Bryan Ferry Concert Review

Radio City Music Hall, New York, 9th August 1988 By Tina Clarke

Music Express, 1988

Throughout his career, Bryan Ferry has always been a portrait in consummate elegance. Even in the early days of Roxy Music, when the group dressed in outrageous glam rock apparel, wearing feathered jackets and the like, Ferry always seemed a bit above it all, just a little removed, a dedicated voyeur, but reluctant participant. Over the years his artfully crafted commentaries on stylish romance and the seedy side of high living have won him a devoted following of art students and would-be trend setters.

On this, his first solo tour since Roxy Music's demise, Ferry featured a surprisingly comprehensive sampling of songs from throughout his illustrious career. Opening the set with Limbo, from his most recent album, Bête Noire, he set the mood for an intriguing evening of fashionable rock. As the stage filled with incense, Ferry, like a high priest of cool, lurched about in a perfectly tailored dark suit. Most of the audience sported such attire, although ironically, not because it's a sophisticated alternative, but because it is now their required career-minded uniform.

Never the most fluid of dancers, Ferry stifly led his eight-piece band, which one observer noted, looked remarkably like those disco daredevils, the Village People, through songs such as In Every Dream Home a Heartache and Casanova with mischievous reserve, while Dance Away was appropriately dreamy. In true Ferry style, Kiss and Tell, his loosely veiled ode to ex-paramour Jerry Hall, was slyly accompanied by slides of women who looked deceptively like her.

Ladytron, a song from Roxy's 1972 debut album, was given one of the most perplexing musical arrangements of the evening. It featured an Eddie Van Halen-style guitar solo by Jeff Thrall as a replacement for the harmonically complex exchange between guitarist Phil Manzanera, synthesizist Brian Eno and saxophonist Andy MacKay on the original recording.

The beautifully textured Avalon was afforded a schmaltzy, nearly abrasive solo by back-up vocalist Etienne, while Ferry's moving cover of Lennon's Jealous Guy offered one of the evening's highlights.

Ferry doubtlessly continues to be one of the most influential recording artists of recent times. If his performance was meant to be as ironic as this observer suspects -- it was an achievement, a deftly fabricated pastiche of his own artistry, meant to surprise, shock and delight. A master craftsman, Ferry will hopefully continue to twist and turn the obvious into art.

Text copyright 1988 Music Express, used without permission. All grammar mistakes, and nasty, unwelcome asides at the wonderful Yanick Etienne, left intact.
With thanks to Grant Goggans.

Last Updated: 19 July 2008