Bryan Ferry: A Rare Bird

Rock music, in all of its cynical, handsome, ghostly and repetitive splendor, is full of dead-ends. Every band runs out of steam, out of ideas, eventually. It’s a gas, but there’s a price you gotta pay just to get a piece. Maybe your label has the payola, or maybe you tour every pig-sty, dive bar and undersold shoebox in whatever country you’re stuck in. Not everyone gets raptured by the powers that be, but a few lucky ones get to bask in the heydaze of showbiz’s great frontier long enough to have their names remembered. But some acts arrive with endless vitality, like Roxy Music, whose music was a portal into postmodern artifice, reinvention and sophistication walloped by a crude, existential and alienated sort of panache.

When you are born in the late 1990s, you have to go looking for music like that. The highest charting Roxy Music single in the United States was “Love Is the Drug,” which climbed to #30 on the Hot 100 in 1975 after reaching #2 in the UK. The band had quite a big following in nearby Cleveland, the rock ‘n’ roll capital of a pre-1975 America, but my parents knew nothing about Ferry’s strain of glam music, instead reaping the benefits of the subgenre of metal that hawked the style at the turn of the 1980s, when hair got bigger, riffs got louder and androgyny was more pompous than gracious. For Roxy Music, it wasn’t just a dinner jacket-clad art prophet singing about impulses while backed by complex, dense canvases of strange instrumentation sharpened by a feather boa-wearing, balding auteur; the band had, as former Paste editor Robert Ham once so beautifully put it, a “devil-may-care bon vivant.” To come of age in a rural town with a population of just 3,000 people and discover what Bryan Ferry, Andy Mackay, Phil Manzanera, Paul Thompson and Brian Eno left us, it was like stepping into the cosmos of For Your Pleasure’s title track. “You’re rubbing shoulders with the stars at night”—yeah, that seemed like an all right place to be.

The Salad Days

Ferry grew up in a working class family in Washington, County Durham. He was the son of a farmer and pit pony caretaker. As a kid, he bought jazz magazines with money he’d saved up from a paperboy gig. The first music he remembers falling for was the Ink Spots, because his parents had 78s of “Maybe,” “We’ll Meet Again” and “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” in the house when he was growing up. He still has the records all these years later, too. “I listened to them a lot when I was about five years old, the lead had this most-incredible high voice,” he says. “It haunted me then, and still does.” When Ferry was 13 years old, he went to the opera to see a performance of Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème. “I remember being in tears—how beautiful, with the music and the presentation and the costumes, the sets, the lighting,” he says. “The combination of it all was overwhelming.”

Nine years later, he’d see Stax Records’ legendary 1967 revue tour in Europe, one-night-only shows with Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Booker T. and the M.G.’s and others. “I remember being overwhelmed by that, too—it was very visual, as well as incredibly powerful music,” he recalls. “They were physically very impressive. The performances of all these people, they have a big effect on you. When I was in school and first started getting interested in art and reading about the great artists of the past, it was all little stepping stones to trying to be an artist myself.”

At 19, Ferry decamped to Newcastle upon Tyne to study fine art at the local college. There, he took classes with the collagist Richard Hamilton, a “real hard worker” in Ferry’s eyes. “You could sense he was in his studio every day, in the same building, working away and doing his best work at the time,” he remembers about his old mentor. “It was inspirational, to see someone producing great work and realizing that they had great discipline about their work and it meant a lot to them.” Collage became a spark-plug medium for Ferry, who saw that art was Hamilton’s life and wanted art to be his life, too. He liked the idea of putting things together and “seeing what kind of frisson” came from it. “So much in life is trial and error, I find,” he says with a laugh. “You just try and do things that you hope you’re gonna like and, sometimes, you do.”

At Newcastle University, Ferry rotated through a few bands—most importantly the Gas Board, which he played in with classmates Graham Simpson and John Porter. The gig was low-stakes, done for fun while Ferry’s creative side remained in visual art and painting. The Gas Board did exclusively cover songs because Ferry, Simpson and Porter hadn’t written a lick of music. Ferry graduated and hightailed it to London, thinking he could channel his art into music while teaching pottery at a nearby co-ed secondary school. “I started piecing it together, teaching myself to play piano and a pipe organ—a harmonium—which was earlier to play than a piano, because I could hold the chords, very simple chords,” he says.

The first Roxy Music songs were written on that harmonium, and some of them ended up on their eponymous debut. One didn’t come out until their third record, Stranded, in 1973. He was playing with Simpson, who was “very cool and very supportive.” Gradually, other faces from the band started coming into focus. First came Andy Mackay, and then Paul Thompson and Phil Manzanera after Ferry put an advert in Melody Maker. “I was very lucky,” he admits, “because they’re all such great players, unique characters. I was quite particular about who I wanted to work with, and that helped, because we auditioned quite a few people for drums and so on.” Roxy Music became a big deal, with its opening song “Re-Make/Re-Model” considered to be quite bizarre and unorthodox, thanks to the gusts of atonal oscillator noise Eno coaxed out of Mackay’s VCS3 synthesizer.

Arriving At the Party

Roxy Music begins not just with one voice but with many stacked on top of each other. Some aristocrats are kicking up a fuss. “It seemed like a good idea to start our first album with a party scene, this kind of celebration,” Ferry recalls. “We used some sound effect tapes, then added our own voices on top, to make the party sound more real.” It calls back to Ferry’s history with collage—pasting pieces together, building an aesthetic out of multiple dimensions and moving parts. So much of Roxy Music’s bent came from their ability to make every track sound like a conversation half over by the time we find it. “From the beginning in Roxy, we were always trying to produce something we’d never heard.” The band would do that again three years later, on “Love is the Drug,” which begins with the sound of dress boots walking across pavement.

In March 1973, Roxy Music released their second studio album, For Your Pleasure. Writing for Rolling Stone at the time, critic Paul Gambaccini said that the project was “either above us, beneath us, or on another plane altogether.” Roxy Music had made a bankable splash a year earlier, and it gave the band more resources once they returned to the studio. Ferry brought lyrics in, while Eno, Mackay, Manzanera, Thompson and guest bassist (or, “guest artiste”) John Porter put more focus on denser, elaborate production treatments. The phasing in “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” in particular was notable, as the track’s closing segment fades out with 70 seconds left but returns as if the instruments rewound the tape themselves.

For Your Pleasure wanders down blackened alleyways, lingering in and out of thrashing mental and sexual states. Ferry penned a perverse ode to a “plain wrapper baby” with “skin like vinyl” on “In Every Dream Home a Heartache—a song that didn’t set a precedent, it was the precedent. The rock music canon wasn’t flooded with songs about blow-up dolls in 1973, nor has it ever. “Was there pushback at all to make that song?” I ask Ferry, candidly. “Not that I can think of, at the time,” he replies. The protagonist of that track resembles a far more twisted version of a character Ferry has woven into his songwriting since the beginning: Jay Gatsby. The force at the center of “In Every Dream Home” is, in Ferry’s opinion, a “guy who has everything but has nothing.”

Ferry first read The Great Gatsby as a teenager, falling in love with it immediately. He’s a big fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald across the board, in fact. “The language, the style of writing, is so beautiful,” he says, “and it has a great mood. It’s a melancholy mood, and that’s something that I can tap into fairly readily. The Gatsby character really had it all—the wealth, the parties—but beneath it all lay his true obsession, and the obsession will always get you in the end.” I think of Ferry singing “my role is to serve you, disposable darling” and “my breath is inside you, I’ll dress you up daily and keep you ‘till death sighs” while listening to him speak gently, 51 years later, about the cords that bind love, time, loneliness and wealth. “These people aren’t any happier than the rest of us—who couldn’t identify with that?”

Less than seven months later, Ferry’s solo career began as a “sideline” to Roxy Music, and his solo debut, These Foolish Things, arrived as a complete tonal shift from the gaudy histrionics of For Your Pleasure. “I felt like, with [For Your Pleasure], I’d made a statement as to being a songwriter, and I thought it would be great to do another album now, because I really enjoyed making the second album,” he says. “I really felt we were doing something different. I thought, ‘I’d love to make another album. I don’t have any songs, so maybe I’ll do some covers of songs that I like from different-sounding genres, different musical areas.”

Ferry went from summoning the boogie man to repurposing folk and doo-wop songs into glammy disco cuts. The tracklist slowly filled out, juxtaposing songs by the Crickets and Elvis Presley with less famous work from Ketty Lester and Lesley Gore. Ferry turned in a take on Eric Maschwitz and Holt Marvell’s 1935 standard “These Foolish Things” and it became the title track. All of Roxy Music (sans the recently-departed Eno) joined in at one point or another. If For Your Pleasure had become an emblem of glam rock, then These Foolish Things was Ferry’s way of showing that anything could fit that description, giving Motown and British Invasion cornerstones a dash of flamboyance. In 1973, Ferry had called the record “a very Catholic selection,” stemming from his disinterest in “pleas[ing] all of the people all of the time.” Rock critics weren’t especially thrilled with Ferry’s approach to already-perfect songs like the Beatles’ “You Won’t See Me” and the Miracles’ “The Tracks of My Tears.”

I’ve always been a bit more attracted to covers that sound ages apart from the source material, especially Ferry’s baroque, clumsy take on the Paris Sisters’ “I Love How You Love Me.” To this day, however, he contends that his first song, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” is his best effort, with the strings from Eddie Jobson and brilliant bass playing from John Porter. The way Ferry bangs the piano, it was pure instinct that went off without a hitch. “Some of the other [covers] weren’t so good,” he says, “but that was a good cover, I think, because it went somewhere different. We’d say, ‘Oh, let’s play this one straight,’ and try and copy that record, and then it would obviously end up sounding quite different.” These Foolish Things rocketed into the Top 5 on the UK albums chart; Ferry had yanked a parallel, secondary career from the ballast of his own inability to remain still, conceiving a first record under his own name to be a “one-off project” but never settling into such a half-baked beginning-and-end.

A Walk Through Elysian Fields

Bryan Ferry isn’t the type of person to look back at his records, but he traipsed through the decades of his career while helping assemble Retrospective: Selected Recordings 1973-2023, an 81-song box set beginning with his first-ever solo single—a cover of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”—and ending with his first new original song almost 10 years, the Amelia Barratt, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross-aided “Star,” making full-disc stops at the various eras of his life. “50 years felt like a good time to revisit things,” Ferry says. “I spend most of my time working on new things. Once finished with them, you tend to not hear them for a long time. But listening back to my own records was interesting, to see how I chose to do things. I was pleased to see there was a lot of variety in the work.”

The colorful text and moving imagery in Bob Dylan’s catalog keeps beckoning Ferry back to the material, as he performed a new cover of “She Belongs to Me” for the Retrospective collection to bookend such a long-standing attraction. “Quite often,” Ferry begins, “his own versions of those songs have been very plain—just an acoustic guitar and a voice and a harmonica, maybe. But, you could take it and rearrange it in a completely different way.” He applauds the adaptability of Dylan’s music—how, from just a place of language, you can step into it far easier than what’s flooding the mainstream. “Once you start looking at songs to cover, there aren’t that many with great words,” Ferry reckons. “You think, ‘Oh, that’s a great tune,’ and then when you have a listen to it and you analyze what the words are, you think, ‘Well, I don’t really want to sing that.’ [Dylan’s] lyrics are outstanding, but he has a great voice, too. I like the way he sings and I like the way his records sound.”

Ferry was not into folk music initially, admitting that Dylan’s early works hadn’t “reached out” to him. It was upon hearing Blonde on Blonde that he was able to go backwards and find a context in The Times They Are a-Changin’ and Another Side of Bob Dylan worth hanging his hat of intrigue on. I liken the change to Dylan going electric, or to black-and-white photographs bursting into color for the first time. “Once you get into color and film, sometimes you go back and say, ‘Oh, black and white is better,’” he gestures. “Sometimes, the cinematography is so beautiful—and the lighting—and, quite often, the dialogue is a lot more grown up and better. I like old movies, I suppose.” Ferry discloses that, recently, he watched Pulp Fiction. His verdict? “Really good.”

Cinema is to Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music what air is to the rest of us. I think of the band performing “Mother of Pearl” in 1974: Ferry in a white tuxedo, with tufts of his hair draping over the collar, rising out of the embers of Manzanera’s red-hot guitar solo, singing, “the search for perfection, your own predilection, goes on and on and on and on,” while his body jerks under the godlike light of a well-shadowed stage. It is not the music that runs through his body like a 9-volt battery, but something less assuming and all the more dangerous. “It’s strange how you develop an aesthetic, things that appeal to you,” Ferry says. “I like a lot of old Hollywood movies, particularly film noir from that kind of 1940s era. There’s a darkness, but also wit, great dialogue—the beautiful black-and-white cinematography. People in good suits. And hats.”

I think of Cary Grant and his straight-laced, demure sense of businessman swagger in a flick like North By Northwest—him sipping on a martini while wearing a $200 suit, or outrunning a crop duster in rural Indiana and still looking like a million bucks after creasing the knees—and how there’s money in an attitude. It’s a fabulous thing, to live at the intersection of edge and luxury, and it’s why an album like For Your Pleasure exists. “Part of the allure is that, behind [Grant’s] façade there seems to be a lot going on under the surface,” Ferry surmises. “When you consider the history of art, many of the people who did radical work were simultaneously rather bourgeois in how they chose to present themselves in life. People like [Édouard] Manet, [Edgar] Degas, [René] Magritte. Alfred Hitchcock himself is another great example. They looked like they might be bankers. The wildness was in the work. That doesn’t strike me as odd, or a contradiction. There’s a mystery to that.”

After he’d written “2 H.B.” as a tribute to Humphrey Bogart, singing of “celluloid pictures of living” and a cigarette that “traces a ladder,” Ferry finally arrived in the Tinseltown he’d so deeply coveted from across the pond in 1972 for a show with Ten Years After, Wild Turkey and Glenn Cornick at the Palladium. “It seemed a hell of a lot more glamorous,” he remembers. “And it was in color, rather than black and white. It had palm trees. It was the landscape of so many movies that one had seen. It was a bit like being in a film, I took to it immediately. A lot of English people do like California very much, it does seem a bit like the Promised Land.” He was fond of New York, too. In 1978, when Roxy Music was making Manifesto in the city, he spent a lot of time ambulating the local clubs, like Studio 54, Xenon and M.K.

Ferry often writes in character. “In some songs, that character might be closer to me,” he explains. “In others, I’m more obviously playing a part.” But that’s part of the gig, unless you want your horizons to be constricted by lack of risk or discomfort. On Boys and Girls, Ferry sang from the perspective of a lothario, while he was a piano man on As Time Goes By. When Roxy Music was still together, the band, inspired by advertising imagery, wanted its album covers to feature a “series of women in different situations.” Once Ferry began working on his solo material, he wanted to establish a separation in visual flavor between the two parts of his career. “The first solo albums were me in different guises,” he says. “These Foolish Things was a really simple, basic shot of me in a T-shirt—a throwback to records by singers like Elvis or Dion. For Another Time, Another Place, we were on location in Los Angeles, at the Hotel Bel-Air, and Antony Price did this outfit for me: a white tuxedo, a very classic look reminiscent of films I like, movies like Casablanca.”

Price—Ferry and Roxy Music’s longtime designer—helped give the band their retro-futuristic look. He and Ferry met at a Margaret Street club called The Speakeasy, and Price “was one of the star fashion students from the Royal College of Art,” Ferry says, detailing how he contacted Price about doing the Roxy Music cover art. “We didn’t want a picture of the band standing in a street looking glum, which was the usual thing at that time. We went for a picture redolent of Hollywood glamour.” One of Price’s model friends, Kari Ann, heeded the call, donning one of his designs and, after the photo session for the album cover was over, he and Ferry struck up a bond. “We felt that the visual aesthetic captured the feeling of the music.” Price told Ferry once that “men always looked better in uniform” and, much like how the target jacket he wore on the Roxy Music back cover was striking enough to work well with that record’s “adventurous mood,” the tailored, Robert Mitchum-inspired, off-white rayon draped suit he wears in the “Let’s Stick Together” music video paired well with his casanova, tongue-in-cheek behavior. “Hard to get now, apparently,” he says of the fabric, not the attitude.

Life After Roxy

After releasing These Foolish Things, Ferry started raising his game as a songwriter. “I started thinking, ‘Maybe this should have a middle 8,’ or something,” he laughs. “‘It would be nice to do a song with a strong chorus,’ because a lot of the things I did with Roxy were more experimental. I wasn’t thinking so much about song technique or craftsmanship. I suppose you learn by doing these things. I hope I did.” The last Roxy Music album, Avalon, was well-crafted, which Ferry attributes to the band having “learned quite a bit” by the time they made it. And they’d brought in other players, like Neil Hubbard and Alan Spanner, who’d worked with Ferry on his solo material. “I always liked to feature the musicians I work with, and I don’t like to sing too much. It’s great to do a song that has words that you like. I’ve always been wary of overwriting or trying to write too much. I think the solo career helped me steady on with my pace of writing.”

Roxy Music would make six more records after Ferry’s solo career kicked off, disbanding after touring for Siren in 1976 and staying on hiatus for two years. In that gap, Ferry made three solo albums: Let’s Stick Together, In Your Mind and The Bride Stripped Bare. He admits that he was never really saving songs for the band, that the populations of his solo full-lengths were composites of “whatever [he] had” ready to go. “I wish some of them had been put into Roxy,” he says, with clarity. “The band records were special.” But going solo meant he could widen the breadth of players he worked with, players he’d never have crossed paths with had Roxy Music stuck together during the mid-‘70s. Waddy Wachtel and Ray Cooper would make appearances on Ferry’s records, as would his old Roxy bandmates and John Porter, who hadn’t yet made it big as a producer for the Smiths.

In a 50-year career, Ferry’s CV of collaborations is long and varied, because he felt like it was a good idea to work with people outside of Roxy Music. As long as that was working, it didn’t matter who wrote the songs. “Doing the solo records—the covers—was about doing something very different from what I did with Roxy,” says Ferry. “I thought it might even open up my work to a different audience. Doing covers also meant I had no responsibility as the writer and was free to focus on arranging and producing.” But one name has remained a fixture, that being producer Rhett Davis, whom Ferry still works with in 2024. “It’s good to have longevity. At the same time, it’s good to bring in fresh people every now and then.”

After Roxy Music disbanded, Ferry would make his best solo album, the Platinum-certified Boys and Girls. As a comedown from Avalon, one of the greatest curtain calls in rock’s lexicon, Ferry and Davis teamed up with a coterie of stars, including Chic’s Nile Rodgers and Fonzi Thornton, Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler and Guy Fletcher, and a who’s-who of session elite, like Bryan Adams’s lead guitarist Keith Scott, saxophonist David Sanborn and instrumentalist Jon Carin. Ferry doesn’t remember how he met Knopfler but acknowledges just how “melodic and fluid” his playing was on “Valentine.”

He recalls a time, however, when Gilmour came to his studio behind King’s Road and he propositioned him about appearing on Boys and Girls; “Windswept” and “Stone Woman” capture Gilmour’s ability to pull such incredible echoes and atmospheres out of his guitar. Ferry had been working closely with Bob Clearmountain, who’d previously engineered Roxy Music’s Flesh and Blood, and the producer put him in the company of Rodgers at the Power Station, where they’d made part of Avalon three years prior. “He said, ‘Hey, why don’t you try Nile? He’s a fantastic guitarist,’” remembers Ferry. Thornton, who’d performed back-up vocals on Avalon, also helped land the connection between Rodgers and Ferry, who waxes poetic about the Chic bandleader’s brilliance. “If you ask him about postage stamps or coins, he’d probably go on for hours—he’d be an expert! He’s fascinating company.”

All That Jazz

In 1999, Ferry made a record of standards called As Time Goes By. The zeitgeist at the time certainly wasn’t interested in a jazz record, as nu-metal was on the rise and rap music began its surging domination on contemporary charts, but Ferry has never entangled himself in any sort of likemindedness. “I can’t think of a time when I consciously tried to keep up with what other people were doing,” he tells me. “When people ask me for advice, I always say: Be yourself, follow your own course.” 13 years later, on The Jazz Age, Ferry went from channeling Gatsby to making the type of Roaring ‘20s music that he and his lavish parties would swing to, re-recording many of his greatest hits—“Avalon,” “Love Is the Drug” and “Virginia Plain,” to name a few—at his own personal studio at Avonmore Place in Olympia.

Ferry’s longtime musical director, pianist Colin Good, arranged the songs and the duo welcomed some of England’s smartest jazz players into the space and dubbing them the “Bryan Ferry Orchestra,” including bassist Chris Laurence, percussionists Frank Ricotti and John Sutton, picker Martin Wheatley, saxophonists Richard White, Alan Barnes and Robert Flower and a string ensemble of Katy Cox, Sarah Chapman, Emma Owens, Emma Parker and Victoria Sutherland. “I had already worked with some of these players,” he says. “There’s a whole set of guys in London who play old jazz and they dress accordingly—waistcoats and watch chains. They like that period stuff, and some of them play really, really well. I thought, ‘Wow, this is quite fun.’ I dared to try, and it seemed to work. It was a fun departure, and I thought it’d be good to do most of them as instrumentals, just to see, ‘Oh, let’s see how this song can go on without me singing it.’

In a full-circle moment, director Baz Luhrmann would take notice of Ferry’s jazz re-working of “Love Is the Drug” and ask to use it in the production of his Great Gatsby adaptation. The Bryan Ferry Orchestra wound up reworking Beyoncé’s 2003 #1 “Crazy in Love” into this spectacular flourish of orchestration. Luhrmann came by Ferry’s Studio One during the production and, upon seeing all the bells, whistles, knobs and thingamajigs, remarked that it was “like a submarine.” “One of the things that struck me was that he had a very precise idea of the music he wanted for each scene,” Ferry remembers. “It was Baz who asked us to do Beyoncé’s ‘Crazy in Love’ and Amy Winehouse’s ‘Back to Black’—great songs—and they worked very well. He had a thorough understanding of the music from the 1920s, Ferry argues, and “that music really was a key element in the film’s identity for him.”

Working Out All the Angles

In September Bryan Ferry turned 79, a number that seems false even now, 42 years after the swan song of Avalon and 10 years Avonmore’s funky, sophisti-pop victory lap packed with familiar faces (Nile Rodgers, Fonzi Thornton, Frank Ricotti, Mark Knopfler), friends of trusted collaborators (Johnny Marr, Marcus Miller) and fresh faces in the Ferry-verse (Ronnie Spector, Flea, Chris Spedding). Even in his earliest swings, as this tall, charismatic and shocking bandleader riffing on out of reach being out of touch, or “a place far beyond the pale horizon” where his Studebaker took him, he turned himself on with the flash of his own prodigy, the “boy meets girl where the beat goes on” of it all.

Peter York once said that Ferry “should hang in the Tate” like an art object. In time, that paperboy job paid dividends and Ferry found sensation in profound mania, electric boogaloos of fascinating magic, post-modern Westernization going through prog-rock osmosis and arrangements mimicking moon landings. Andy Mackay once said that Roxy Music didn’t invent eclecticism, but forced rock ‘n’ roll to accommodate it. As the 1970s waned, Ferry’s tastes became more sophisticated, and the insanity and edge that Eno so deeply revered became something ostentatious and worth gawking at rather than retreating from. The first 10 years of Ferry’s career, despite eventually letting go of the covers racket and releasing his own songwriting under his name, was defined by his leadership of Roxy Music. But at that time, he’d felt that his work in the band was his main career. “The solo work complimented it,” he affirms, “but would not have existed without the Roxy work setting it up.”

Ferry and his bandmates weren’t just players when they broke big in London, they were performers. You couldn’t simply hear Roxy Music. No, they forced you to listen. Their gadgetry and éclat made them a smoldering lodestar for the off-the-beaten-path wrinkle in rock ‘n’ roll thrashing through a drab, no-musical-identity, 1970-ish Europe. While the band was making Avalon at the Power Station in New York and Compass Point in Nassau, Ferry didn’t know it would be the last Roxy Music album—but he had a feeling it would be. The Avalon Tour, he says, “felt like an end of a chapter.” I bring up “More Than This,” one of—what I consider to be—the greatest entries into the English-language musical canon, and I ask him to tell me something, anything about it. He mentions Lost in Translation, the Sofia Coppola film that put Roxy Music into focus for millennials post-9/11. “I thought it was great how she used it at a pivotal point in the movie: Bill Murray sings it and reveals his vulnerable side.”

Getting to spend time with a piecemeal, didactic collection like Retrospective: Selected Recordings 1973-2023, you can see just how Ferry’s musical lineage might now get re-introduced to a generation like mine. These 81 songs arrive newly mixed but as impressionable as they were in whatever decade he wrote them in. They arrive in contrast to what Ferry was talking about on “Manifesto” more than 45 years ago, when he sang, “Now and then I’ve suffered imperfection. I’ve studied marble flaws and faces drawn pale and worn by many tears. I am that, I am from out of nowhere.”

Bryan Ferry was, and is, everywhere. David Bowie gushed about him in a 1976 interview with Dinah Shore, lauding Ferry for “spearheading some of the best music that’s come out of England in years.” Two weeks after he released These Foolish Things, Bowie would put out a covers record of his own, Pin-Ups, and ring him up to share the news. It wasn’t a cat-and-mouse game between the two, instead a never-ending tide pushing and pulling through different inspirations. Ziggy Stardust was a persona much like many of Ferry’s characters. They were both forefathers for the New Romantics who’d plod around London and Birmingham nightlife, creating a template for the Boy Georges, Classix Nouveauxs and Visages of the world to adopt, but there came a point where Bowie eventually began speaking up about how other artists tried to be him. Ferry’s work, in my eyes, has always been primitive and inimitable; not even Bowie could quite conjure Ferry’s perfect strike of sleaze, extravagance and bizarreness during the obviously Roxy Music-tinted traces of influence stiff in the framework of Station to Station and, later, the Eno-assisted Berlin Trilogy.

I ask Ferry if he ever had a moment where he was able to step back, draw the curtain and catch a glimpse of his progeny running rampant around rock ‘n’ roll like Bowie had, especially during the New Romanticism era that emerged from the rubble of Roxy Music’s conclusion. “Light and shade [are] very important to me, in my life and work,” Ferry says, shrugging into his own modesty. “It’s good to hear that some people are inspired by my work, just as I was inspired by people before me.” Like the green glint Gatsby was forever grasping toward, there is something elusive about whatever context you meet him in.

But that wasn’t the case when I heard Bryan Ferry’s voice for the first time, in my mother’s wine-red sedan—a Pontiac with a race-car engine in it, or so I always thought when she’d rev it down the bypass with an ‘80s radio station cranked up. “Like a dream in the night, who can say where we’re going,” Ferry sang, as if he was right there in the backseat regaling us. I remember those words, because they were always meant to be held onto. It was like his singing was a combination of all the voices I’d ever loved before. He brought them back to life, he made them alive. He made them mine and he made them yours. “That’s really why you make music,” Ferry concludes, “to touch people and get an emotional response. ‘More Than This’ uses very few words, but they seem to be the right words, in the right order.”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.

COVER STORY: Bryan Ferry, A Rare Bird

The Roxy Music frontman sits down with Paste for a career-spanning interview.