Bryan Chow, bryan@loudcloud.com
by Robert Everett-Green
The Globe and Mail, Thursday, September 23, 1999
Toronto -- You're sitting in the coffee bar near the back, and it's nearly empty, and you hear the singer do the sweet, sad beginning of Kurt Weill's September Song. And since you're alone you try to guess who's singing. Judging from the arrangement -- dusky strings and liquid clarinets -- it could be somebody from way back, a little- known maverick from the early stereo period. But the breathy baritone has a familiar quiver, and a painterly way of daubing at the words, that suggests a later, more spangled epoch. The song fades like a departing ghost, and as you pass the counter to leave you ask who that was, and of course it's Bryan Ferry, the silver prince of seventies glam-rock.
You shouldn't be surprised. Even in his heyday as the inventor and front-man of Roxy Music, Ferry had a quiet passion for songs from the pre-rock era. He has just never recorded an entire album of them, with arrangements that revive the sound of the thirties. As Time Goes By, his forthcoming disc on the Virgin label, could be the oldest new record of the year.
"I've dabbled in the period before, but this is the first time I've done an acoustic, authentic- sounding album, without guitars, with drums using brushes, and with that Teddy Wilson kind of piano," Ferry said, during an interview last week in Toronto. "I was just trying to do respectful arrangements within the period."
Even with that rather narrow purpose, Ferry has managed to produce a remarkably original album. The songs, which include such standards as The Way You Look Tonight, Where or When, and Just One of Those Things, are not so much covered as quoted in full, with a palpable sense of distance but without irony.
That tone couldn't have been easy to find, and Ferry isn't yet convinced he's done it. Sitting in his hotel room, shyly averting his gaze as he speaks, this most stubborn of rock musicians was not above asking a music critic, point-blank, whether he'd blown it.
"Do you think the romanticism of these songs is refreshing now, or do you think it's too -- weird?" The anxiety in his voice told me he wasn't fishing for praise.
Acceptance matters a lot to Ferry, almost as much as having his own way. He's famous for his meticulous habits, and his unwillingness to let anything leave the studio that could be improved with a few additional tracks. But he's also extremely attentive to what his intuition tells him about where the next Bryan Ferry album should fit. And though he got onto his latest project through a request from a film producer -- a song was wanted, then not needed, for Ian McKellan's thirties' update of Richard III -- Ferry sees a gap in the popular scene that he thinks needs filling.
"Whenever you get a slow romantic song nowadays, it's usually in a blockbuster movie, and it's done very mainstream, very saccharine and bombastic," he said. "It's given the whole notion of a romantic song a bad name."
The same sentiment marks the limits of his interest in the jazz and show tunes of the past. The compact, stylish sound of the thirties suits him much better than the big-band expansiveness of the forties.
"When the music is a bit later it gets a bit too big for me," he said. The lushness of the bands I find not quite my thing. I like the solos [of thirties jazz], that's one of the things I enjoy very much about Billie Holiday's recordings. You hear this fantastic voice, and then it stops, and then an equally wonderful voice, on an instrument, takes over."
And, of course, he loves the glamour of songs like The Way You Look Tonight, which was first recorded in the classic film musical Swing Time by Fred Astaire. The connection is apt: Even as a rock vocalist, Ferry has always been an Astaire in a field dominated by Gene Kellys.
It's impossible to listen to his Roxy Music albums, all of which are being lavishly remastered and reissued by Virgin, without being struck by the individuality of his style. With his feints and swoons, preening declarations and nervous vibrato, Ferry always seemed to be not just singing the lyrics, but courting them physically.
"Though the world is my oyster/it's only a shell full of memories," he sang in Song for Europe, on Roxy's Stranded album. The line has a peculiar resonance now, with an album of old favourites coming out, and a lingering sense of disappointment over the fate of the last album of his own material, the 1994 disc Mamouna (his next is due out in late 2000).
"It was terribly depressing," he said. "I think my confidence was shaken . . ." It didn't help that he had been struggling with the album over a seven-year period, assembling ever-more elaborate multi-track compositions that would often turn out to be missing one essential ingredient.
"I got into some very bad habits over the years, where I would virtually make the entire record without having the lyrics written," he said, with a laugh. "I would have so much on tape, because I love the process of recording, and at the end of the day I would say, 'hang on, there isn't really a song here yet, it's like an abstract piece of music.' I would quite often write myself into a corner, where I found that if I sang a certain line a certain way, it would clash with something else that was happening."
On top of that, he felt a heavy burden of expectation. Would there be a single, would it play on the radio, would the whole album be seen as an appropriate thing for Bryan Ferry to have done?
"I really felt that I should have a patron, like the Medici, so as not to have to worry. . . . Doing this record was a release from all that. There are no expectations, no singles, it's not going to be played on the radio, and I don't think there are going to be any videos. It's just a record, and I'm very happy with the simplicity of that."
Here's to simple things, and to romance in the old style, without a smirk.
Bryan Chow, bryan@loudcloud.com