Summer Nights
Bryan Ferry
Kelvingrove Bandstand, Glasgow Keith Bruce
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ON DAY two of Regular Music’s festival of the surprisingly well-preserved, it is remarkable that Bryan Ferry is on the stand at all, exactly a week after the apparent suicide of Lucy Birley, the mother of his four sons, and cover-star of the Avalon album, at the age of 57.
The singer and songwriter from
Roxy Music fronts a nonet of chiefly younger talent but, like The
Pretenders’ Chrisse Hynde with Martin Chambers, also has an old stager on board to prove that the age-defying rock’n’roll phenomenon extends behind the frontline.
Ferry’s older sidekick is guitarist Chris Spedding, whose own colourful career has embraced the jazz of Ian Carr’s Nucleus, his own hit Motorbikin’ and a pivotal role in the studio work of the Sex Pistols, the extent of which is disputed yet.
More pertinently, his guitar graced Ferry’s 1976 cover of the
Everly Brothers’ The Price of Love, the lead track of Ferry’s Extended
Play solo excursion beyond Great American Songbook, prompting DJ John Peel to remark that what he really wanted to hear was a recording of Don and Phil with Spedding playing the riff.
Even Peel, were he still with us, would have to concede that the Ferry voice remains in good shape, at least for the bulk of this set.
A trot through his classics is quite a strange journey, however, as early 70s Brecht-weill influenced art-rock is juxtaposed with smooth dance-floor smoochers that are just an expensive suit and a supermodel away from being elevator music. (Quite often not that close then, really.)
More Than This and Avalon seem from a very different mind than the preceding coupling of In Every Dream Home A Heartache and If There
Was Something, especially as both of those were notable for the recreation of the sound palette with which the Roxy pioneers were working, from vintage mellotron and synth sounds to saxophonist Jorja Chalmers’ faithful rendering of Andy Mackay’s trills.
Substituting soprano for Mackay’s oboe, as well as playing tenor and alto, she straddled the two worlds effortlessly, striding across the stage in strappy heels, while violinist Marine Moore similarly was both a one-woman string section as well as replicating the wilder solo excursions of Eddie Jobson.