BRYAN FERRY: The Pariah Speaks

BRYAN FERRY: The Pariah Speaks

FEATURES

by Gill Smith

For someone who once seemed to dominate the rock scene—both musically and visually—so totally, Bryan Ferry seems strangely alienated from what’s going on in 1987. Almost like an outsider merely looking on in mild curiosity, he occasionally breaks the silence with a new album hinting at past glories, teasing at what could still be and then disappearing like a snowflake.

His latest work, Bete Noire, has already been announced by the presence of a hit single, “The Right Stuff,” a swirling, emotional song that features the work of exSmiths guitarist Johnny Marr. Amazingly, before deciding to work with Marr, Ferry hadn’t really heard much of the Smiths—“just bits on the radio...it seemed interesting enough, but I hadn’t really followed it as such, because I don’t really do that. So I wasn’t listening closely.”

The link with Marr came through Warner Bros., which has both Ferry and the Smiths in America. “They were aware that I was open to working with different people and so someone sent me a cassette of some things and I met Johnny and we got on very well. It was as simple as that, really.”

But why choose Johnny Marr—a relatively unknown quantity away from the Smiths—when you could have called on more established musicians like Eric Clapton or Elvis Costello or Robert Palmer?

“Well, funnily enough, I’ve never really met that many people in this business; I’ve always kept pretty much to myself. But this time I specifically decided it was time to work with different people, and Johnny was just one of them. Patrick Leonard was another one—he’s worked with Madonna, of all people! I generally like working with guitarists because I’m a keyboard player, but Patrick’s a very good keyboard player and he’s also very adept at programming all that hi-tech stuff, which I’m not. And also it was great because I’ve never really co-written songs before...”

The music for “The Right Stuff” was originally a B-side called “Money Changes Everything,” wasn’t it?

“That’s right—when I first got it, it was just a demo and it later became a B-side, but that doesn’t really matter that much because I didn’t really change it an awful lot. It’s a very similar arrangement.”

You just beefed it up?

“Yeah. I’d worked on it a couple of days before Johnny heard it and he loved it. It features Paul Johnson, who is a fantastic singer, an English singer—which makes a change to find a great singer here. Generally, the singers I work with have been American, and when I came across this guy, I just couldn’t believe it because he was so good!”

How was it working with Johnny?

“I got along with him very well, because he’s so up and bright and cheerful and funny. I guess we share that Northern sense of humor, which is cynical and sarcastic. We had a great time—I hope we’ll do more together. In fact, I think he’s just opening up on his career options.”

Can we talk a little about Roxy?

“Go ahead...”

OK. After Avalon, you seemed unwilling to take Roxy Music any further, almost as though the very name was holding you back.

Well, we d reached a certain point and I just couldn’t see us...I thought it would’ve been a struggle to do anything beyond that. Maybe I was wrong—and you can always be wrong—but you have to follow your gut instinct about what you should do... whether you should be safe and stay with the name that can sell a million albums or sink a thousand ships or whatever... or maybe try to do something a bit different.. .

“I mean, it’s always a temptation to stay with the name that’s established, like Cornflakes or whatever, but at that point in Roxy, it had got to where it wasn’t so much a band, more a trade name. Most of the musicians on the record weren’t in the band—they were session musicians who I really liked and were very good players. But I always loved that name.”

Are you still too sensitive about the split to talk about Brian Eno?

“No, not at all—that whole thing was invented, you see, it was just a press war that didn’t exist at all. It was just people moving apart really, and he’s done really well since then. He’s a good catalyst, he can spark an idea and make it lead somewhere. I think that’s what he does when he produces Talking Heads or U2 or whoever he works with. Actually, I was hoping he’d take me out to dinner on his royalties from U2!”

Do you think that you’ve now found your niche as a solo performer and you’re sticking to what you’re good at, rather than making sweeping innovations?

“Erm.. .1 can’t say, I don’t know. I’d hate to think I was just doing the same as I’d already done before—but you never really want to think that anyway. But if that’s what you think, that’s your right.”

No, I was playing devil’s advocate to see what you think.

“Well, no—I always think what I do is really hard, really difficult. It’s very subtle, but I guess to most people it’s just another record. It’s very hard, you know, getting things right.”

Are you a perfectionist then?

“I don’t think ‘perfectionist’ is quite the right word. I certainly like to spend time getting things right, so maybe I am. It just seems so hard to get some things right, so it takes a while. It’s like nothing’s ever good enough. But perfection, to me, implies smoothness and I never try to make it smooth as such. I always like to use the first take as much as possible, then play around with it afterwards, because I believe very much in invention and being on edge.”

Do you yearn for the old days when everything was much simpler, when you just got all the band in the studio at one time and recorded the song together?

“Nah, not interested, not really.” He adds a dismissive wave of the hand.

‘‘I’ve done that and it doesn’t really interest me. You can get away with that when you’re starting out in your first band, when you have the great plus of novelty on your side. There’s nothing really wrong with that approach, but it’s not really for me now—except the title track, ‘Bete Noire,’ which was a kind of one-take thing.”

Looking back on your last album, Boys And GirlSj it seemed a very fluid record, flowing from track to track.

“It was a difficult album to do, though! The difference now is probably that the songs on Bete Noire are more within themselves, whereas I think there’s probably more flow on Boys And Girls—it’s a more complete album.

“I’m in a very fortunate position where I do have great people I can work with, but in a sense that makes it all harder because then you think ‘How can I make this better?’—apart from it just sounding like great session musicians playing, which you don’t want. I want it to sound more than that.

“That’s why it’s sometimes great to be in a group, where the'players aren’t great musicians—which is how I started off— and we had a great attitude. We weren’t the best, most technical players in the world and eventually you reach the point where you want to be able to do things that are just a little bit beyond what you can do. People never understood that about us. That’s probably what Johnny’s thing was in the Smiths, too, though I can’t speak for him.”

What, that he felt he was being held back?

“Well, maybe he wanted to grow beyond them, or had outgrown them or something...”

Do you actually enjoy singing?

‘‘It depends on the song, whether it’s in a good key. Sometimes you work on things and think ‘Oh, I wish I’d done this a bit higher or bit lower.’ I’m very scatterbrained about that kind of thing, and sometimes it’s all a matter of luck that I’ve done it in my key.”

It often looks as if it’s physically painful for you to sing.

‘‘There’s nothing wrong with that! I think it’s good to sing on the edge of your range, because then you’re straining physically as well as emotionally, and that means you’ve got to really go for it to get it right. It’s better than singing everything in a country & western baritone. I’ve always considered singing just one part of the record, just like another instrument. A lot of the songs I do now could be instrumentals as far as I’m concerned.”

Have you ever considered doing a purely instrumental album?

“Sometimes, but then I always think ‘Oh, it would be nice to do some vocal thing on this because it’s such an irresistible tune.’ ”

I read somewhere that you wanted to do an acoustic album.

“Oh, I think I was joking with the journalist! But I’d quite like to do some longer pieces. I suppose there’s always something else to do—-that’s why you never stop.”

Are you still making all the same mistakes?

“I make ’em all the time! I’m only human, so there’ll be some that I’ll make again, or maybe slightly different ones. I never really like looking back much; it depresses me.

“Some people see some things as mistakes while others see something else—like, should we have tried to tour America more and make more money, or did I make too many records at one time and not enough at another time? In 1973, I did three albums, but everything seemed to have its own time and place and sense of rightness about it.

“For instance, those early solo albums I recorded of other people’s songs, I thought that was kind of cool. I thought it was undermining the system in some funny way, but instead, I was alienating the cult audience I had. So sometimes if you stick your neck out, you get it chopped off.

“But I always wanted to be my own man and not just play to the rules. For me, that meant not living the rock ’n’ roll life all the time, and that’s kept my feet on the ground, I think. I’m very much a dreamer, really, and part of the time my head is in the clouds, yet I still have a street sensibility too, so it’s a funny combination.”

How has being married with children affected your outlook on life?

“Well, in some ways it makes it easier to work and in others, more difficult. For the first time in my life I’m responsible for children, but I try not to let that drag me down or make me too domesticated and therefore safe and bland. But I don’t really think of rock ’n’ roll as sacred—I consider myself more of an artist than a rock ’n’ roll musician.

“It’s sometimes reassuring to look around at someone like Picasso, because I think that as an artist in your 40s or 50s, that’s when you do some of your best work. So I hope things are going to continue for quite a while longer and I’m not worried about losing my youth, because that’s not what I’m selling.

“But remember that I didn’t start in music until I was 25, which is retirement age for some pop stars today. It must be horrible for some people to feel redundant when they’re just beginning to learn what they’re doing. But, obviously, the music changes as you get older, because you become a bit warmer and more caring about other people. So you get a different perspective on life.”

Looking back, what is your favorite record you’ve made?

‘‘There are one or two, but I haven’t listened to them for a while. I always thought For Your Pleasure was a good one; that was always one of my favorites. Also, I suppose Avalon, and I still like Boys And Girls. Yeah, those three, really, though there are bits on other albums as well. It’s just personal preference— I’m not saying one is better than another, because a lot of feeling went into all of them. One that surprised me recently was These Foolish Things.’ I was having my hair cut and that was on in the background and it just sounded really good. I was quite surprised, but it had a lot of things going for it. It was done in a short time and with a lot of feeling.

‘‘For Your Pleasure I always liked, because I have good memories of writing and recording it.. .under pressure, yet feeling that whatever I did was right. You know, that thing where you don’t have any self-doubt and you just roll along.”

What’s your least favorite?

‘‘I think the second one, Another Time Another Place. It just sounds a bit labored now.”

You were quite a raver in the ’70s, with a well-deserved reputation as a party-goer and womanizer...

“That sounds like your editor speaking!”

No, this is me! Do you regret any of that?

“Erm... no, not really. But then I never really saw myself in that light. I mean, I’ve met some great chatters-up in my time, but I was never one of them!”

Oh, I wondered if the song “Kiss And Tell” on your new album was inspired by various newspaper stories along the lines of ‘My torrid night of passion with Bryan Ferry’?

“Well, I just thought it was a good idea for a song. That song was the first one of a batch of songs I started writing about two years ago and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a great idea for a song title,’ because every Sunday paper features kiss-and-tell stories. And I thought ‘Surely there’s already been a song with that title,’ but there hadn’t been.

“Then, six months after I started working on it, a song with that title came out in America, but... it still seemed such a good idea, and the fact that I had been victim of some of those type of stories seemed to add a certain spice. But that wasn’t really the motivation. It might be the next single, actually.”

Have you ever thought of giving up music?

“Frequently! Sometimes it just seems too much to do—it’s never the studio side of it that gets me down, but the whole promotional and business side, and also the touring side of things. I’m not so interested in that now, not to the extent that I’ll never play onstage again, but being backstage in Vienna doesn’t seem like a big deal anymore.”

Have you thought about playing live again?

“Yeah, but when and where it will be, I don’t know yet. It’s partly not having access to a very good band. I don’t know if Johnny would be available or if he’d want to play, but it would be a shame not to make it available to the public. But after 10 years of doing it, it seems a very oldfashioned concept now.

“You just think to yourself, ‘How is my energy best spent?’ and you start to think that the real work is done in the studio and you should just let the records speak for themselves. In an ideal world, that’s what would happen, but the world we live in is not ideal, so I’ll still play live and also do some TV appearances. You can’t beat that kind of direct contact with an audience.” ®