Doing It In Style

Phillip Oakes in "Goings On", NME

April 1978

What Bryan Ferry has always had in abundance is style. In the heyday of Roxy Music (the group he founded with Andy Mackay, then led in fractious tandem with Brian Eno) it was Ferry who was the flashiest of front-men. His wardrobe was prodigious: ice-cream suits, black leather jackets, Führer-style uniforms; sleazy and menacing at the same time. In one stage act billowing velvet drapes emblazoned with the initials "RM" flowed from the wings and - as a grand climax - a mechanical golden eagle with a 30ft wing span was launched the length of the hall. It was like Nuremberg in a rock setting. "The Nazis had a great sense of visuals," says Ferry nostalgically.

Not that his sympathies ever lay in that direction. "What we were doing with all that theatre was to creat a style which matched the music. It was vital that the act should be visually interesting. Audiences latched on because it gave them identification."

Four years later and after an assault on America which proved to be only a qualified success, Ferry is back in London to find himself hailed as "the father of punk."

"How do I react to that? With a wry smile, you might say. When sufficient time has passed we'll all be able to play historian and see what presaged what and what led to something else. Sure, the relationships are there. But so are the differences."

The most important difference is Ferry's undisguised sophistication. The son of a Geordie Miner, he studied art with Richard Hamilton and the title of his new album (which he recorded in Montreux) is "The Bride Stripped bare" which pays homage both to his old teacher and to Hamilton's own idol, Marcel Duchamp. "I worked with Hamilton on his reconstruction of Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even." I used to paint a lot; that's what I always intended to do. But then I got in with the music crowd and the only art work that I'm responsible for now are the sleeves of my record albums."

The musicians on Ferry's new album are a pick-up group ("Musical mercenaries" he calls them) but the titles include six by Ferry himself with Lou Reed and J.J. Cale among his fellow composers. It's released next month but Ferry has planned no promotion tour: "Concerts and festivals, yes. But a tour takes up too much valuable writing time."

He's at present living in a very elegant apartment off Picadilly but plans, eventually, to find somewhere in New York. "It may sound corny, but when I am away from England I miss the countryside very badly. I liked Switzerland for the mountains. They have so many romantic and adventurous associations. Climbers like Wymper, and so on." But was Ferry himself ever tempted to scale the peaks? "My only adventure is my music," says Brian Ferry (sic). The quote is impeccable. The irony is what gives it style.

Last Updated: 16 August 2008