Music |
Bryan Ferry
By
Published: Mar 30, 2010
Category:
Rock
Bryan Ferry was born in 1945. He started dressing like Cary Grant in the early 1970s. Jerry Hall dumped him for Mick Jagger in 1977. Avalon appeared in 1982. “Boys and Girls” came four years later.
Since then, it’s been grim. CDs of songs by others, with embarrassing covers of Bob Dylan. Now fodder for British journalism mostly as a fashion icon and as a celebrity who dates a woman thirty years his junior.
For most people: about as relevant as Flock of Seagulls.
But I find myself listening to “Boys and Girls” often because Bryan Ferry was, simply, one of the greatest filmmakers ever to become a rock star. And his songs, individually and collectively, are like travelogues that take you to a place you’ve always wanted to go. [To buy the CD from Amazon, click here. For the MP3 download, click here.]
That place is love. Not “My wife is my best friend” love. More like lust and longing so intense it redlines into love. Obsessive love. Love on two bottles of Krug and maybe a puff of Mendocino’s best. Love that jets you out of this vale of struggle and anxiety into elegance and glory. Love that makes you, as one of his songs has it, a “slave” to love, love for which you’ll pay any price:
Tell her I´ll be waiting
In the usual place
With the tired and weary
There´s no escape
To need a woman
You´ve got to know
How the strong get weak
And the rich get poor
In his prime, Ferry was tall and Bowie-thin, with a forelock of black hair that hung just so. He performed in black suits and white shirts; sometimes he wore a dinner jacket. He didn’t move much, never broke a sweat. An English decorator said of him that he was more likely to redecorate a hotel room than to trash it. Exactly.
Music is what he heard. Or saw. Words came harder, which is one reason there were big spaces between records. But texture was another reason; these songs are layers upon layers. In one song, he starts with clip-clop drums, plucked guitars, a distant organ, a wail of a sax — instruments tiptoe in and out. And over that, his lovesick tenor:
Oh baby do it again and again
I can hear nothing
Windswept is the sand
Oh baby show me more
I can see nothing
Windswept is the shore
And there you are, on the moonlit beach. You may regret it in the morning, but for right now, you want more, you must have more. From “Don’t Stop the Dance”:
Mama says love is all that matters
Beauty should be deeper than the skin
Living for the moment, lips and lashes
Will I ever find my way again
No one has a name, no one has a past, no one has a problem. And no one has a question about any of it.
What do you find on the street tonight?
Nothing
It’s a river of no return
Diamonds they’re your only friend tonight
Break the mirror and bang the drum
Let’s be cool about it
Oh we’re cool about it now
Stone woman — the pain is gone
And the pleasure is yet to come
“Cool about it” is Bryan Ferry in three words. Cool like the most handsome man at the party, sitting in the corner, just watching and waiting for the moment to come to him. Cool like the tall beauty, the one you think must be a model, but is actually so much more. Cool like you becoming that gorgeous, cool like the best dream you ever had of yourself. Cool like the magic you and your partner might find via this movie music. Cool like this super-produced CD. I mean: just totally cool.
