Frantic

Frantic? Surely not! Monsieur Ferry gets stirred occasionally, but never shaken. Maybe it’s a Polanski thang.

Whatever, this record signals the silver-tongued devil’s return to compositional chores after a spell in the interpretive wilderness (was I the only person on earth who liked As Time Goes By?). Curiously enough, he chooses to kick off with a rollicking blues harp and slide powered cover of Bob’s ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’, but the quality of the rendition (and there was never so perfect a marriage as Ferry’s phrasing and Dylan’s snidest lines) renders questions about its inclusion a moot point. If he’d lost his voice in the first place, you’d have to say he recovered it here.

Maybe as the result of the Roxy reunion, Ferry doesn’t embarrass himself much with session sidekicks whose idea of style is to roll up the sleeves on their pastel jackets. So, Eno’s back on board for a couple of numbers, while Jonny Greenwood does his stuff all over the blue neon sushi bar cityscape of ‘Hiroshima’, a showcase for the singer’s firm grasp of atmospheres.

Okay, the court poetry and MOR rock of ‘Fool For Love’ does set off warning bells, but let’s avert our eyes from that particular faux pas and instead concentrate on the Norma Jean madrigal ‘Goddess Of Love’, which starts off like the best Velvets tune Lou never wrote (“Marilyn said…”) before dissolving through an omnichord arpeggio into one of those patented Life Of Bryan choruses that makes you feel like you’re driving a Ferry-ari through a Vertigo remake opposite Kim Basinger doing her best Veronica Lake. Hey – dreaming is free.

And speaking of dreaming, ‘San Simeon’, which features a lyric dating back to ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’, is a piano and viola fuelled hallucination, which finds our hero chasing old Hollywood ghosts through William Randolph’s castle.

In this ornate environment, covers of ‘Don’t Think Twice’ and ‘Goodnight Irene’ seem like odd bedfellows, yet even here Ferry mines the bitterness in Bob’s kiss-off and the downright morbidity of Leadbelly’s standard, where a man, because he cannot have an underage girl, admits impulses of suicide by drowning and morphine. Extraordinary stuff, yet hardly out of place on what is an unexpected pleasure.