Bryan Ferry: Bête Noire

By Dave Rimmer

Q Online, November 1987

An associate of Bryan Ferry's told me that the other day she arrived at a meeting with the star to see him standing there in the classic clothes that so many have tried to copy, flicking back a forelock with the casual cool so many have attempted to mimic, and told him: Hey, you look just like Bryan Ferry!

In a way this LP inspires a similar reaction. Put it on and what do you hear? Great sweeping swathes of layered sound that so many young bands have laboured to match. That voice, trembling with a despair-or is it irony?-that so many have been inspired to emulate. Hey, this sounds just like the new Bryan Ferry album!

Which seems-after two years' presumably hard work plotting and planning in England, writing in Los Angeles, recording in the Bahamas, Paris and the South of France with a legion of star sessioneers and co-producers before finally finishing off in New York-a bit of a shame really. If Boys And Girls was Avalon Part Two, then Bête Noire is Son Of Boys And Girls. I played the two albums back to back the other day: you could hardly tell the pair of them apart.

Various tracks here smack of early Roxy Music-the echoey ennui of New Town recalls Chance Meeting, the violin and accordion make the title track sound like a sequel to Song For Europe, the guitar riff and exotic inflections of Limbo bring Amazona back to mind. All this however simply serves to remind us that Bryan Ferry once had a talent for inspired juxtaposition. These days the element of surprise is drowned in a rich and sophisticated aural soup-it's tasty enough, but the individual elements, including the lyrics, are virtually indistinguishable.

The sounds, when you concentrate and listen to them, are all dead clever of course. From the chattering typewriter noise that underpins Kiss And Tell to the edgy sax on Limbo that may or may not be Courtney Pine. The tang of guitars strikes the palate more sharply than most. These are played either by Johnny Marr or David Gilmour or by both of them. As with all the rest of the music, so many sessioneers have been called in at different times-often to play the same parts-that after two years not even Bryan Ferry's management will hazard a guess as to exactly who is playing what. Safe to assume that Johnny Marr plays on the excellent single The Right Stuff, which he co-wrote. After that it's anyone's guess. Featured also are Marcus Miller on bass and Siedah Garrett and Paul Johnson on backing vocals and Paulhino Da Costa on percussion and so on.

A constant presence is Pat Leonard-keyboardist, co-producer and writing partner on five of the nine tracks herein. Pat Leonard is best known for doing a similar job with Madonna, which perhaps explains why the track The Name Of The Game sounds so uncannily like Live To Tell. This is the absolute nadir of the collection-Bryan Ferry doing a sort of mega-MTV scarf-waver. (Bryan Ferry also drifts into unreconstituted cliche on New Town, with that irritating kind of wailing female vocal pioneered by Pink Floyd on Dark Side Of The Moon and more recently employed by Simple Minds). Some songs also involve Chester Kamen, brother of Nick Kamen, as co-writer and producer. Faithful Bryan Ferry cohort Simon Puxley gets his name on the sleeve as executive producer and, in one line that sums up the scale and absurdity of an LP like this, the credits conclude with directed by Bryan Ferry.

If one was being tortured by secret police to reveal the one essential difference between this LP and the last one, it would have to be that Bête Noire is just that little bit heavier. Sure, there are still songs, like Zamba, which sound gentle and eerily sensitive in the time-honoured Bryan Ferry fashion, but Limbo, Kiss And Tell, Day For Night and The Right Stuff are all propelled by a big, big beat that it is futile to resist. In the end it remains Bryan Ferry's unfailing instinct for a good solid groove that provides this album's salvation.

(grade: 3 stars)

Last Updated: 19 July 2008