66 • Rolling Stone, September 2011

The Lifeof Bryan

of Bryanof BryanBryan Ferry on relighting his solo career, and why there was never going to be a new Roxy Music record

BY MATT ROSS

Bryan ferry is hungry. having braved the istanbul sunshine for a photoshoot, he’s retreated indoors and now sits at a table littered with half-drained glasses of fruit juice and abandoned teacups. While his people mill about, some marshalling journalists and others whispering into cellphones, the 65-year-old singer, and founder of Roxy Music, politely enquires about getting something to eat amid the maelstrom of activity. There’s nothing edible immediately to hand,

but it’s apparently on the way, so he shrugs and leans back in his chair, smoothing his tie. His enduring relationship with London fashion designer Anthony Price means that Ferry is rarely seen looking anything other than quintessentially refined, and despite the June sunshine, he’s sporting an immaculate two-piece suit, carefully arranged

PHOTOGRAPH BY EMRE YUNUSOGLU

The Lifeof Bryan

Rolling Stone, September 2011 • 67

The Lifeof BryanThe Lifeof Bryan

brya n fer ry

68 • Rolling Stone, September 2011

so that his designer watch is conspicuous-ly showing. His whistlestop visit to Istan-bul has come about so that Ferry can play a private show tonight for the launch of the Swiss company IWC’s new line – “I’ve been admiring the watches that every-body’s wearing,” he admits, glancing down at his own wrist while also pointing out the other people in the room who are sim-ilarly equipped, before filling the first few minutes of our interview with the obliga-tory patter – and time, it appears, is short. “Do whatever you have to do,” an officious-looking man had impressed upon me a few minutes earlier, “but just do it fast.” In person, however, Ferry speaks slowly and carefully, pausing before every answer, as if considering every word in great detail.

“It’s been a busy year so far,” he says, his soft, measured voice suggesting any-thing but. “We did a U.K. arena tour with Roxy in January, and then went to Austra-lia with that. And now I’ve got the Olym-pia tour started. We did a couple of weeks in Scandinavia, and that went really well too.” Juggling two tours is undoubted-ly a huge amount of work, but as Ferry points out, touring Olympia – his latest solo album – and playing with Roxy Music

doesn’t quite involve pulling double duty. “It’s a big band, some of the same people as Roxy. The same basic core of the band.” To work with Ferry is to be part of a mod-ern-day musical circus. Friends and col-laborators dip in and out of his troupe of musicians, instrumentalists switch from the Roxy tours to Ferry’s solo shows, even members of his family – he has four sons – are often performing on stage, designing the shows’ visual elements, or helping out in some way or another. “It’s a family busi-ness that it’s turning into,” he says, laugh-ing as he recounts how a friend of his son wound up being his “star” guitarist. “I’m obviously doing something right, as a tal-ent spotter.”

Surrounding himself with talented musicians is something Ferry has been doing for more than four decades. After his early attempts at starting a band

resulted in relative f lops The Banshees and The Gas Board, Ferry founded Roxy Music in 1970 with Graham Simpson, Andy Mackay and a then-little-known Brian Eno. The band’s first single, “Vir-ginia Plain,” reached Number Four in the

ing quite a lot, so you get quite drained.” The solace that Ferry found in covers was vital to the survival of Roxy Music, but it wasn’t long before his innate creativity began to seep into his solo material, albe-it in a slightly muddy manner. His second solo album, 1974’s Another Time, Another Place, featured one of his own songs as the final track on the second side, while its fol-low-up, 1976’s Let’s Stick Together, includ-ed five re-recordings of Roxy Music num-bers. “I started complicating things by doing my own songs in the solo albums, and it all kind of began meshing togeth-er, so people would generally think ‘Jeal-ous Guy’ is a Bryan Ferry track, but it’s ac-tually a Roxy hit.”

The two entities – Roxy Music as a col-lective and Ferry as an individual – con-tinued to coexist, apparently happily, for several years. Though Roxy’s line-up was tweaked, they continued to release albums until Avalon became the last studio re-cording in 1982. Following their disband-ing in 1983, it appeared that Roxy official-ly ceased to exist until a 30th anniversary tour in 2001. The group remained active, touring Portugal and the U.S. in 2003. Two years later, Roxy Music played the

Isle of Wight Festival, and the Berlin edi-tion of Live8 the following month. But to listen to Ferry, the symbiotic relationship between the band and his own pursuits makes the notion that they were official-ly ‘broken up’ a tricky one. Indeed, many of Ferry’s solo albums feature some of his longtime Roxy collaborators, such as Phil Manzanera, Andy Mackay and even, on selected records, Brian Eno. I put it to him that Roxy Music never really stopped, but rather that the ebbs and flows of the band and his solo career have merely danced around each other over the last 40 years. “There’s always been something happen-ing,” he agrees. “When I got married and had a family, I kind of slowed down from touring. I just couldn’t go on the road. I was fed up with being on the road actual-ly. In ’83 I thought I wouldn’t tour again, and started spending a lot of time labor-ing over things in the studio – maybe too long – but since my children have grown up, I seem to have a new lease of life as far as touring is concerned. The last five years I’ve been really hard at it.”

This reluctance to call time on a band he so clearly still enjoys has also led to no small amount of speculation about new Roxy ma-

U.K. charts, and a f lamboyant perfor-mance on the BBC’s Top of the Pops fur-ther raised the band’s profile. Their self-ti-tled debut record was well received upon its release in 1972, while 1973’s For Your Pleasure peaked at Number Four on the U.K.’s album charts. Following the sec-ond LP, Eno parted company with the band, and while the next Roxy album was released that same year, it came a month after Ferry’s emergence as a solo artist in his own right. His decision to go it alone, he insists, was not the result of a band-shattering rift. “The tradition-al solo album from guys in bands comes when you say ‘Oh, the band won’t play my songs, I’ll go and do my own thing,’” he says. “But it was the opposite of that, be-cause I’d written the first two Roxy al-bums, and I just wanted to get away from my own writing and do something differ-ent.” For Ferry, “something different” in-volved an album that allowed him to pay homage to some of his favorite tracks. “I thought it might be fun to do an album of covers, covering different styles as well as different artists,” he says of These Foolish Things, his 1973 debut solo record. “There was a song from the Thirties, ‘These Fool-

ish Things,’ a Bob Dylan number, ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,’ which was the hit, and all sorts of things from Brill Build-ing, Tin Pan Alley and Beatles, Stones, I covered a lot of different genres I think. I just thought it was a bit of an ‘I can do this as well.’”

The album, which was certified gold a year after its release, came at a perfect time for both Ferry and Roxy Music. “It was probably quite a good thing for my ca-reer, because it opened up a more main-stream audience to Roxy Music. I’d always thought we’d have a very esoteric, ‘art’ kind of audience, and having those mainstream hits like ‘A Hard Rain’ meant, I think, that people started to get me more. It also meant that I never got tired that much of being in a band, which would have proba-bly driven me mad, had I not had that out-let to go and work with other players and get away, as I said, from the writing.” It seems strange to hear the man who wrote “Avalon,” “Love Is The Drug” and “More Than This” express a desire to avoid writ-ing. As it turns out, Ferry has always found that particular side of the business a little tiresome. “For me, [writing] is a torture, a torment, and in those days I was writ-

“Solo albums normally happen when you say, ‘The band won’t play my songs.’ With me, it was the

opposite. I wanted to get away from my own writing.”

Rolling Stone, September 2011 • 69

terial. For the last decade, numerous music publications have claimed that a new album was imminent, out of the question, and ev-erything in between. It’s a tendency that causes a wry smile from Ferry. “I never make pronouncements like, ‘That’s it for the band,’ because it never seems to work. It never seems like the right thing to do any-way.” So in the nicest possible way, it’s his own fault. By refusing to commit, one way or the other, rampant speculation was al-ways going to be on the cards. “They’ll all say that we’ve got a new album coming out, and we never did. It’s because I always said that I’d like to one day, which is true. And I’d love to go into the studio for a week with Brian Eno, say, and just fiddle around and something interesting would come out of it. But not to do, like, an album of songs, which would take about two years, but to do some-thing instrumental.” He pauses for a mo-ment, appearing to consider this for the first time. “It would be nice to do film music with Brian, or with the rest of those guys. You know, they all have their own careers, and one lives here and the other lives over there, and Eno very much has his own career. But it’s nice to have some kind of contact with your history.”

Ferry’s history, with Roxy members and other famous faces from the industry, has certainly stayed with him. The person-nel listing on 2010’s Olympia reads like a fantasy studio session. Credited on the album (amongst others) are none other than David Gilmour, Johnny Greenwood, Dave Stewart, Steve Nieve, Nile Rodgers and Flea – not to mention Roxy stalwarts Eno, Mackay and Manzanera. It’s a trib-

let’s stick together(Above) Roxy Music in 1972 comprised,

from left, Paul Thompson, Andy Mackay, Bryan Ferry, Rik Kenton, Phil Manzanera

and Brian Eno. (Right) Ferry performing in the U.K. in July. Many of his former

bandmates continue to join him on tour.

ute to his standing among his peers that he’s able to command such a turnout. “It’s staggering really, how many great people we got,” he says. “I wasn’t trying to really make a cake with all the best ingredients. Well, I guess I was in a way, but it happened like that over a long period of time. Like with Flea, for instance, I met him a couple of times. I met him once in Sotheby’s and once in Claridges, because he was there for an art visit. In fact, when he came to play, he had the most incredible… do you know what a Stradivarius is? Well, this must be the modern equivalent. It’s a Fender, but it’s decorated by Damien Hurst, and it has but-terflies all over the bass. It must be worth a fortune, I reckon it must be worth a mil-lion dollars. And he played that on the re-cord, so I was like, ‘Cool.’” Ferry recounts these anecdotes with genuine affection. Though everybody around him seems des-perate to ensure he remains on schedule, when Ferry talks about his past – in partic-ular, he lingers over a charming story about how he was fired from his job as a substi-tute pottery teacher for playing music dur-ing his lessons – any sense of urgency leaves his voice, and he seems happy to simply sit and chat.

The warm reception for the Roxy tour, and his own material, has ensured that

both have remained high on Ferry’s agenda. But as he snatches a few relatively peaceful moments ahead of another show, in an-other city, he hints that it might be time to take stock. “I’m not sure if I’ll be doing many more Roxy things because I’ve got to start, at some point, not slowing down but… I feel like I’ve done the Roxy thing […] If some amazing offer came next year, then I might very well say, ‘Oh yeah, let’s do that.’ But I feel I’ve been ignoring my own solo career. I’ve got so many albums that I haven’t ever played to people, because I’ve toured very little, comparatively, as a solo artist. I’ve been choosing the material for this tour, and it’s been like ‘God… this one or that one?’ You suddenly find you have a huge catalogue of stuff to choose from.”

For the moment though, it’s business as usual. In a few hours, he’ll be on stage, distilling 40 years of hits into a 45-min-ute show. A few days after we meet, Ferry will be awarded the CBE from the Queen of England in recognition of his servic-es to music. Right now, however, it’s time for him to eat.g

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