Bryan Ferry
Paramount Theatre
Entertainment Centre
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
When they first appeared Roxy Music represented an outbreak of style. Even their name was confidently generic. Amidst the singing cowboys of California and the remnants of psychedelia had come a definite change of paradigm. Roxy Music, with their quiffs, their leopard skins, their gilded platforms and their beguiling, shuffling rhythms promised to deliver us from all those grievous angels and ladies of the canyon, the singer songwriters and pedal steel guitars. All that excess , shall we say, of sincerity.
There were a few portents- David Bowie’s Hunky Dory and the brilliant Kinks- but when the first Roxy Album appeared in 1972 it was like a new species. Not just the music – Brian Eno’s synths, Andy Mackay’s blaring reeds, Phil Manzanera’s fluid guitar- but the whole schmiel. The packaging, those cover concepts from Bryan Ferry and Nicholas deVille. The Roxy pinup women -in pink satins for the first album, in Mapplethorpe leather for the second. These fetishised sirens defied the pragmatic feminism of the seventies, but like all aspects of Roxy Sensibility they were subverted by their own parody. Their poppy poutings, like Ferry’s matinee idol affectations, were a complicated put-on- half in love with easeful fashion but at the same time highlighting its vacuous artificiality.
Ferry’s career sashayed through to the early Eighties with an impressive run of albums- the Roxys, brilliant with Siren and Avalon, the solo ventures in an upward spiral from the wonky cover versions on These Foolish Things to the consummate assurance of In Your Mind. There was more to come but the signatures began to blur. With Eno long gone and Mackay and Manzanera gradually dropped from the batting, Ferry worked with pickup bands -top guns from the session music aristocracy to be sure- but his early flair was yielding to a surfeit of postproduction.
Returning to Australian stages after more than a decade Bryan Ferry has some large cultural claims to make and, although modest in number, the Adelaide crowd showed the kind of enthusiasm this city has demonstrated for Roxy Music from the Beginning. But even though he has anticipated virtually every nuance of retro-chic from the windswept aviator look to the damply Wildean disdain ubiquitous in current English art rock, on the stage of the Paramount Theatre, the half size version of the Entertainment Centre, Ferry looks like a man more overtaken by history than in command of it.
It is scarcely a secret that he has been in a career doldrum- with delays and disappointing sales for his Mamouna album he released the covers album, Taxi, as a stopgap. He has also referred recently to difficulties in his private life. But, all the same, it comes as a surprise to see him putting together such a diffident and indistinct retrospective.
Opening with great promise with I Put A Spell on You , lead track from the Taxi album, Ferry and his six piece band get into groove. Following keyboard player Guy Fletcher’s fanfare and a serve of guitar on full sustain the rhythm section kicks in with unwavering precision. Then, into the Arabian-style tent with which the stage is framed, into the dense red and blue lighting and the usual wads of smoke, making one of his slow and sinuous entrances, it’s Bryan. He’s still got most of his dash- hair tossed to one side like a bodgie Errol Flynn. Dressed in careful style- leather trousers and bum freezer jacket- but no longer a decade ahead, he sings I Put A Spell on You and puts the first twenty rows into certain hypnosis.
Further back and on the side in this unlovely venue, the effect is less convincing. Despite an excellent sound mix for the mostly-unplugged support set from Wendy Matthews, the pesky acoustics of the Entertainment Centre are again in evidence. The bottom end is booming and the trademark Ferry crooning is getting buried. It is a setback but we persevere. The order of performance consists of alternating hymns ancient and modern. Slave to Love from Roxy, Your Painted Smile from the new album, Out of the Blue, then Mamouna. A cluster of classics follow – Casanova, Virginia Plain and Jealous Guy. Tossed off without introduction they seem at arm’s length. By now it is also apparent that the band is a veritable engine of funk but that is all we are getting. When Ferry sings Carrickfergus to solo piano accompaniment the variation is startling and refreshing.
The band takes charge with extended solos on The Thirty Nine Steps, the stand-out track from Mamouna. Melvin Davis virtuosic on bass, metronome beat from drummer Alvino Bennett, chunky guitar rhythms from David Williams and searing leads from Robin Trower, guitar whizz with Procul Harum, latter-day collaborator with Jack Bruce and now, co-producer with Ferry. They are a great band but I can’t understand Ferry touring without a sax player and for arranging the songs with so little concern for their complexity.
We know what we’ve been missing when, with minimal accompaniment, Ferry dreamily enunciates the opening lines of In every Dream Home a Heartache. The panegyric to an inflatable sex-aid is still chillingly sardonic. Extruding his meanings to twanging point Ferry’s performance is startling- Inflatable doll, lover ungrateful/ I blew up your body but- you blew my mind. On cue comes Robin Trower’s wall of wahwah, the kind of eyeball-melting rock that Roxy used to such sparing good effect with Manzanera and Ferry continued so successfully with Chris Spedding on the solo albums.
Closing the show with Love is the Drug and encores -Avalon, Let’s Stick Together and Do The Strand- Ferry kept to the Greatest Hits format of his Street Life compilation. We’d been given the Life of Bryan. The band played the chords and Ferry sang the lyrics. His performance of Dream Home had offered a glimpse of the stylist’s shading and wit, although, for most of the evening, it was in disappointingly short supply.
The Adelaide Review, No.137, April, 1995, pp.32-3.