Slave To Love

By Chris Roberts

Melody Maker, 12th November 1988

Bryan Ferry WITH Roxy Music: The Ultimate Collection (EG)
WHEN I was but knee-high to a snake, Bryan Ferry was a Truly Great Man. Bryan Ferry was timeless and placeless and not a little mystical. "Mother of Pearl" was the Bible and the effortlessly glamorous Ferry, pre-cover versions, was the perfect fusion of languor and passion, yearning and swagger, fluency and frustration, rationale and romanticism. Basically Bryan Ferry was the furthest a mortal could get from Andy Kershaw. Another plane. When the good Patsy Kensit and myself last visited the Riviera (hush, I'm trying to keep a straight face) there was Bry! Eating marmalade in the breakfast room just like Bryan Ferry! In the togs and everything! It was a very exciting moment. I leapt up and shook his hand and recited some Rupert Brooke. Actually, no. I just asked if anyone had any Anadin. I imagine it is more entertaining to regale you with my laterally factual anecdotes than to give you a track listing of the latest greatest hits throbber. This is by no means the "ultimate" collection. There will be many more, and it's not a particularly definitive one, concentrating as it does on the later, more nuance-reliant work. Ferry was at his best with the mania of Roxy egging him on to increasingly arch flushes of lovelorn philosophising. Thus only "All I Want is You" and "Love is the Drug" are grandiloquent here, both kitschily knowing, both very very superb. I love them dearly. Any record with these on is worth, say, your clothes and half your pets. His "Oo-oo, I'm all cracked up on you" at the crescendo of the former is thrilling, inspirational, irrationally calm, just as his "dim the lights, you can guess the rest" in the latter is fully-realised suggestion, telling it like it is. There is a fair degree of the mid-period slightly-scintillating stuff -- "This is Tomorrow", "Dance Away", "Let's Stick Together", even the neglected but terrific "In Crowd". Then for slush there's "Jealous Guy", "Slave to Love", "Avalon", etc. You get a previously unreleased and listless rendition of Jim Reeves' "He'll Have to Go", and a rare collaboration with Nile Rodgers called "Help Me" where, well, somebody should. Ferry's stealth rests easily on modern recording rituals -- he was questioning the validity of the demonstrative way back when. One tends to wish he could find something to question again. Something to keep him awake. Flicking the needle back, off-duty, I find my senses jolted even by the way he phrases "Kiss one..." in the gleam of "The Price of Love". And "All I Want is You" speaks more truth in its casual sneering bittersweet lingo than a dozen overtly sobbing minstrels. But certainly this compilation has been selected with a ham fist and a club foot, neither religiously nor riskily. You'd be better off with the "Streetlife" double, which at least didn't deny "Pyjamarama", the greatest sonic love poem in English history, its deathless due. You'd be better off still with the peerless first five Roxy albums. But I'm getting boring now, if not bored. That's because those heartaches and artquakes mean something to me. More than this. (So where's this flaming pension then??)

Text copyright 1988 Melody Maker, used without permission. Any grammar mistakes left intact.
With Thanks To Grant Goggans.

Last Updated: 9 April 2008