The Guardian - Fri 19th Apr
The Guardian
19 April 2002
By Dave Simpson
London's chic Sanderson hotel is exactly the sort of place you'd expect to find Bryan Ferry, sometime frontman of Roxy Music, the most glamorous rock group ever. Ferry is in the penthouse suite. Enormous rugs feature designs from old masters. The television set perches on an artist's easel, which delights the former art student enormously. "Look at this!" he exclaims, with childlike enthusiasm. The scene could have come straight from a lost Roxy album.
Ferry has been dubbed the "Coolest Living Englishman" and the "Sultan of Suave". In the flesh, he doesn't disappoint. But beyond the unmistakable cheekbones and the silk scarf effortlessly set just so, the Geordie boy turned rock aristocrat has a surprisingly self-deprecating sense of humour. "You know that Fast Show character?" he says, as we sit in two wooden African chairs facing a marble table. He is referring to Competitive Dad, who takes pathological care to show his offspring just how things should be done. "My children say he reminds them of me." He pulls an appalled face.
The other surprise is his shyness. Ferry is famously strong-willed and the epitome of confidence on stage, but at first struggles with eye contact. He gradually relaxes enough to sidestep some questions and respond to psychoanalytical ones with a comical "Doctor!" He tackles topics as diverse as slobbing out (admitting to "occasionally" wearing jeans); whether last year's Roxy reunion tour ever risked his cool ("God, no! If we sounded terrible I'd have pulled the plug") and even his first taste of being in an audience, when he won a ticket through Radio Luxembourg to see Bill Haley. "When they read out: 'And the winner is Bryan Ferry,' the whole street came banging on my door."
Ferry is in fine form, personally and professionally. A youthful 56, he's about to release Frantic, his first album containing original songs for eight years and his best solo effort since 1978's The Bride Stripped Bare. After defining the 1970s and 80s, inspiring frontmen from Simon Le Bon to Jarvis Cocker, Ferry found the 90s less kind. Struggling with expectations and his own perfectionism, he was often cocooned away, spending vast amounts of money on albums such as 1994's Mamouna, which featured 112 musicians. "I had a sort of mid-life crisis," he says, frankly. "Certainly concerning the creative process. I was hiding myself more and more. I listened to Mamouna the other day and thought: 'Wow, really interesting, but I can't hear the vocal. Where am I?' "
By contrast, some of Frantic's songs were recorded in one take. Touring has rejuvenated him - "It was a big thing for me to rediscover the audience. I don't care if there's a note wrong, as long as the feeling's strong" - but Ferry has also rediscovered a sense of urgency.
On December 29 2000, Ferry, his wife Lucy and two of their four sons were flying from London to Nairobi when a passenger dashed into the cockpit and grabbed the controls, forcing the aircraft to plummet towards the ground. The story is well documented - Ferry's bewildered expression as the man was overpowered made the front pages - but his reaction to cheating death has never been explored. At the time, he was flippant - "I thought, 'Not now. I've got an album to make!' "
But with his life and family in peril, surely the last thing on his mind was making a new record. "Knowing me, it probably was, actually." He chuckles, momentarily sounding just like Terry-Thomas. "I do remember thinking, 'Mmm, we seem to be zooming down to earth at a colossal rate of knots.' You get a tremendous sense of relief when something like that is over." He sighs. "You certainly worry more about getting things done."
Ferry had already had a massive jolt six months earlier, when his best friend, Simon Puxley, died suddenly. Puxley had been integral to the Roxy "gang". He was the band's press officer, wrote the sleeve notes on the first album, and remained Ferry's "sounding board". "We did everything together," says the singer. He suddenly sounds and looks desperately sad. "So even before the plane thing I'd already been thinking, 'God, Simon's dead...I must get my act together.' "
Getting his act together has meant reconciling himself with aspects of his past. Ferry's best work has always balanced past and future. In Roxy, his genius was in juxtaposition; 1940s lounge and futuristic glam; cinema and pop art (Ferry was at Newcastle University under pop art pioneer Richard Hamilton); tradition and revolution; introspection and decadent grandeur.
On Frantic, old blues and Dylan nestle alongside cyberpunk. Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood ("a great player, very experimental, which I like") appears alongside Roxy's Paul Thompson, a soulful, hard-hitting drummer of whom Ferry says: "We're both Geordies, peas in a pod. Music can get very heavy. You need people around that can make you laugh. It's the same with Brian."
Brian is, of course, Brian Eno. This is a major development: after a 30-year gap, the pair are writing songs. In Roxy Music, Ferry, the svelte, louche frontman, felt threatened by this wild, androgynous synth creature in peacock feathers, who had his own following. Eno left Roxy in 1973, saying that he found himself "thinking about the laundry on stage". (Implausibly, Ferry claims not to have heard this quote, dryly admitting: "It would be a very good reason to leave.")
"We were young and foolish," says Ferry, grinding his fists together to illustrate the relationship. "But at the same time we worked well together. I just didn't like being portrayed as the glamour-boy singer when I was writing this stuff. Back then I felt threatened, but that's changed. We felt that the chemistry was not exhausted. If we'd done 12 albums together, maybe we wouldn't have had that."
So what about Eno's quote last year that the Roxy reunion "left a bitter taste"? A misquote, according to Ferry. "Brian was incredibly embarrassed and tried to get it retracted," he insists. "He thought the tour was quite good. He wouldn't have expected to have been asked to join us, and he wasn't." Did Eno leave Roxy at the right time? "It's impossible to say. To Brian's credit, his favourite album is Stranded, which he isn't on. It is intriguing to imagine what he'd have done with the others...Maybe I should get him into my studio to play along with them."
Eno is credited as the avant-garde force behind Roxy, although Ferry's own complex personality has most significantly shaped his work. A favourite theme is the emptiness at the heart of the thrill of it all. In Frantic's epic centrepiece, San Simeon, Ferry revisits lyrics he didn't use for Roxy's In Every Dream Home a Heartache - "It's like finding a vintage unworn suit that still fits" - and conjures up the mansion in Citizen Kane: vast, peopled by flashbacks and ghosts. A mischievous dig at the Ferry myth? "Oh yeah."
It has always been perplexing how a poor miner's son from Washington, near Newcastle (the Ferrys had a tin bath), acquired such a career-defining lust for glamour. "We went to Blackpool once when I was a child," he reveals, visibly entranced by the memory. "The pavements were boiling hot. It seemed incredibly exotic." Blackpool? I almost fall off the African chair.
At first in Roxy, Ferry hid at the back of the stage. Through clothes - inspired by Cary Grant, whom Ferry was impressed to find was born Archie Leach, a poor lad from Bristol - and singing, he camouflaged his shyness. The opposite sex was something strange and mythical. Ferry's first love was Marilyn Monroe, who gazed at him longingly from Hamilton's pop-art posters.
Throughout his work, not just on the famous Roxy album covers, featuring such models as Amanda Lear and Jerry Hall, Ferry has idealised women. In Beauty Queen (1973), he depicts a vision of womanhood so powerful he has to look away ("It's true. I can't look!"). Now he has finally penned a love song to Marilyn. Goddess of Love, Frantic's forthcoming single, is classic Ferry - the singer as the rescuing knight on the white charger. Others may profess adoration for Monroe but, he insists in the song, "Nobody cares like I do." It's a faintly ridiculous notion, as Ferry is aware. But he can't help himself. "I think once that [iconic view of women] is formed, it's a hard mould to break," he says.
After a string of doomed romances with models, Ferry married Lucy Helmore, the daughter of an insurance bigwig, in 1982. Significantly, Helmore was the last of the Roxy cover girls, featuring on Avalon. After that album Ferry broke up the band and settled into domestic life.
There's one aspect of his past with which Ferry will never be reconciled: Jerry Hall, who notoriously dumped him for Mick Jagger in 1978, unforgivably comparing the Sultan of Suave to a lampshade. Before the interview, I was asked not to mention Hall because Ferry would "clam up". But I can't resist querying the lyrics to Fool For Love: " You played me for a fool/You really hurt my pride." "Oh, it's all a subconscious jumble," says Ferry, seeing the Exocet coming a mile off.
Ferry now lives in Sussex, where his children bombard him with Dr Dre. In June, he tours again as a solo artist. After that, there may be more live Roxy Music and possibly even new Roxy music, not least because Ferry - the wag - suggests it would be "fun" to get the cover art going again.
I suggest Nicole Kidman as the epitome of the Roxy cover girl. "Mmm," Ferry considers, with a final cheery laugh. "I'll put her name in the hat."