Bryan Ferry in The Telegraph - Mon 12th Dec
Good grief, Bryan Ferry is cool. So cool he doesn’t really do eye contact. So cool he answers questions with silence, causing you to move on to the next one, at which point you will get a long-thought-out response to your previous query. So cool he named one of his four sons Tara. So cool that he has no interest in meeting Bob Dylan, despite once having recorded an album of the American’s songs. “I don’t think he wants to hang out with people like me,” shrugs Ferry, coolly. “I don’t think he wants to hang out with anyone, really.”
Ferry is so cool that he is actually rather hot. Like Bowie and Jagger he is a member of that exclusive band of musicians from the Seventies who are still as current now as they were then. How would he describe his average fan? “None of them are average, darling”, is his succinct answer.
We meet in his west London studio, a cavernous, musical Tardis spread over two floors that I imagine will one day be left to the country as some sort of Roxy Music museum. The 66-year-old has taste so good it is actually quite nauseating; all the books and paintings and photographs are cluttered around the place in an irritatingly effortless manner. He apologises to me for looking smart, explaining that he has had meetings in the West End all day, but the rail of blazers in the corridor suggests to me he wouldn’t know how to look anything other than tailored, and his look is so impressive that he has just done an ad campaign for high-street store H&M. “Many years ago it would have been considered really uncool to do that,” he says. It is safe to say that now Ferry has done it, it isn’t.
He recently went to Buckingham Palace to receive his CBE from the Queen. She was “very charming, very nice, quiet”. What really fascinated him was the look of his medal – “a beautiful thing, really pretty, like a blue cross on a kind of pink ribbon” – and the uniforms on display, “with those wonderful white stripes down the trousers and the sword on the side”.
He took his sons, Merlin, Tara, Isaac and Otis, to the ceremony. Ferry was divorced from their mother, the model Lucy Helmore, in 2003, citing her infidelity, and now lives with a 29-year-old called Amanda Sheppard, whom he met through his 25-year-old son, Isaac. I suppose that this might seem rather odd if you sat down and really thought about it, but, Ferry being Ferry, the fact he makes clothes fall off women half his age just feels rather natural. (Kate Moss posed wearing very little for the cover of his latest album, Olympia.)
Anyway, there have always been people who have sniped that Ferry is somehow selling out or sucking up to the establishment. He was born in Co Durham, the son of a farmer who looked after pit ponies, and his voice is a soft Geordie burr by way of Sloane Square, where he has had a home for almost 40 years (there is also a place in East Sussex). He is, naturally, unbothered by these accusations. “I don’t get it. I’ve been curious from an early age. I always wanted to find out more and do more. Gosh. Social exploration of this life just sort of seemed natural to me. My parents wanted me and my sisters to go to college and have a better life than they had, and we did.”
He loves the Royal family and his eldest son, Otis, stormed the Commons in the protest at the ban on hunting. Ferry doesn’t feel comfortable talking about politics, but he supposes he is probably a bit conservative because “I tend to be quite old-fashioned. I like double-decker buses and red phone boxes, and I don’t like that they are getting rid of them. I think if something is quaint and still works, they shouldn’t have to change.” He doesn’t download music and became the owner of a mobile phone relatively recently. He can see the point of emails, “but I am much happier talking to somebody in person”.
He thinks Rihanna’s videos might be a bit sexually explicit (“Roxy’s album covers were very suggestive, not blatant”) but concedes that “she’s a great-looking girl, make no mistake”. He worries because Waterstone’s have changed their typeface (“Have you seen that?”) and suspects this might be a sign of dumbing down. If this seems rather uncool to you, that’s because it is – so uncool it’s actually cool again.
I like Bryan Ferry. He reminds me a bit of an airbrushed Howard Jacobson. Might he have more children with his girlfriend? “Oh, I never feel comfortable predicting the future.” Is she getting broody, now she’s nearly 30? “Hmm, that’s about the age, isn’t it? Do you think about it a lot? That you’re being left out? Maybe it’s just a primitive urge.” Does she coo at babies in the street? “A couple of her friends have started having children, yeah.”
I get the sense that Ferry might be a bit embarrassed. Last week, he put on an art exhibiton in Europe’s capital of cool, Berlin, featuring “all the Roxy Music album covers [they featured scantily clad girls, one of whom, Jerry Hall, famously left Ferry for Mick Jagger] and photographs from my chequered past. It was like a retrospective or something.” What was it like to look back on them? “Ah, to see the decay!”
He is 66 and has experienced “quite a few deaths recently; it’s terrible. I’ll have to show you my records. It’s like, 'He’s dead, he’s dead.’ ” The pop artist Richard Hamilton died in September – he taught Ferry fine art at Newcastle University and was the singer’s mentor. “Very sad. You always think you’re going to see people again and then you think, 'Oh, I wish I’d gone one more time to visit.’ ”
Ferry had a heart scare earlier this year. “You should see my pills. I take quite a few. But [the heart scare] was only publicised because I had a show that night and had to cancel it. Otherwise, I could have gone on without anybody knowing about it.”
He does another of his long silences, and I am about to move on to the next question when he suddenly pipes up. “I like having a secret life, you know. It’s hard for people to imagine anybody who is famous, or well known for something, wanting to have a secret life. But you do. You cherish your secret life.”
I hope it’s at least a little bit uncool.