The Mail Online - Mon 19th Nov
'I do like to be surrounded by beauty': Why Bryan Ferry is taking us back to the Roaring Twenties
by Lousie Gannon for The Mail Online
For decades rock's most stylish crooner has been voted – in magazines from countries as far afield as Iceland, Italy and America – the man most men would not only like to look like but be like.
'There is a dark side. There has been darkness in my life. The blackness in me is inclined to melancholy sometimes...and I just thank God for music,' said Bryan Ferry
In the glamorous gloom of London’s Ronnie Scott’s on a stormy weekday afternoon, Bryan Ferry is sitting on a battered velvet chair.
Artfully crumpled, his long legs stretch out to reveal moss-green cashmere socks and Berluti loafers.
The effect is, as ever, faintly remote and effortlessly stylish.
At 67, Ferry remains impossibly handsome, which surprises him.
‘You know, I have a photo of myself taken when I was a fine art student at Newcastle University. I’m standing in Eslington Terrace in Jesmond next to my car, this beautiful American Studebaker. It’s strange.
'I look at it now and I look exactly the same as I did then. Maybe a few more lines and more than a few years more age but the silhouette is identical. Same haircut, same lines in the clothes, same posture.
'I’ve never really changed from who I was. I’ve just sort of developed along those same lines I’d always been on.’
For decades he has been voted – in magazines from countries as far afield as Iceland, Italy and America – the man most men would not only like to look like but be like.
'I like to control my environment. I do like to be surrounded by beauty,' said Bryan
There is a tribe in the Congo, the Eleko, that worships Ferry as a god.
‘It’s absolutely true. They think I visit in an invisible plane.’
Ferry has pretty much got it all – he’s a rock star, a fashion icon, he has a home in west London and a big house in the country.
‘It’s not very big,’ he insists. ‘It’s big but not, you know, huge.’
Added to that, he is married to the beautiful Amanda, 36 years his junior.
He has four sons by his first marriage to the aristocratic model Lucy Helmore (they met when she was photographed for a Roxy Music album cover, the same way he met his other famous girlfriend, Jerry Hall).
He collects early 20th-century British art, from Wyndham Lewis to John Nash, eats out almost every night of the week and in the Seventies hung out with Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol.
David Bowie rates him as one of the world’s greatest ever lyricists, while the comedian Noel Fielding goes further in his adulation: ‘As far as reincarnation goes, coming back as Bryan Ferry would be the optimum ticket for any bloke.’
We are sitting in Ronnie Scott’s because Ferry’s latest album, The Jazz Age, is a tribute to the music that inspired him as a young working-class boy from the mining village of Washington. It was a sound that made him dream of a different life.
‘I remember waiting at the bus stop in the rain for one of the first concerts I ever went to, at the City Hall in Newcastle. It was Chris Barber’s jazz band. To me it was magical: the guys in suits and ties, the music.’ He pauses. ‘It forms you. It helps you become who you want to be.’
There is often a confusion of class with Ferry, with his detractors painting him as a mock aristo. In fact, his father Fred worked down the pit, in charge of the pit ponies. His mother Polly took in washing and was the treasurer of the local Labour party.
‘To me,’ he says. ‘What is interesting is not the class but the contrasts in my life. That is what I have enjoyed, the contrasts.’
Scroll down for exclusive video
'I was a terribly romantic kid. I was shy and a bit of a loner. I definitely didn't think I was handsome or a ladies' man,' said Bryan (pictured with model Jerry Hall, who left him for Mick Jagger)
He makes no attempt to hide his roots. He likes pease pudding (‘Only cold though’) and is partial to a Greggs pasty.
‘I once stopped a tour bus so I could run into Greggs and buy pasties. I bought 20 and made everyone try one. They are wonderful. I have a predilection for pies, pasties and fish and chips. Although I try and limit the quantities these days.’
He takes his sons to visit the north-east and to his parents’ grave in County Durham. He speaks of his parents with an understated pride.
‘My mother was a very intelligent woman who had to work all her life and my dad was a ploughman – he won prizes and then because of the economic conditions he had to go down the pit.
'They were both grafters. They came from nothing, they had tough lives. They grew up without electricity. We had it in our house growing up. To them it was absolute luxury.’
To this day, he feels compelled to turn off lights in both his houses.
His son Otis was jailed for four months in 2008 for his pro fox-hunting protest, although it’s a subject he will not be drawn into.
He might be a social misfit but what defines him is being an aesthete. Even in that mawkish era that catapulted him to fame – the glam-rock Seventies – Ferry’s glitter, catsuits and feather boas had that edge.
However it was the classic white tuxedo that defined him.
‘That was me,’ he nods. ‘The rest was… well… stage costumes, performance. That was my performance look.’
As to wearing make-up now (he calls it ‘grease-paint’) he shakes his head. ‘Even on Halloween you’d be hard pushed to get me to wear more than a smudge.’
Roxy Music were known not just for their haunting lyrics and mesmerising songs but for their look and their iconic album covers. But Bryan was initially a reluctant performer
Ferry has found his home, it seems, in the jazz era of the Twenties. Although he plays no instrument on the album, he has arranged each track and obsessed over every string and trumpet note. For Ferry, the Twenties are a perfect fit.
There is more than a hint of F Scott Fitzgerald’s dark hero, Gatsby, about the singer. Apart from the obvious ascent from lowly roots, Ferry – like Gatsby – is utterly compelled by his vision of perfection.
‘It has to be right,’ he says after insisting on details during the Live shoot.
‘For me it’s the art of it. I know I’m irritating. I can drive myself mad as well as everyone else around me.’
He pauses. ‘On one level, I don’t mind it because I know I do have artistic integrity. I can’t let something go unless I am absolutely happy.
‘But there is a down side. One of the worst moments in my life was when I was working on an album called Mamouna.’
It was 1994, as Ferry was trying to kick a cocaine habit.
‘I was deeply unhappy – it was a very bad time for me and my response was to go deeper and deeper into the music I was doing, changing, tweaking, not letting go. It took five years to make and it cost more than I’d ever even care to admit to myself. But it’s in my nature.
Bryan is married to the Amanda, 36 years his junior
'There is a dark side. There has been darkness in my life. The blackness in me is inclined to melancholy sometimes… and I just thank God for music.’
When I ask about his cocaine use, he says, ‘I think it’s a good thing to experience all sides of life. You have to go through things to understand what life is about.’
The faintest trace of a wolfish smile flickers across his face.
He considers the idea that he is a 21st-century Gatsby with the same smile.
‘I remember reading the book when I was about 15 or 16 and yes, I wanted to be him. I just loved the glamour of it. I can see the Gatsby in me.
'At the time, when I was doing my paper round on my bike, I never dreamed my life would be anything like it is now. But even then the people I responded to were the Clark Gables, the Cary Grants, the Billie Holidays.
‘I was a terribly romantic kid. I was shy and a bit of a loner. I definitely didn’t think I was handsome or a ladies’ man.
'At school (Washington Grammar) I was fortunate to have three amazing teachers in art, English and history, who really took me under their wing. I was definitely privileged educationally. They completely inspired as well as educated me.
‘At school I never felt that I fitted in. I lived in my head, in a dream world of books and poems and paintings. When I got to university I felt more in place.
'But I still didn’t think I was in any way handsome, I never have done. I always had the feeling then the girls were after the other guy…’
It was at art college that Ferry met a group of musicians that included Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera, and then morphed into a rock star. Roxy Music were known not just for their haunting lyrics and mesmerising songs but for their look and their iconic album covers.
But Ferry was initially a most reluctant performer.
‘It was that shyness. I started off performing to one side of the stage, sitting at the piano. I had to be forced to stand in the front. The whole thing didn’t come naturally to me. The aspect of it I always liked best was the creative side – the look, the covers, the theme, the music… that was my comfort space.
‘I had no confidence with women. I was terrible at chatting girls up, dreadful. I’ve never been the guy in the nightclub who could go up to women and know what to say.
'I’ve sat back and watched other men do it. Some guys, like Brian Eno, are completely remarkable. Eno could talk to anyone and he was amazing with women. That’s never been me. Ever.’
Now, like Gatsby, Ferry lives a rarefied life where he is surrounded by beautiful women and beautiful things.
‘I like to control my environment,’ he says. ‘I do like to be surrounded by beauty.’
When asked to name his favourite contemporary female beauties, he struggles.
‘I don’t think it gets better than Grace Kelly,’ he says. ‘I think Carey Mulligan is exceptional.
Bryan has four sons by his first marriage to the aristocratic model Lucy Helmore
'And Kate Moss, always. It’s not just because of the way she looks, it’s because she’s intelligent, smart and completely knows how something should look. I think that’s what really makes someone beautiful.’
So what about David Beckham?
‘Oh yes, he’s good. He’s very experimental with all his different looks and tattoos and hairstyles.’
Would Ferry ever consider a tattoo? He raises an eyebrow: ‘I don’t think so. I don’t experiment like that.’
In modern life, there are things that bruise Ferry’s aesthetic sensibilities, such as wind farms.
‘I absolutely hate them,’ he says.
‘I was in a plane a while ago and I was flying over Yorkshire. It is possibly one of the most beautiful landscapes in this country and I looked down from the window and all you could see were wind farms scarring this gorgeous, breath-taking countryside. Enough is enough, when is this going to stop?’
Luckily for Ferry, he has made enough money to live exactly as he wants.
‘I’m not super-rich, like those people whose names you don’t even know who have these huge yachts.
'I had a very expensive divorce (his settlement with Helmore was rumoured to be £10 million) but I have a comfortable life.
‘During the week I’m in town. I go to my studio in Olympia at 10.30 in the morning and leave around 7.30 and then go out to dinner.’
When he’s in the country, he says, ‘I walk around, boss people around, walk my dogs, stroke my vases – they are not Ming but they are very beautiful – and I hang paintings.’
He says he’s not keen on The X Factor (‘I’m not comfortable with the public humiliation aspect to it’) and confesses to never having eaten a McDonald’s.
He’s a fan of the Royal Family (‘I watched Kate and William… I thought it was great but I didn’t shed a tear’) but didn’t play at the Olympics or the Queen’s Jubilee because he was away both times and ‘my style doesn’t suit those huge events.’ He likes Rihanna and is a fan of Lady Gaga (‘We had a mutual friend in Isabella Blow. All her references are old-school, from Queen to Andy Warhol’).
At nearly 70, I wonder if he would ever consider plastic surgery.
‘Absolutely not,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t let anyone decide which bits of my face he wanted to change. Maybe if I could do it myself…’
He runs his hands through his hair, which is still suitably thick and floppy even after all these years.
‘I’m lucky,’ he smiles, ‘but then my dad always had a full head of hair. I don’t think it would have been a disaster for me to lose it.
'I’d have cropped it very short. I like that look. It’s only a disaster if you are a member of Aerosmith and lose your hair. Not me.’
‘The Jazz Age’ by The Bryan Ferry Orchestra is released on November 26 on 10in vinyl Folio Edition, 12in vinyl, CD and digital editions, all on BMG Rights Management.
Previous Article | Next Article