I could have Irish blood I certainly love it there

From Roxy Music to quintessential Eighties crooning, Bryan Ferry has left an indelible mark on music... just as Ireland has left on him

Bryan Ferry

As a member of Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry had a profound influence both on punk music and the New Romantic movement of the Eighties. He then became synonymous with suavity in his solo career. Besuited and singing of tristes in cocktail bars, he was the Dolby quality sound of the yuppie era. He has gone on to sell over 30 million albums, having hits right into this decade.

Whichever Ferry you took to your heart, you will be pleased to know that he will cover all of his stylistic shifts at an outdoor show at Trinity College Dublin next Friday night.

At 72, the still effortlessly elegant man from Durham in the north-east of England is not surprised that he is still performing, as the musicians he listened to in his youth rocked ’til they dropped.

‘When I was starting out, the blues artists that I loved seemed to have been around forever and not inclined to stop,’ he says with a slight chuckle.

‘For most of my career – and I’m sure it’s the same for anyone who has managed to survive and sustain a long career – I was just keeping my head down and thinking of the present.’

We must go back to 1972 to see why Ferry’s band Roxy Music had a profound influence on the music which followed. When they performed Virginia Plain, their debut top five single on Top Of The Pops, even by the standards of the time, Roxy Music looked and sounded like little else.

‘Our original line-up with Andy Mackay, Brian Eno, [Phil] Manzanera and Paul Thompson were a band of people who were just so different from each other,’ he says.

‘They were real characters. It’s great when you have that on record and can observe it onstage.’

That’s certainly true. Ferry was all sleepy loucheness and green eye shadow singing at a keyboard, Brian Eno looked like a boffin at his prototype synths and computer while drummer Paul Thompson thrashed the drums in a caveman outfit; the seeds were sown for the look of New Romantic groups such as Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. Neither were Roxy Music perceived as dinosaurs when punk’s asteroid hit in 1977. The admiration was mutual.

‘Oh, I thought the energy of punk was incredible,’ he says.

‘The Sex Pistols and the Clash were particularly good. Sometimes really basic music works because of the energy and attitude.’

Ferry was also relatively unusual at the time in that he embarked on a solo career in tandem with the seminal output of Roxy Music.

‘I felt like I was getting the best of both worlds,’ he says.

‘I was writing my own songs for Roxy. The solo career began as a one-off album (These Foolish Things, 1973) of songs that weren’t mine and that I really liked such Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall and Smokey Robinson’s Tracks Of My Tears. It turned into a second career and now the careers have sort of merged. I enjoy being able to pick and choose from one and the other.’

He even persuaded his then supermodel girlfriend Jerry Hall to spit and snarl seductively in the video for his version of Let’s Stick Together. The now Mrs Rupert Murdoch left for a life with Mick Jagger in 1977 but Ferry soon found love again with social- ite Lucy Helmore with whom he had four children, Merlin, Tara, Isaac and their firstborn Otis, a pro-hunting activist, who was remanded for four months on a charge of perverting the course of justice only to see the charges

‘The blues artists that I loved seemed to have been around forever’

dropped. Bryan Ferry stood by his son and even took a decade away from touring to become a ‘family man’.

‘I had four sons and they were quite a distraction you could say, albeit a great one,’ he laughs.

‘They are all interesting people

‘I had four sons and they were quite a distraction you could say, albeit a great one’

in their own ways and we all get on really well. Ireland actually became very important to us at that time. We used to go to the west coast in the summer and Easter time. It’s beautiful there. I don’t really get there enough, or as much as I used to. It’s fantastic over there around Galway and the Burren.’

He also had a cameo in Neil Jordan’s 2005 Irish film Breakfast On Pluto and confesses a little curiosity at the possibility of having Irish roots. ‘I never done that thing of tracing roots but maybe one day it would be interesting,’ he says.

‘Coming from the northeast (of England) it could be anything. There was an influx of people to work in the shipyards and the mines, I could have Irish blood, who knows, I certainly love it there.’