Shy Guy BRYAN FERRY INTERVIEW

Rip It Up, Issue 97, 1 August 1985, Page 18

Shy Guy BRYAN FERRY INTERVIEW

Kerry Doole

There’s something happening here, and it is gradually becoming clear The hesitant laugh, the fumbling for the first of many cigarettes, the fearful look in those rivetting blue eyes, the fidgeting in the chair Bryan Ferry is both shy and nervous. This is both surprising and somehow endearing. After recently facing the amiably extravagant self-confidence of Robert Plant and hearing of the surly arrogance of Sting, to meet an equally (if not more so) good-looking, talented British singer/songwriter without an ego problem is a decided pleasure. Given Ferry's long-term status as suave pin-up boy for the urban sophisticate set ( G.Q. and Es-

quire, not 17 and Smash Hits), the awkwardness of his demeanour is disconcerting, but Ferry soon tells you what you already detect in his eyes; he’d far rather be somewhere else. ‘You just have to accept that interviews are a part of the job you don’t like but have to do. I’d love to just put the record out and that’s it, but I’m realistic enough to know that there are a lot of other records released every week. “If you’ve spent as long a time making a record as I did this, you start to get a little nervous when you finally finish it. You think ‘My God, I should at least tell people it’s available. I’ve been doing a lot of interviews, especially in Europe, because I’m not going on tour with this album, at least not at this stage. Still, I survived the 20 minutes of the Live Aid concert, so maybe I'll do some more dates!" The record in question is Boys and Girls, the-

oretically Bryan Ferry's sixth solo LR but more accurately one that can be seen as a follow-up to the 1982 swansong of Roxy Music, Avalon. Roxy Music, in essence, was Ferry’s baby ever since Brian Eno split for freer pastures back in 1973. Founder member saxophonist Andy Mckay and early recruit guitarist Phil Manzanera certainly added their own stylings to Roxy’s distinctive Music, but Ferry increasingly stamped his individual sound and vision on the project, right down to the album cover designs. “My best work has been with Roxy Music; that's the major part of my catalogue,” emphasises the handsome hitmaker. The band split once before, back in the summer of 76, only to re-unite two years later, going on to produce the Manifesto, Flesh and Blood and Avalon albums. Looks like it’s Permanent Splitsville this time around, however.

“No, it wasn’t really an amicable parting,” explains Mr Ferry, exhaling yet more nicotine (Dunhills, not the expected Gitanes).‘‘We had always more or less disappeared into our own lives after each project we did; we never hung out together. This time I just knew or felt there’d be no coming back. Even when I was making Avalon, it felt like the end of a run for me, it was as far as I wanted to go with it. If it had carried on, would it have been for the right reasons? “I don’t think the security of a trading name is the right reason to make music. So many groups stay together too long because they’re afraid to leave. I just wanted to try and do something with a complete lack of limitation.” Avalon was a perfect epitaph for a band that was arguably the most influential, certainly one of the most succesful (their eight studio albums all made the UK Top 10) British bands of the 70s.

The aural equivalent of Haagen-Dazs ice cream (smooth, creamy and expensive), Avalon showed all the pretenders to the Roxy throne just who was boss. In retrospect, the choice of album title was prophetic. According to Arthurian legend, Avalon was the island to which King Arthur was sent to die. “Yes, I did feel the irony of the title,” concedes Ferrv. “At that point I did think it would be the last one, so I toyed with that Arthurian idea this is the end in my usual melodramatic way. I don’t think we could have done a better album than that with the same nucleus of people.” No one could accuse Bryan Ferry of rushing the starting gun to leap into the post-Roxy void; three years elapsed from Avalon before Boys and Girls hit the record racks. He admits to a bad case of writer’s block while working on the album and claims “I'd love to do it at a faster rate. I used to record at a much different pace, I once did three albums in a year! “In the context of the rock world, that is a long time, but I have contemporaries who are painters. It is normal for them to take two years between exhibitions of their work, and, without wanting to be high-falutin’ about it, that’s how I really look at it. This was an important album for me to do. Hopefully I've learned from this how to make the next a little faster”

Three years is long enough for many a quickie pop sensation to be manufactured, exploited and cast out on the slagheap, but Ferry’s absence from the scene only made the hearts of his European fans grow fonder. Boys and Girls went straight to the top of the charts there, something Ferry modestly attributes to his being "very lucky.” What’s luck got to do with it, Bry? Fact is, Boys and Girls is another near-flawless example of Ferry’s elegantly extravagant modern pop. It may have been recorded at as many studios (six) with as many engineers (seven) and backing musicians (30) as your average Top 10 chart, but the many joins are rendered invisible courtesy of Ferry’s characteristically melancholic, soulful vocals The voice that fuelled a million candle-lit dinners and satin-sheet seductions is still in fine form, seemingly untainted by all those cigarettes It is framed by a superb supporting cast drawn from the jazz and soul as well as rock fields, including such formidable names as Mark Knopfler, David Gilmour, Tony Levin, Marcus Miller, Omar Hakim (Weather Report) and David Sanborn. Comparisons with Avalon have inevitably flowed: “I tried to make it stronger rhythmically, that was my only real objective," claims Ferry. “Probably it sounded closer to Avalon at the end of the day than I’d originally have liked. I was after something much harder, but you can't fight

nature too much! "Nowadays I tend to see the voice as just part of the music. I try not to get in the way of the music, I just want to highlight the mood and atmosphere by the words Many of the songs could actually be instrumentals.” The omniscient Nile Rodgers is present, this time as a guitarist, not a producer. Consider his contribution part payment of a strong stylistic debt to Ferry and Roxy Music.

“Nile told me that he was living in London when he saw us do ‘Love Is the Drug’ (1975), with the girl singers in the uniforms and so on. And he and Bernard (Edwards) said ’Let’s see what we can do: He did a great job; Chic made some great records.” And of course we all know just how much British pop in the 80s owes to both the Roxy sound and the Ferry lounge lizard persona. ABC, Spandau Ballet, Simple Minds, Duran Duran, Icehouse,

the Associates, Human League ... the list is endless. "I met John Taylor (Duran Duran, Power Station) recently. He said he got my autograph outside the Holiday Inn in Birmingham once and that he became a musician because of me. It’s a daunting thing. “Yes, I guess I could reel off 50 names,” laughs Ferry. "Of course you have to look at it that way (imitation being a source of flattery). Sometimes it is worrying, however. You think, that area is being covered, where will I move next? “I believe that one of the reasons for it is that with all the records I made I suggested a lot of things. I don’t feel I just created one particular sound, the way the Who or the Stones had a sound. I think it was a matter of opening up different avenues that I never really completely exhausted, there’s always something else to do there. “That sort of competition is good in that it makes me want to go more and more into myself, to become unique. You fear increasingly as you get older that you can’t just trade on a haircut or on selling the latest pair of shoes the way a new teenage band would. Your music has to be good.” Nudging 40 the Ferryman may be, but he could still teach those upstarts half his age a few volumes on style. For the interview, he dresses casually in blue denim, white shirt and black boots, that characteristic glossy black forelock threatening to halve his vision, but you soon realise why he is so beloved of fashion photographers. This guy would look menthol-cool even if he’d just run a marathon through Death Valley. One aspect of his career that still irks Bryan Ferry is the reluctance of the US to accord him the approval he’s elicited everywhere else: “I could moan on for hours about reasons for that,” he chuckles. “I think it is partly that American radio has always been too tightly formatted for my music. Roxy Music never slotted into any of the existing formats and I don’t think I quite do now either. At least there’s this thing called MTV now and if you get on that, information will travel more quickly. "The only people who found out about my music were those who seek things out for themselves. That’s a great audience to have, of course, because you know they’re genuinely interested, and not just having music fed to them like hamburgers. “I think the conceit of every artist is that he wants tc have a larger and larger audience all the time, so I’m still plugging away. In a back-handed way, I think there’s a chance that many of the young ones with a similar attitude to mine may make the music I make seem much less strange in North America." The title of Bryan Ferry’s latest meisterwerk is perhaps an ironic reference to the dominance matters of the heart have always held in his songs. While the likes of Sting feel they have something wonderfully meaningful to convey on such topics as coal mining and the cold war, Ferry sticks to what he knows best. "No, I don’t feel much of an expert on those other themes. There’s a certain sensuality about the music I make, I think, and I dont see the point of forcing things that don’t really fit. I don’t feel any moral compulsion to do it either. My heart is in songs of a more personal nature, rather than a preaching to the masses type thing that someone like Bob Dylan can do so well.” One last subject remained to be broached and it was not an easy one to inflict upon the sensitive songsmith. Prior to snagging Mick Jagger, Texan model Jerry Hall was heavily involved with Ferry (that’s her alluring form on the cover of Roxy’s Siren LP). She has just released her memoirs of life amongst the jet-set, Tall Tales, (don’t buy it!) and Ferry figures prominently and none too favourably. Naturally, the English gutter press lapped this up. When the topic was raised gingerly, Ferry’s pain was palpable: “It’s a nightmare,” he confesses. “It’s just terrible for someone with as private and vaguely secretive a personality as mine. When you lose control of certain things, they become legend, whether they’re true or not. They get slipped into newspaper files, then come out later, and you have to say ‘Oh, that was never true anyway.’ “It makes you really irritated. You try not to think about that side of it at all. You just say that’s another person who they invented.’ ”