The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Is it a mistake to publish lyrics as a book?
Bryan Ferry is one of pop’s most playful wordsmiths, but strip away his voice – and you’re left with bathos
336pp, Chatto & Windus, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
Bryan Ferry set out his stall in 1972 with Roxy Music’s extraordinary debut single Virginia Plain: “Far beyond the pale horizon/ Someplace near the desert strand/ Where my Studebaker takes me/ That’s where I will make my stand.”
Here we catch him, aged 27, the leading man in his own Hollywood dream (complete with auto-erotic product placement), yet maintaining an air of ironic distance on a song filled with nods to its own illusions. Virginia Plain was a brand of cheap rolling tobacco that featured the image of a pin-up, transformed by Ferry to some alluring siren.
The son of a Durham labourer, Ferry reinvented himself at Newcastle Art College, dispensing with his Geordie accent and discovering a flair for fashion. Roxy Music dressed like alien Teddy Boys fronted by a space-age nightclub crooner. Their music was like a pop art collage, smashing together avant-garde electronica with rock ‘n’ roll and classic jazz-age songcraft. Ferry developed a distinctive singing style, a caricatured croon shot through with lazy eroticism and underpinned by melodramatic anguish. His image as the archetypal doomed romantic emphasised the other great theme of his songwriting: the impossibility of love.
Now 76, he will tour this year with Roxy Music, although they haven’t released any new music since 1982. In the meantime, we have a book of Ferry’s lyrics to contemplate. A lifetime’s work, it clocks in at 300-odd pages, and 149 songs – an average of three a year.
I have interviewed the great man many times and he appears to fret over songwriting. For such a clever, erudite writer, he once described himself to me as “a very reluctant lyricist”. He never writes the words in advance, rather creating melodies, then “wrestling” to find something that fits. “I leave it till it has to be done at knife point,” he claimed.
This book contains an author’s note by Ferry, in which he proposes: “The right words mixed together with the right music can be strong medicine, and in a good song they should feel inseparable.” Nevertheless, here they are separated, for better or worse. Sometimes (it must be said) much worse. It is awkward to see a phrase like “Ooh ooh/ I’m all cracked up on you” laid out as if it warrants close contemplation.
We are forced once again to ask whether songs are poetry. Lyricists and publishers seem to think so, increasingly offering up lovingly
bound collections of the scribblings of any pop and rock star who can string a few words together, from the amusing Shaun Ryder of Happy Mondays (“You’re twisting my melon, man!”) to the surprisingly lumpen Van Morrison, whose lyrics can seem stranded on a page without his fantastic voice.
Of course, Bob Dylan has been publishing lyrics in book form since the 1970s, and was rewarded with a controversial Nobel Prize in Literature. Yet precious few songwriters can hope to match the density, intricacy and flair of Dylan. Too often the style of presentation suggests a level of academic weight at odds with the short lines, quick rhymes and repetitive modes of pop songcraft. Paul McCartney got it right with last year’s two-volume collection, emphasising the stories behind the songs rather than the often insubstantial lyrics themselves.
Where should we place Ferry in this literary pantheon? He is a writer of artful precision, delighting in words you don’t often find in pop: “etiquette”, “cognoscenti”, “archetypal” and “ennui” all appear, along with “rhododendrons”, “geraniums” and (in Editions of You) a badger. He has a fondness for striking pairings – “crimson chords”, “undercover hours”, “disposable darling” – and piles up imagery like a cinematic montage.
Mother of Pearl still sings on the printed page: “Serpentine sleekness/ Was always my weakness/ Like a simple tune/ But no dilettante/ Filigree fancy/ Beats the plastic you.” Other songs fare less well, particularly in later material when Ferry stopped trying to display his cleverness. Angel Eyes is a gorgeous pop song, but couplets like “Let your lovelight/ Shine on me” look clichéd when stripped of melody. And even at his most lyrically heightened, the words cry out for the soundscapes Ferry builds with his extraordinary voice.
Lyrics is a book any Roxy fan would be proud to have on their shelf, yet unlike almost anything else in Ferry’s oeuvre, it feels like less than the sum of its parts.