As originally published in Venue magazine:It’s not cool to like Bryan Ferry. Roxy Music, sure, but not him. He was, afterall, carried through that group’s early years by the errant genius of Brian Eno. The point is proved by a solo career, covers-driven from the start, that has seen him come to resemble little more than a karaoke David Niven. Today he’s the brooding mannequin fronting an M&S clothing range, no mouth and all trousers. Worse yet, he bequeathed to the world Otis Ferry, poster boy of the Countryside Alliance, named after a soul singer and who spends his days – sing along if you know the words - sittin’ on the top of a horse, wastin’ foxes.
Well, the hell with that. Yes, Eno brought manic individualism to Roxy. But so did the freeform guitaring of Phil Manzanera, the wild sax and mournful oboe of Andy MacKay, and the skittish drumming of Paul Thompson. Few groups have harnessed such wilfully distinct elements into a sum still greater, and Ferry was the catalyst. The man looking like Comeback Special-era Elvis mugged by a girls’ high school make-up team, all black leather and glittery eyeshadow, provided focus. And his own contribution – musically an underrated pianist, vocally the jaded fop nevertheless convinced that the best party is just around the corner, affected disdain shielding the heart of a true romantic – is the most distinct of all. Roxy might never have recaptured the uniformly giddy heights enjoyed in the Eno years, but many are the later moments – ‘Mother Of Pearl’, ‘Out Of The Blue’ and ‘Street Life’ to name but three – that stand effortlessly alongside them.
The loucheness is a problem, I’ll grant you. Not stylistically, but in the way it’s apparently bled into a laissez-faire approach to quality control. Latterly, for every moment of AOR perfection (‘Oh Yeah’, ‘More Than This’) there’s been a ‘Taxi’, the mid-90s covers album so wretchedly uninspired that this unabashed Ferryhead has never made it to the end of side two. It’s even there on his new one, ‘Dylanesque’, a largely sleepwalking county-rock affair, and an illogical conclusion to the fandom originally highlighted with his urgent, piano-hammering take on His Bobness’ ‘A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall’ back in 1973. But yet, even here, there’s a gem to rival anything in the back catalogue. In the ghostly ‘Make You Feel My Love’ his voice is a mist rolling in across the moors, inflected with a new-found, Cash-echoing, pleading frailty. A voice he first mastered on two starkly haunting contributions to last year’s Warren Ellis-helmed collection of sea shanties, ‘Rogue’s Gallery’. And a voice highlighting a singer, well into his fourth decade of performing, for whom reinvention – despite too many inferences to the contrary - remains key.
Well, the hell with that. Yes, Eno brought manic individualism to Roxy. But so did the freeform guitaring of Phil Manzanera, the wild sax and mournful oboe of Andy MacKay, and the skittish drumming of Paul Thompson. Few groups have harnessed such wilfully distinct elements into a sum still greater, and Ferry was the catalyst. The man looking like Comeback Special-era Elvis mugged by a girls’ high school make-up team, all black leather and glittery eyeshadow, provided focus. And his own contribution – musically an underrated pianist, vocally the jaded fop nevertheless convinced that the best party is just around the corner, affected disdain shielding the heart of a true romantic – is the most distinct of all. Roxy might never have recaptured the uniformly giddy heights enjoyed in the Eno years, but many are the later moments – ‘Mother Of Pearl’, ‘Out Of The Blue’ and ‘Street Life’ to name but three – that stand effortlessly alongside them.
The loucheness is a problem, I’ll grant you. Not stylistically, but in the way it’s apparently bled into a laissez-faire approach to quality control. Latterly, for every moment of AOR perfection (‘Oh Yeah’, ‘More Than This’) there’s been a ‘Taxi’, the mid-90s covers album so wretchedly uninspired that this unabashed Ferryhead has never made it to the end of side two. It’s even there on his new one, ‘Dylanesque’, a largely sleepwalking county-rock affair, and an illogical conclusion to the fandom originally highlighted with his urgent, piano-hammering take on His Bobness’ ‘A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall’ back in 1973. But yet, even here, there’s a gem to rival anything in the back catalogue. In the ghostly ‘Make You Feel My Love’ his voice is a mist rolling in across the moors, inflected with a new-found, Cash-echoing, pleading frailty. A voice he first mastered on two starkly haunting contributions to last year’s Warren Ellis-helmed collection of sea shanties, ‘Rogue’s Gallery’. And a voice highlighting a singer, well into his fourth decade of performing, for whom reinvention – despite too many inferences to the contrary - remains key.
+-+Copy+-+Copy.jpg)
