Q Magazine, My Indecision Is Final... - Mon 1st Feb
Q Magazine, My Indecision Is Final...
01 February 1993
Q Magazine, February 1993
Once he was the prolific matinee idol of space-glam, the original Earl
of Suave and the king of luxuriously lined lovelessness. Now Bryan
Ferry takes decades to make an album and everyone thinks he lives in a
castle. Not true, he says. His new record--all covers!--only took five
years. "I'm still a workaholic," he tells Mat Snow.
Last year, in the Radio Times, Bryan Ferry let it be known that he is a
Libran with Scorpio rising. Only someone very interested in astrology
takes the trouble to discover his rising sign. This is not the hip,
modern Bryan Ferry we thought we know. "Glad to have broken out of the
constraints of whatever," he chuckles. "I'm always looking for some
pattern to life, I guess. Frequently I find I can guess somebody's sign
from the characteristics. Though," he hastens to add, "I don't go
around trying it out."
"Indecision is the classic Libran characteristic," he sighs
philosophically. "Often I think I'm right because I've weighed it up
more than you would ever dream of doing. It can be maddening, but
generally we're fairly honest when we're not sure. These walls would be
nice white," he pronounces, sweeping an arm around the boardroom in
Virgin's New York office where he is holding somewhat diffident court
this overcast Sunday afternoon, "but then, on the other hand, off-white
would be quite good too. It can go on forever, can't it? I'm not Mr
Together at all; I'm totally the opposite. I need to be helped getting
through the day, for God's sake..."
"Going on forever" is a concept familiar to those entrusted with the
stewardship of Bryan Ferry's creative processes. It is over five years
since his last album, Bête Noire, and when word first surfaced of a new
LP of Ferry originals, to be titled Horoscope, the consensus in the
music industry was that it was long overdue even by the achingly slow
standards of the man once jestingly nicknamed Byron Ferrari. But that
was well over a year ago, and the record about to hit the shops is the
fruit of a different project altogether.
Produced in a 56-track studio with the collaboration of former Procol
Harum Fender-bender Robin Trower, Horoscope was finished last year. But
even within the Ferry camp the feeling was that he worked on it too
long, that it had suffered because Ferry wouldn't leave it alone. "I
love starting songs but I have difficulty finishing them off. I
probably over-indulged myself in terms of recording too much music and
trying to make it too complex, which therefore made it impossible to
mix. Everyone who heard Horoscope liked it very much, but there wasn't
a single on it, a radio play record. Both friends and the record
company said this, and having worked so hard on it for such a long
time, I'd reached the same conclusion myself," the master of
well-tailored melancholy explains.
"So, hey enough already, I've got to try and focus and make things
simpler. What I resolved to do was choose a couple of songs that might
have some radio appeal, otherwise the record might not be heard by
anybody, which would be tragic because I'd put my heart and soul into
it as I tend to do, and it just snowballed. This was fun after the
difficult time I'd had working on my own songs, and I did more and
more. I decided, hey, I'll make this into an album in its own right."
Recorded in a modest 24-track studio in Woodstock, New York, Taxi
collects nine cover versions and is thus the first entirely
non-original Ferry album since his 1973 solo debut, These Foolish
Things. Making Taxi seems to have refocused Ferry on the Horoscope
project. Without being quite sure whether another remix or perhaps a
more radical rejig is in order, he promises release later this year. Or
maybe next.
"Technology can get you by the throat, but I think I've come out of it
now. It's been 10 very hard years wrestling with all that, and whether
I'll find it easier next time writing my own things or whether I'll
write anything else again, I don't know. I wouldn't actually care much
at the moment whether I did write another song. I really enjoy remaking
other songs and taking huge liberties. I like having a kicking-off
point."
FRED FERRY WON MEDALS FOR HORSE-DRAWN ploughmanship in County Durham
until the 1930s slump forced him to look after the pit ponies in the
nearby mining town of Washington, where Bryan was born on September 26,
1945, the middle child between two sisters, both now teachers. He
fondly recounts that his father courted his mother, Polly, on a
cart-horse with a hedgerow flower in his buttonhole. "He was a bit of a
throwback, which is why I loved him so much. But my mother was modern
and understood what I was doing. She would watch Top Of The Pops and
say, 'You must get something out. This is all rubbish, you know. All
rubbish!'" he giggles. "She was the one who really pushed me to do
anything at all, to do my homework despite Libran prevarication. My
mother was very sentimental--she liked ballads. But my Auntie Enid was
really responsible for getting me into the music business," he
continues. "She used to baby-sit and play 78s of Nat "King" Cole, The
Inkspots and Billy Eckstine, the first real music I ever heard."
On Taxi, Bryan Ferry pays tribute to those times with a version of Nat
"King" Cole's Answer Me, remodelled to incorporate the expensively
funky, widescreen rock talents of drummer Steve Ferrone, bassist Nathan
East and supplementary keyboardist Greg Phillinganes, all veterans of
stints with Michael Jackson and Eric Clapton. Other tracks include The
Velvet Underground's All Tomorrow's Parties, Screaming Jay Hawkins's I
Put A Spell On You, the Fontella Bass hit Rescue Me and the
much-covered Amazing Grace: "I saw The Deer Hunter on television one
day, where Meryl Streep sings it. I thought it was an American song but
apparently it isn't, which slightly spoils the American theme of the
album," he sighs, two yards-plus of fidgety swoon-god whose odd
combination of jeans and tailored jacket, denim shirt and discreetly
dotted black tie suggest an art student togged up for a family wedding.
"Most of my clothes I buy at army and navy stores--three checked shirts
for $10 or a tube of white socks, 12 for $11.95," he says, revealing an
unexpected sartorial frugality. "It's cool. K-Mart is my tailor."
In 1964 Bryan Ferry won a scholarship to Newcastle University to study
under the British pop artist Richard Hamilton. Like many
contemporaries, Ferry's attentions became divided between his course
and making music. His first band, The Gas Board, were a soul covers act
whose repertoire also included Bobby Bland and Freddie King. In the
horn section was Mike Figgis, who has since found fame as director of
the films Internal Affairs and Stormy Monday. Figgis claims that The
Gas Board fired Ferry after two years with the band "because he wasn't
a very good soul singer; he had that tremble." Told of this allegation,
Bryan Ferry gets rather cross: "The reason I left The Gas Board was
because I wasn't doing any work, since I was organising it as well as
singing, which meant I was going into college less and less. The rest
of the band wanted to drop out and go professional, and I wasn't
prepared to do that at the time. How dare he say that! It's f***ing
rude, isn't it? I think he was jealous of me."
After finishing his degree in 1968, Ferry moved to London and taught
ceramics at a girls' school, drove a van and restored antiques. "I also
auditioned for King Crimson. I thought their first album was really
powerful. Although I was influenced by black American music I'd had all
this art school training and art world sensibility, and King Crimson
stuff was pretty artistic, inventive musically. Then I started learning
to play the harmonium, and I'd pedal away at these dirgy songs which
became the first Roxy album. When Roxy Music first happened, I didn't
like rock music very much. It seemed very conservative and dull, so
anybody who did something new seemed like a revelation."
Roxy Music were a revelation to many with their image of '50s rockers
from Planet X, their camp contrast of nostalgia and futurism. Both
1972's self-titled debut album and their first single, Virginia Plain,
were hits, and the following year Ferry found the energy to make the
solo album These Foolish Things ("done in three or four weeks and
people still like it, because it's so graphic, I guess. It's clear-cut
and hard-edged, almost like a cartoon, a Roy Lichtenstein, as opposed,
to continue the analogy, to a Robert Rauschenberg. My children like it:
Please, Daddy, give us a cassette of that to take to school")
sandwiched between two excellent Roxy Music albums, For Your Pleasure
and Stranded. "I had two tracks back then: one for the vocal, the other
for the piano," Ferry remembers those palmy days when recording
technology concentrated the mind wonderfully.
"The career was your whole life. There was nothing else. I'm still a
workaholic, but back then at weekends I'd be writing lyrics because the
band would go crazy if they didn't have the song to sing on Monday. Now
at weekends there's the family. Also, now you're always searching for a
new formula whereas with a group you're stuck with that limited
palette, which can produce great things but you get bored with it."
The break-up of the band a decade later came shortly after Ferry
married Lucy Helmore, daughter of a stockbroker and then aged 22 (they
now have four boys). "In retrospect I'm sure it's connected. I didn't
need the companionship of group life any more," Ferry rationalises. "It
was time for a change, and Avalon (1982) was a high point, like I'd
felt that For Your Pleasure was a high point, after which Brian Eno
left..."
Responsible for electronic noises and treatments, Brian Eno's keyboard
inadequacies had kept Ferry stuck to one side of the stage live,
wrestling with the ivories ("very badly") while simultaneously having
to sing. "In hindsight" (a favourite Ferryism) he considers he should
have added a proficient keyboardist and retained Eno. But he had other
reasons to ditch him. "It was a straightforward ego struggle. I saw
myself as chief creator, because I was writing the bloody songs, and I
didn't want to share that with other people because I thought I had so
much to give," he laughs. "That was perhaps silly of me. And the
artwork of For Your Pleasure I thought was really good, but I heard
some sniggering behind me. I thought, Is it worth it? I just got
peeved, pissed off.
"Brian is very smart, even though he doesn't actually play anything, or
at least he didn't used to; he was just very good at being provocative
and getting me going. Brian's got it right: he spends about five
shillings making an album and though it won't sell a vast amount, it's
all profit," Ferry laughs ruefully, "while I'm bashing away on some
Cleopatra project."
BRYAN INSISTS ON LUXURIOUS LIVING; HE's obsessed with splendour,"
declares his old friend, fashion designer Anthony Price. "I made the
white lounge-lizard jacket for the sleeve of Another Time, Another
Place (1974). It was his idea. He wouldn't be satisfied with something
unless it was right to the last eighth of a centimetre."
Image-wise, Bryan Ferry has consistently displayed the attention to
detail of a '60s Mod and the wit of a pop art adept. Back in '74 the
sleeve to the Roxy Music album Country Life caused such a sensation it
had to be changed in America.
Anthony Price: "On holiday in Portugal we met these huge German girls
on the beach, Constanza and Evaline, who had enormous shoulders like a
drag act. Bryan said, Let's use them. We put them against a hedge, and
it was shot at night with a flash as if they'd been caught by car
headlights at a country house. It could have been a picture of mad
hooray girls at a party in their underwear. The typeface was made to
look like a Country Life cover, which Bryan subscribed and aspired
to--a clue to his bizarre character."
Bryan Ferry: "Country Life is quaint and old-fashioned, preserving
itself like a fossil and I like that. I always skim through it, and
enjoy the odd piece about badgers. Country houses are one thing England
does well and the whole lifestyle which still exists in places, though
I've never lived it--one of the myths about me which is not strictly
true at all. I lived in the country for a bit, but I was never a fully
paid-up Land Rover driver, though I have Wellington boots, both black
and green. It's nice to get fresh air and I like nature."
Bryan Ferry's brother-in-law, journalist Edward Helmore, also rebuts
the popular notion, crystallised in a 1985 Sunday Times profile which
made Ferry "incredibly upset", that the singer aspires to the tweedy
English squirarchy: " I think Bryan would rather die than go to a hunt
ball."
Ferry: "I've always been a great fan of good things, a great
appreciator. I've collected pictures over the years; it's my one
indulgence. It's a Libran trait to have their surroundings to their
liking. They feel almost physically hurt in the wrong surroundings. I
never had any fancy sports cars, apart from a second-hand Porsche."
The title track of Taxi is the 1984 soul tune by J. Blackfoot. "I first
heard that record on Peel when I was driving home one night to Sussex
when I was just starting the Bête Noire album; I remember hastily
scribbling the details of the song down while driving at 100 miles an
hour," Ferry chuckles with his customary nervousness. "And for the
beginning of my version of Rescue Me I was recording the radio, just
going down the dial as you do, and there was Peel's voice. He was one
of the people who helped in 1972, and I was so hurt getting a really
bad review from him of my last tour in 1988. I thought the show was
good, I really did, and I don't know anybody more critical than me.
Making fun of the girl singers just because they're funky and he
isn't--what's the problem? I think John Peel had the problem with the
glamorous image and presentation, which I think is silly and
small-minded.
"The incense and smoke was a soulful thing, a churning pot of
signs--interesting and very good value for money. You can't just be
playing Virginia Plain for the rest of your life; you've got to feel as
if you're moving on, even though you might be moving down an avenue
where very few people will come with you. But that's the way of being
creative--though I've never heard a Charlie Parker record I didn't
like."
"As for playing live again, "I dread it, really. It's the preparation
and commitment to doing it every night I can't handle. I'm not very
healthy. I used to have tonsilitis all the time, and now I don't have
the tonsils, I cough instead. That's why I stopped smoking four years
ago. Every winter I was in such pain I had to stop." Indeed, as the
evening has drawn in and the temperature dropped, Bryan Ferry is now
pacing around in a scarf, white raincoat and Jets baseball cap. For the
first time all day he looks something like his 47 years, a man with
melancholy memories, the maestro of languid tristesse. But he wasn't
always like this. What happened to the playful mood of yore?
"Yes, it's not playful like that any more. You go through dark periods
and sometimes they can be really long," he giggles deflectively. "I'd
like to think I've come out of it, and turned the corner with this new
record. I really do hope so."
Bryan Ferry's new album, Horoscope will be out in March.
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