Bryan Ferry is one of UK pop’s arch futurists – yet his latest project is a daring look back. Opening his doors to CLASH, he offers revelations on a five-decade solo career, and a glimpse of what could come next.
Within seconds of getting off the train, CLASH is hit by some unseasonal August wind and rain. The British summertime is doing its worst. Collar tucked up around our neck, we’re left to squint once more at Google maps, turning this way and that, down unassuming West London streets, before we uncover the right address.
Bryan Ferry’s HQ is unassuming on the outside but beyond the entrance it’s a labyrinth of ideas. His PA greets us at the door, offering an ad hoc tour while the man himself gets ready; we’re shown an archive room, where a veritable mountain of oxidising film cans are being transformed into pristine digital. The walls are lined with art collected over the years, while Ferry’s personal studio hums with activity – the lights blink across the sound desk, while a video is frozen on the screen. We’ve clearly come at an opportune time.
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Climbing a myriad of stairs, the man of the hour greets us warmly. He bought this building decades ago, and it’s grown in line with his activities. A feverish bookworm, we’re led past the groaning shelves of his personal library – littered with art history tomes, lavish fashion titles, and an enduring (but also endearing) interest in science fiction – to the far corner. Bryan sits on a leather chair, a tartan throw placed snugly across the back: we’re here to discuss his epic new archival project, a five-disc solo repository that frames his mirror career, the points where he needed to step out of Roxy Music and flex his aesthetic muscles a little. “It’s not a job, it’s a life,” he points out. “There’s not really time off from it. I’ve never been any good at relaxing, so it’s just as well I’ve got something in my life to really care about.”
The suggestion for a solo collection was mooted a few years ago, with Bryan and his team spending months “chucking ideas together” before getting underway. He’s not used to glimpses back, preferring – as he puts it – to remain fixated on the future. “I’m more interested in what I’m doing here and now, but you always have affection for things you’ve done, and the people you’ve worked with.” Flicking through his notes – the full package is a work of art, complete with a book-length essay – Ferry is concerned about getting his facts right. It’s been 50 years since his first solo release, and the memory can play tricks. There’s little doubting the figure in front of us, however; the glittering blue eyes, and the innate sense of style that today opts for a crisp Ivy League style shirt, and a classic piece of British knitwear.
There’s a certain joy in experiencing the way an artist views their own work, as he puts it. Bryan Ferry recently absorbed Irish artist Michael Craig-Martin’s retrospective at the Royal Academy in London, for instance, and travelled to Los Angeles for legendary photo-journalist Art Shay’s career-spanning exhibition. He’s approached his own retrospective in the same way, enthusing about the memories uncovered.
Roxy Music’s 1972 debut album reflects their rehearsals, but follow-up ‘For Your Pleasure’ found the band making their home in the studio. Emboldened, Bryan Ferry opted for something different, recruiting some close friends to work on material under his own name. “I just wanted to make something really quickly,” he recalls. “I wanted to fence it in as an album of covers, the way that Elvis Presley or Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby would do. And it was just so fun and enjoyable to do!”
In contrast with Roxy’s ground-breaking art pop, Bryan Ferry’s stylish solo run would fixate on his voice, allowing him to broaden his musical experiences. His solo debut alone veers from Dylan and The Beatles to Black American R&B via showtunes: “tunes that people could whistle on a ladder,” as he puts it. “I imagine there were some fans who were purists, and thought: oh I can’t relate to these songs… but it was my party, so why not? It was all songs that represented a cross-section of music that I listened to when growing up, and I was still a kid, anyway.”
Our conversation is littered with references to artists, and works that piqued his interest. His solo work, for example, prompts a comparison to Picasso, or artists who have “side-lines in sculptures and fun things, but also create quite tragic and deep and more emotionally meaningful things. I think it’s good to have the contrast of light and shade in your career.”
Indeed, there’s a quiet sense of the outsider about Bryan Ferry. A working class kid from the North of England, he studied fine art before falling into music almost by accident. When CLASH praises his vocal technique, there’s a self-effacing chuckle before he bats the compliment away; it’s almost as though his status as a non-musician is what has enabled him to create such outside-the-box work. “It was kind of a fluke that I got into music,” he recalls. “I wasn’t training to be a musician or anything like that, I was an enthusiast.”
A friend from a local cycling club was piecing together a band, and happened to ask Ferry if he knew anyone who could sing. Having spent his weekends and holidays working on building sites and the local steel factory – alongside an eye-opening stint assisting a tailor – he immediately volunteered his services. “I thought, well, singing in a job must be better than those jobs,” he laughs. “I had six weeks to learn the songs and join this guy’s band. He gave me a crash course in singing in a band. When I got to college I put together a band, and it just went from there.”
It’s remarkable, then, that so many of his enduring creative obsessions stem from his youth. Bryan Ferry’s opening solo single was a cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’ – a potentially sacrilegious move, the sheer passion and gusto of his vocal gels the daring arrangement into place. “When I’ve worked on all these records, I’ve really enjoyed hearing the instrumental parts. That’s what paints the picture, what you inhabit as a singer is the final thing that happens.”
There’s a full disc of Dylan covers on his new retrospective; 2007’s ‘Dylanesque’ for example remains a cherished part of his oeuvre. “I wasn’t heavily into Dylan back then, I just thought they were really interesting songs,” Bryan shrugs. “He was different from all the other people I liked back then, who were all Black American artists, pretty much, with smatterings of Europeans; Piaf and people like that. The oddballs.”
“I subsequently found myself going back to Dylan, if I was looking for something to do in-between my own writing. Great songs, great words, that singers love to sing. Usually, a lot of his work was done in a plain way – just a guitar and some singing – so there’s ample room to do something different. I wasn’t a die-hard devotee, so I could go in with gusto and start banging the keys. We found a way to do it that was very me.”
Emboldened by the success of his debut, ‘These Foolish Things’, Ferry would return to these solo harbours over time – a one-off fling that turned into a mirror career. He calls it “an interesting departure, and a bit of an adventure” with wry under-statement. Take ‘Boys And Girls’: the 1985 record saw Bryan Ferry move beyond the colossal success of Roxy Music’s globe-shattering ‘Avalon’, allowing him space to re-establish his own voice. “I wanted to get rid of any pressure of expectation. Everyone else remembers it taking a long time, but to me… it was like a sprint!” he laughs, “ but it was worth the effort.”
The record utilises the skills of some potent collaborators, including Miles Davis’ cohort Marcus Miller. “One of the beauties of working on these solo albums is that you get to rub shoulders with these people. It’s like playing tennis with somebody much better than you, and you raise your game. There’s nothing wrong with Roxy – those guys are great, too – but I wanted to broaden my horizons. It gave me a chance to work with lots of different people. It gives you a wider canvas. And it led to jazz records, and all sorts.”
Bryan Ferry has an inherent thirst for collaboration; other voices embolden his own, and allow him to try things he would never have anticipated. “I like to ask everybody’s opinion, and then I change it,” he says with a smile. “I like to edge my way to what I want. It’s a case of ducking and diving, bobbing and weaving, and eventually finding something you think is unusual. I don’t feel I’ve been a part of any scene. You always have to just follow your own instincts, or your own desires. And you hope people will relate to it.”
For all his bashful comments, there’s a sense that Bryan Ferry is a perfectionist. Whether it’s reworking Dobie Gray’s ‘The In Crowd’ – a song he first fell for in sweaty Northern clubs – or working with a full swing orchestra, each project has to be pushed to its furthest limit. “Oh, it’s always emotional,” he admits. “You want everything to be the best it can be, so there are always ups and downs. I’ve had terrible low moments, when you feel you’ve run out of ideas. But then you try something else, and work your way back. The studio is the best place to be, really.”
His new retrospective is testament to that. It dips into his roots – hearing his auntie play doo-wop group The Ink Spots as a kid, or encountering Leadbelly in the skiffle craze – before soaring to the future. We touch on his pervasive influence as a style icon, with each change in outfit being mimicked by countless fans across the land. “Antony Price (designer and multi-decade collaborator) is a great friend,” he says. “We’d always chat about what to do next. It was so much fun. GI uniforms, the white dinner jacket, they’re all fairly classic, standard looks. You’d look out during shows, and these fantastic kids – usually Northern kids, actually – were so invested in the glamour of it all.”
Here, too, you can discern evidence of Bryan Ferry’s working class roots, and his formative nights at Northeast mod clubs. “On Sunday, you wore your Sunday best to go to church. It started there. One of my jobs at school was working in a tailor’s shop each Saturday. That was educational. I got interested in American style, and the way the jazz musicians dressed. They always wore cool clothes. Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, all these people. They looked good.”
This idea of world-building, and visual representation, occurs and recurs throughout Bryan Ferry’s career. The painstaking design of the new box set is a case in point, with Ferry becoming involved in every single decision. It all goes back to his time in art school, and his belief in the representation of the object. “I very much wanted to be an artist, and to create something. When I went to college, I wanted to be a painter,” he says. “I thought that’s how I was going to express myself. But then I began to feel like I could express myself musically; first through singing, then through making songs. Through music, I came to do what I had originally wanted to do with painting, which is to present myself to the world, and be self-shaped as a unique creature.”
Notably, the box set contains a glimmer of the future. New single ‘Star’ is remarkable, it’s crunching, frosted, sub-zero electronics (containing ideas supplied by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) lit up by Bryan Ferry’s vocal, the ache of ages on his voice. Labelling it “a pointer to the future” there’s seemingly more to come. Our visit literally forced Bryan to press ‘pause’ on his studio activities for a hard-earned break. Currently plotting two studio albums in 2025, he’s in a potent place, creatively speaking. “There’s always something else to do in music,” he says. “The things I’ve been doing in the past couple of years I really like, very much, and the pressure has been taken away in terms of songwriting because I’ve been doing a lot of instrumental things, and collaborations. It’s given me incredible freedom.”
As we speak, his team is setting plans in order. More demo ideas are coming in from collaborators, and Ferry’s plotting a few more late nights in the studio. The years pass but the energy doesn’t dim. “I always thought that as a singer I had to expand,” he notes. “Why deny yourself the chance to sing a lot of other stuff, and maybe approach those songs in a different way? I’m very glad that I’ve had this other career. It’s nice to look back, but I don’t like to do it all the time… just occasionally. I like to be doing new things, and some 90% of the time I’m working.”
“There’s always more to do,” he closes. “The past couple of years have been really busy, but that’s for the next time we speak!”
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‘Retrospective: Selected Recordings 1973 – 2023’ is out now. As seen in CLASH Issue 129, order your copy here.
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Words: Robin Murray
Creative Direction: Rob Meyers
Lead Image Credit: Antony Price
