There’s nothing plain about thrilling Ferry
Bryan Ferry Brighton Dome
Bryan Ferry is a transformer. Like his Seventies peers Lou Reed and Bowie, he morphed at will, for a while, before settling after Roxy Music into the singer we see tonight. He hangs from the micstand at an immaculate angle, perfect as a Savile Row suit, but with a crumpled heart. He still knows he is a Geordie mineworker’s son, but has remodelled himself to his own design.
His latest album, Avonmore, uses a photo of young, brooding, beautiful Bryan on its sleeve, but at 70 he remains a matinee idol, unwilling to age too much. In some ways he has also frozen artistically, each new LP bringing moments of moody, carefully wrought pleasure, but few surprises. But he still transforms songs. His glam-rock past can obscure his greatness as an interpretive singer – along with Barb Jungr, the best Britain has.
Dylan is his favourite songwriter, and “Don’t Think Twice (It’s All Right)” is an early, heartbreaking highlight. It’s the version tucked away on Ferry’s fine 2002 album, Frantic, just keyboard backing a voice that knows every nuance of romance. “We never did too much talking anyway,” he tells the lover he’s quitting, with a sexual shiver Dylan lacked. Ferry has a masterly sense of scale in the spotlight, delivering the final kiss-off with a small, offhand gesture. He finds everything the song has for him. He has also learned from Dylan the art of extreme personal vocal style. A Seventies radio that could switch between Ferry, Bowie, Dylan, Johnny Rotten, Kate Bush and Ian Dury shows the timidity of current chart singers, with their varieties of plaintive whine.
In “Bob Dylan’s Dream”, he catches the writer’s hitching tics, adding the shadowy echo of his own records and an air of decadent innocence. His 1974 hit version of Jerome Kern’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” puts faux-crooner contemporaries such as Rod Stewart to shame as he rockets the song into his own time. He’s equally adept ramping up “Let’s Stick Together” with blues harmonica, delivering the line “Now the marriage vow is very sacred” with a gigolo’s lack of conviction, or dropping into the Kingston ghetto, Jamaican accent in tow and hand archly on hip, for “Love Is the Drug”.
The set ranges across his career and into the deeper grooves of old Roxy albums. “If There Is Something”, from Roxy Music (1972) is all vocal swoon and fluttering sax. “Zamba” is an expensive, hollow night of the soul, the classic image of a smoking Sinatra alone at a bar switched to a lonely, glass-and-metal penthouse suite. He has a sleek gloss that can be a weakness, as on Roxy’s “Stronger Through the Years”. But “Avalon” mixes old English and Eighties new romance, Ferry grazing its words like skipping stones across a pond.
The final hits rampage includes Roxy Music’s first single, “Virginia Plain”, then their third, “Do the Strand”, full of the band’s initial cocky, hyper-intelligent, funny and decadent fantasy of rock’n’roll. It’s simply thrilling.
He has learned from Dylan the art of extreme personal vocal style