Glasgow Royal Concert Hall (Herald Scotland) - Fri 29th May
Music Review: Bryan Ferry, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
by Keith Moore for
This is a three star review
It's astonishing to think that Roxy Music's eponymous album was released 43 years ago. That's a longer period of time than Elvis lived. But such is the cycle that has become rock'n'roll that a man soon to enter his eighth decade can fill the Concert Hall of a Friday evening and leave them dancing in the aisles.
With rich pickings to choose from Ferry could hardly fail to please an adoring Glasgow audience and his nine-piece band created a wall of sound that captured the lushness of the Avalon period while nodding at the avant-experimentalism of those early Roxy albums.
Kicking off with Avonmore and Driving Me Wild from his most recent album, we were immediately in familiar and safe territory: Ferry the smooth crooner of succinct, well-constructed easy-on-the-ear songs of the kind he's been producing for the last 30 years. That they did almost slip unnoticed into 1985's Slave To Love shows they most obviously suits his more mature voiced stylings. When freed of the envelope of the backing singers, his own voice has a poignancy heard most evidently on a cover of Dylan's Don't Think Twice, It's alright.
But it was the second set, following an extended musical interlude of Tara, that things began to loosen up with a run of early classics including Virginia Plain, Let's Stick Together, Editions of You and yes, he still remembers how to Do The Strand. Although the musical edges were smoothed you could see occasional flashes of menace in Ferry's eyes, no more so than in an unexpected, but aptly revamped take of Remake/Remodel where things, for once, began to sound as if they might just go out of control.