Bryan Ferry: As Time Goes By

by Richard Cook

New Statesman, November 1999

Last week we welcomed back Smokey Robinson; this week, another wayward soul finally rouses himself to release another record. Bryan Ferry's work-rate is almost as miserly as Scott Walker's these days: five years since his last album of original material (the disappointing Mamouna) and six after a record of cover versions, Taxi, here comes . . . another record of cover versions, As Time Goes By (Virgin). In the meantime, inevitably, his audience has ebbed away, and one of the great stylists of the 1970s has turned into a distant figure, remote from any topical considerations.

Which has perhaps freed him up to make a record like this, 15 songs of a bygone age, none of them younger than 50 and all representing Ferry's most explicit investment in the retro-chic that he started 26 years ago with his version of "These Foolish Things". He's a performer whose own writing has always co-existed with the work of his peers, but in the past most of his cover choices have been drawn from the rock era at least. Here, he goes back to cafe society and has recreated a pre-war glamour with hair's breadth accuracy. The lyrics are Porter, Hammerstein, Dorothy Fields; the music is small-group swing or dance-band sweet. Ferry has brought in genuine jazzmen to play the charts, and the musical director Colin Good has fashioned a convincing sound that Mark Tucker's engineering catches perfectly: nuanced, almost obsessively precise. Because obsession is Ferry's way. His records must take a long time because he wants them to be absolutely right.

Which doesn't necessarily mean that they're absolutely fine. It's something of a shock when his voice enters on the first and title track. Normally he surrounds himself with reverb or a bodyguard of backing voices, but he's very closeup and alone here and throughout - and since his voice has lost some of its top-end purity, he can sound almost hoarse on some lines. This might be an intended huskiness, but that's not really Ferry's metier. His entire style is based on mannerism, so much so that the borders between affectation and emoting blurred into nothingness long ago, and you feel that he believes in every line even as the artist in him is laughing at them. It's a balancing act that would take only a sniff of scepticism to make it fall down. Yet Ferry sustains the mood impeccably. It might help that, out of 15 songs, only seven of them breast the three-minute barrier.

Not that there aren't some failures along the way. "When Somebody Thinks You're Wonderful", once associated with Fats Waller, is a gauche bit of fluff that Ferry tries to play for laughs and can't do anything with. "You Do Something to Me" is better done by a coquette than a male singer, and comes across as mere jollity. The most peculiar piece is Porter's blackly comic "Miss Otis Regrets", which Ferry does absolutely straight at a funereal pace, over the rumble of distant thunder. Here his voice sounds as parched as that of a gallows crow. It may work for you, but I didn't bite.

Last Updated: 2 July 2008