing with it. I started buying records being a jazz fan initially, when I was really young, noticing that the same song could be done in many different ways. The different musicians you had doing a song like (George and Ira Gershwin’s) ‘Embraceable You’ or something like that. It could be Billie Holiday on one version, Charlie Parker on another, Coleman Hawkins on yet another, all with a different take on it, bringing something of themselves into it, so that’s what I try and do.
Well, you did the ‘30s classic thing at the end of the 1990s, you’ve done Dylan now.
Where next?
Well, could it be one of your great first musical loves, which was Stax? If Eric Clapton or Rod Stewart were listening to Muddy Waters or Mississippi John Hurt, you went to the other extreme, the kind of Cuban Heels aspect of it, the girl group kind of thing. Could we see a Bryan Ferry Stax album?
Ah well, I love all that music and, in fact, the day I really decided to become a musician was when I hitchhiked from Newcastle to London to see Otis Redding, to see the Stax review, which was the most amazing thing, and I still have a vivid memory of it, Otis Redding, the Memphis Band, Steve Cropper, all these great players, and I was just like “Wow, I’d like to do that!”
But you weren’t ‘wow-ing’ neccesarily at the early Dylan…
A bit too folky for me, absolutely, yeah. The first couple of Dylan albums went by me. I was a student then at the University in Newcastle and had my own band, and we were doing all soul covers really, and saw these rather earnest looking people carrying the Dylan folk albums and thought, “Hmm, not really for me.” But when he started doing electric band things, then I got interested and thought, “Oh god, he’s really good you know”, and discovered the earlier songs after that.
Do you think, in many ways, people who can’t get into Dylan are put off by the production values? He’d make an album in four days and then he’d be back on the never-ending tour. And maybe you’re saying to people, “Hold on, look how good this all is”?
I think sometimes, especially with the early songs where he was only using a guitar and a harmonica and, as you say, the production values aren’t enormous, you could bring more musicality to it. For instance, the cello works well on ‘Positively 4th Street’. The fact that he had such a huge career with a voice and an acoustic guitar tells you how great those songs were.
You did this album very quickly, in the space of about a week.
It was fantastic. It was therapeutic really!
That’s not very 21st Century. That’s not very Bryan Ferry even!
No, it’s not. It was just like the old days where you just go in with half a dozen great players and hope that something good will come out, and it did, I think. I would work out the key with the piano player, and I’d work out the mood of it, kind of, and the band would just jump in. Which is unusual for me. It was good because it meant that I could lead from the front instead of being in the control room, which I am most of the time when I make a record, behind the desk, playing Phil Spector if you like. All the album is done kind of live in that way; vocals, harmonicas, and most of the solos as well.
So do you look back through the decades and say you blew it 13 years ago in 1994 with an album that cost nearly £1 million to make…
Oh, much more than that! (laughs)
How anal and up your own arse were you?
I think I called it experimenting (laughs). Sometimes you’re looking for new ways of doing things and you’re embracing new technologies so I understand now, having done it, how people can get lost in the studio and go round and round in circles. But sometimes great things come out of that. I’ve made albums which did take a long time which, in the end, did kind of validate the way they were done. Avalon and Boys and Girls were two examples of albums which I was quite happy with what happened in the end, even though the was a lot of angst getting there. This project was angst-free, from the beginning to the end.
Avalon was the last Roxy Music album, and it was also the most successful. I get the impression it wouldn’t neccesarily be one of your favourite Roxy Music albums?
Actually, I like it because it hangs together well. My favourite one is still For Your Pleasure, which is the second one. But all the other ones… It’s very hard, it’s like having children, you know, you like them all but in different ways. I like the way For Your Pleasure hangs together as a mood. Avalon had a different mood but it also had a cohesion about it I think, which was good, even though there were different players and it was a different kind of style of music.
For Your Pleasure was the last one with Brian Eno. The two of you were always seen as the ‘mad guy with the feather boa’ and the ‘suave’ singer…
We were both as mad as each other!
…but there must have been a bit of ego at the time, because Eno didn’t write the songs, you did.
There was a lot of that going on at the time. I think we both had ambitions of what to do, and it was probably the right thing that we separated and did our own thing. It’s great now to be able to work again with Brian without any pressure, and just ring up and ask him to come over and work on this, which he did on one of the tracks on the new (Roxy Music) album, ‘For You’. He’s quite happy to play a background role sort of thing, and fiddle around with one or two songs as a kind of enhancement of what is already there.
It’s very hard to see any other album in the history of music that had the impact, as far as I’m concerned, as the debut album by Roxy Music, because it just came out of absolutely nowhere, and was just completely different than anything else.
What I was trying to do was reflect all of the different influences I had in music, so they all kind of came out in that album, and it pointed a lot of different directions of where we could have gone with the band and the music. What was interesting for me about it was that it was all different genres, even within each song, we’d jump from one mood to another and I thought that was quite exciting at the time. We learned a lot making that record, so that a year later when we did the For Your Pleasure album, we seemed quite accomplished. We made a lot of mistakes on the first album but it was all quite honest and like: “Whoosh! Here’s one idea and here’s another.”
Sure, but you haven’t even mentioned the look. You looked like a bunch of drag queens and you sounded like the future, as somebody put it.
I was very interested in the way things looked. I’ve always been interested in design, so it was natural to get involved in the album design and the clothes, to some extent, although we were very lucky to have so many good friends that were fashion students or had just graduated, who were desperate to use us as guinea pigs really. Antony Price was the most important one and is still a very interesting designer today. So, yeah, we had one foot in the past and two in the future. We liked to borrow from the past and kind of do twists on it.
Do you still remember when you first heard ‘Virginia Plain’ on the radio?
Yeah, I think we were in a van on the A1 or something, or some motorway, and it was really exciting to hear your record. And it was equally exciting to see the album cover in a shop window the first time. There was a window on King’s Road which was full of them and I just stood there one night looking and was like “Wow, that’s cool”.
And are you glad you didn’t go straight from school to a band? What did college do for you?
It made me, really, going to college. For the first four years I met all these people who are still friends now. While I was there I started to perform as a musician too, so it was good for music as well as art appreciation.
And were you ever aware of any competition with David Bowie? You bring out a covers album, he brings out Pin Ups, you do disco, he does disco, then he even started using your friend Antony Price to design his stage clothes.
Well, he was much more popular than we were. We were more alternative I think. I remember he was always a big fan of Roxy, which was great, and we supported him because he’d been going for quite a few years by the time we started, and he had the big record Ziggy Stardust. We supported him in London at the Rainbow Theatre and that was a very big night for us, and it was where we made quite an impression I think. Although he was great, he had a very small band with an amazing guitar player called Mick Ronson who was a big part of their sound. No, he was very, very good and he was a great supporter.
And there were bands that subsequently came along, like, for instance, Mott the Hoople, Duran Duran, ABC, Japan, Talking Heads, the Psychedelic Furs, Pulp, Franz Ferdinand and The Smiths, all of whom, if they haven’t all said it somewhere, owe more than a small debt to Roxy Music. Somebody invents something and then somebody else comes in from left-field and takes all the glory…
It happens in life quite a lot, that kind of thing, and I think we’ve done very well and one can’t really complain.
Yes you can!
(laughs) But usually if there is a band that likes the same sort of thing that I like, say, or is working in a similar sort of vein, I can always hear it immediately and…the most interesting example recently has been Arcade Fire I think. When I first heard them I thought they had a sense of something very Roxy about them, a sort of adventurous spirit. I haven’t heard their new album yet, but apparently it’s very good.
Why did Roxy Music fall apart when their most successful album was out? Not many people can say their 9th album is their most successful.
It’s strange, isn’t it? I think I was just anxious to get away at the time, I can’t really remember much about it. I think I was tired. We did a long, long tour and I just felt I’d done too much of it with the same people and wanted to work with different folks, you know. It’s great that now we did quite a big tour in 2001, and last year we started recording together again, but that’s a really long project and God knows when I’ll finish it.
As in a new Roxy Music album with Brian Eno involved?
Yeah, right. That could be a couple of years more, because it’s not like we’re in there every day.
Has playing live again given you back your confidence?
Yeah, I think I’ve been much happier with my live work, as it were, since I did the As Time Goes By tour. What happened was one of the players who played with me on Avalon called Jimmy Maelen, who was a wonderful percussion player in New York, he very sadly died and they had a sort of benefit concert for his family and they asked me if I’d go along as well. Now I felt I had retired from live work at that point, but doing that show kind of kick-started me again, and sometime after that the As Time Goes By ‘30s tour felt so different, so fresh, being on stage with all of these kind of jazz players. After that I thought, “Hmm, it’s time to get down to business again.” And the fact that my children had also grown up a bit meant I could feel happier about going out on the road again.
And do you see your children as much as you’d like to?
No, not at all. I’d like to see them more, yeah. Two of them are away at school, and the other two have their own lives really. One of them works for me, actually, in my studio, and I see him everyday.
When you saw your son Otis on the telly storming the House of Commons, how did you feel? Was it pride?
(laughs) Very much so. It was astonishment first, and I was really impressed. I’ve always been quite shy myself. I think he felt very passionate indeed about his life and the life of all of his friends and all the people he has grown up with. He learned to ride in Ireland with this great guy on the West Coast in Galway, who taught him to ride and hunt with the Galway Blazers, so he did his apprenticeship as it were.
Your kids have said that when that other famous (airplane hijacking) incident happened around 6 or 7 years ago, you were the coolest man around.
Well one has to keep standards, you know (laughs).
But seriously, when a man who is mentally deranged takes over a major international flight and it plummets 10,000 feet in the space of two seconds or whatever, how does one retain one’s cool? I read in the paper, one of the best things ever, “and by the way, Brian Ferry’s hair stayed in place.” That was fantastic!
Well, thank God for that!
But seriously, did your life flash before you?
It’s funny how things happen in a situation like that. It was like being in a James Bond movie, this guy wrestling with the captain about 10 feet away and the guys in the front row jump on him. You know, it was quite fascinating really. And all I could think about at the time was my son was swearing, and I said, “Isaac, stop it!”, trying to impose my authority. (laughs)
Let’s go down with a stiff upper lip here. No bad language!
(laughs) Exactly.
There is a reserve about you that’s very genuine. Is any of it cultivated, for whatever reason? Do you feel people expect it of you?
Erm, I can’t really say, I’m not really sure. I’ve always been pretty much as I am now. I suppose maybe a lot of performers are retiring or reclusive or whatever’s the word and I think maybe we see our lives on stage as a compensation of that. The universal balance and all that. I think with Roxy Music it was very much a case of creating something that was, say, more extravagant or more colourful than one’s self.
They say creative people are very hard to live with. Are you?
Oh impossible! (laughs) Totally impossible.
There was a time around about 1976 when yourself and Jerry Hall were like the equivalent of what Brad Pitt and Angelina are now, or Posh and Becks. Obviously it’s much worse now because there are about 44 magazines a week.
Oh, it’s really changed now because when I was emerging, if you like, there weren’t any celebrity magazines really, there were only the music papers. In fact, for rock ‘n’ roll people to be mentioned in the national press was quite strange, and they never went out and reviewed concerts or anything, there was no attention on it at all. Now it’s completely changed. It must be, well it is awful, if you’re in the public eye in a bad way nowadays. So it’s nice to live a quiet life if you can.
So live, what is Bryan Ferry these days? Is it like a Bryan Ferry revue?
Yeah, I like to have quite a few musicians so that you can have lots of different musical colours. Although, I saw Cream last year when they reformed and that was amazing, just three people on stage, but in my case I like to have lots of different sounds on stage. We now have so many albums to delve into in a live performance, it’s frightening really.
You need that thing from the audience don’t you? I mean, Dylan’s on the road all the time.
I now know why he is. It’s strange isn’t it? It takes on a whole rhythm of its own, life on the road, and I can see how you can become addicted to it in a way.
Did you ever meet him?
No. I saw Dylan play for the first time last year at Brixton Academy.
Seriously? He’s on the never-ending tour for 20 years and you just saw him for the first time?
Yeah, really good. Although he didn’t play guitar, he was playing keyboards, and a very good band, I liked it a lot. But, no, I think he’s probably as retiring as I am, so I doubt if our worlds will meet.