FERRY CROSSES AND MERCY

FERRY CROSSES AND MERCY

ROXY MUSIC SEEKS AVALON

by

John Mendelssohn

Which fabulous screen stars have lain to gether here at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and which heirs to vast fortunes and swarthy potentates with unpronounceable names passed out here on the floor after a night of immoderation in the Polo Lounge, a highball glass's toss nearer Sunset Boulevard away? If the walls of Bryan Ferry's bungalow could talk, what stories they might tell!

But it's pop's most elegantly Sentimental Foul hiiiiself who's doing the talking now, the man who helped l)avid Bowie invent the '70s in Great Britain, who conceived the New Romance while Steve Strange was still teething. Fle is deeply British, and profoundly decorous, an(I so embarrassed 10 he talking about himself yet again. As though to allay his bruised sense of propriety, he crams his utterances with tiny se If -efface rn ents, with a profusion of sort of's and kind of's, and maintains eye contact with a point on the carpeting five feet behind his latest visitor and three feet over. Even when he reveals and then answers that most savagely rankling question, that whkh has followed him from Manhattan to Beverly Hills like a curse, his tone is so muted that the recording light of his visitor's cassette machine scarcely twinkles.

"Fveryhody wants to know why, when we're such big stars everywhere else, we can't seem to have a hit here. It's an endlessly recurring theme. Well, I just wish that somebody would tell me why.

"Coming to America is strangely numbing, a real headtwister. You speak the same language, and yet it feels so very foreign. Watching our records flounder here while they do so well everywhere else, I find myself losing my sense of humor and thinking, 'Well, how dare you!' Until we switched record companies recently and the new one suggested that I come over for these interviews, in fact, we hadn't been thinking in terms of America at all for the past few years. It isn't that we wouldn't love to have a big audience here. It's just that we'd given up on that ever happening.

"America tends to take things very much at face value, to lack any sense of the ironic. For instance, a few years ago, I wore an old-fashioned white dinner jacket on stage quite often. I thought it was obvious that, even though I might have been dressed as a sort of crooner, I was still ...well, I dislike the term 'avant-garde'...at least an artist. But I think the dinner jacket kept people away from our music in America, where the audience seems to ask itself a lot, 'Is this really the sort of group we ought to like, or would doing so be a terrible blunder?' Audiences in other countries are so much more willing to make up their own minds."

He's reminded that he appears to have had a hard time making up his mind about whether to trade under his own name or as Roxy Music. The group dissolved in the mid-'70s, after very nearly breaking through in America with "Love Is The Drug," and then reformed just a couple of years later. Ferry explains that the commercial failure of his 1978 solo album made him nervous about carrying, on as himself, and himself alone, even though The Bride Stripped Bare marked "the first time that I felt I really understood the craft of making records.

'Several times in my solo career I realized that I hadn't taken ideas far enough. I'm so competitive that I generally get my own way anyway. But I realized that the records still would probably come out better for the push and pull that you have when other people have equal responsibility, or at least are sharing the project's cost."

He replies with uncommon candor'= when asked if original member Phil Man-1 'zanera resents the spotlighting on record of another guitarist, Neil Hubbard, who, with drummer Andy Newmark and bassist Alan Spenner, have come to be perceived by Ferry as "associate members" of the group. "Well, yes, I suppose he must. But I hope that he recognizes that his own greatest talent—that of an pff-the-wall merchant who uses strange effects to create interesting textures—isn't always the one that's called for."

Between the astonishing Flesh + Blood and the less astonishing, if very similar new Avalon, Roxy Music fans had to content themselves for over two years with the group's tribute to John Lennon—a recording of his "Jealous Guy." But Ferry won't have anyone thinking of him as a lazy sod. "I've done 14 albums in 10 years," he notes, "and that seems quite a lot to me.

"After Flesh + Blood, we toured everywhere but America for six months, after which I simply had to have a few months off, as touring destroys my love of music. Playing to a live audience can be very thrilling, but one just doesn't feel like doing it every night. The trouble is that, on the nights you don't, you can't simply cancel the show. You start relying on things like pills to get you up for it, and then, once it's done, you need something else to get you back down. Then you become convinced that you're doomed to wind up like Elvis.

"There's always a naughty little boy lurking just beneath the surface with me."

"Anyway, sort of planning the new album took a few months, and then recording it. took six more. (It wouldn't have taken so long except that we decided it would be nice this time to see if we could maintain lives away from the studio while we recorded, to catch an occasional glimpse of daylight. We'd work from sort of noon to eight and then have dinner with friends or something. Well, the

others would—I get so obsessive while I'm making an album that I can't think of anything else.) By the time you add all that up, two years have gone by."

Fully 10 years have gone by since Roxy Music made its first videotape. Though they've characteristically been gorgeous beyond telling, giddy pinnacles in art direction, subsequent video spots of their device have rarely been glimpsed here. But Ferry can't help but bristle a bit when well-meaning American interviewers ask him if he's ever thought of making promotional videos. "For 10 years," he tells his favorite point of the carpeting a little ruefully, "I've been saying that sending a videotape all over the world would be a much more modern way for a group to promote its records than to tour."

He brightens when asked which piece he's fondest of. Surprisingly, he shuns the indescribably sublime "Angel Eyes" spot of 1979, which featured cherubic maidens with harps, pastel mints, and his funniest Robert Mitchum emulation to date, in favor of "Remake/Remodel," produced a decade and more ago at London's Royal College of Art. "I'd love for that one to be shown here because it's amazingly modern, with us in all our finery and Eno twiddling away at his synthesizer."

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Speaking of art direction, he relates that another artist has never approached him about the prospect of creating album cover art, even though Roxy Music's are the most evocatively beautiful sleeves in the bins. "Perhaps my management's been approached," he who's supervised every cover from conception to the printer muses, "but if they have, I've never been told." He'd very much enjoy being an art director, he says, but* not as much as he'd like to be "a sort of farmer—ideally a very rich one—with a very large farm that I could work. I really do like being close to nature very much. Living in the country, as I do now, one feels removed from the dayto-day frustrations he experiences in London, for instance."

Speaking of frustrations, he concedes, "I'm a lot less fit than I wish I were," and puffs thoughtfully on his cigarette. "Other than that, though, I've actually been quite happy the past year. At the same time, it's very unlikely that I'd ever say, 'Yeah, this is It—this is just how I want everything to be.'

I always seem to be looking for something else, which is why my getting married last week sort of surprised me. But I thought, as I'd never done it before, that it would be an interesting thing to experience. And that last time we toured, I met a guy backstage at one of our shows in Australia who told me that I must become a father before it's too late. I suppose I've been carrying that around in my head ever since.

. "The thought of the responsibility is quite daunting, because there's always a naughty little boy lurking just beneath the surface with me."

Asked whether his new marriage or his work is a source of greater satisfaction, he replies without hesitation. "The work, absolutely. I think my wife knows that. Whether she'll be able to handle it, or whether it will change, who knows?

"I determined fairly early on that what made me happiest was the thrill of composing or making something that was better, more interesting, than I. Which is why I think most people do art—to feel less inadequate." He glances at his visitor long enough to detect the incredulity on his face, and moves to dispel it. "At the same time that I've felt inadequate, I know that I've projected a sort of arrogance. I've always hated to do anything that I thought might seem undignified. In the world of rock music, that sort of stance creates a lot of distrust."

At the rate he's been going since The Bride Stripped Bare, He's only a couple of albums shy of 40. "Lately," he confesses, "I've found myself tilting my head at a particular angle whether anyone points a camera at me. I've realized that from a different angle I'm beginning to look unnervingly like my father."

He's silent for a moment, and then dares once more to return his inquisitory's gaze. "I was sitting at home watching TV about a year ago when I suddenly found myself confronting the me of 10 years ago. The BBC had dug a video of us doing 'Ladytron,' from our first album, out of their archives. It was sort of the reverse of that very moving scene at the end of 2001 in which Keir Dullea goes from infancy to old age in a matter of secords.

"I'd had that same sort of eerie feeling before, while I was recording The Bride. I was virtually alone by the lake in Montreux, in a hotel sort of like the one in The Shining. All the rest of the group had gone home for Christmas, and I was virtually alone. Suddenly at dinner one evening I became...very aware of the sound of my cutlery on the plate."

He puffs decorously at his cigarette. "In the past," he reveals, "I thought it was inevitable that I'd wind up a casualty of one sort or another because that's what all my heroes, musical and otherwise—Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, had done. But now I can see myself living a long time."