Bryan Ferry
Retrospective: Selected Recordings 1973-2023
BMG
If you punched the phrase “elegant romanticism” into any search engine, Bryan Ferry’s name would come up. Whether it’s been his founding association with art-rock avatars Roxy Music or his own solo recordings, Ferry’s deep, liquid-lizard crooning is the focus of a series of songs touched by dada-sensualist lyrics, serpentine melodies, and crepuscular instrumentation. Yet what stands out to a greater degree when placing the earliest, eeriest, and most elegant of Ferry/Roxy’s songs next to lush, latter-day paeans to lust and loneliness such as his recent single “Star” (done with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) is how absolutely singular this body of work is. In their time, members of Duran Duran, Magazine, and Chic have all claimed Roxy/Ferry’s influence for their own newer waves. Maybe. But I dare you to connect the dots between “Girls on Film” and Roxy Music’s ragingly odd “Virginia Plain.”
By focusing this new 50-year celebratory box set on his often-parallel solo career path (to Roxy Music releases and tours), this Bryan Ferry collection doesn’t isolate him from Roxy co-founders Andy Mackay, Phil Manzanera, Brian Eno, and Paul Thompson. Far from it. Collaboration—and their collaboration in particular—is a throughline to who Ferry was and still is. Take “I Thought,” a humming noir-ambient work shared by Eno and Ferry in 2002. Manzanera, Eno, and Mackay are all over Ferry’s 2010 effort, Olympia, several of whose songs are represented within Retrospective.
No matter who he’s with, Ferry’s records sound like no one but Ferry. The best example would be his love for rustic bard Bob Dylan and his execution of a handful of that subject’s most puzzling, earthen tracks such as “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” (which starts this box), “Simple Twist of Fate,” and “Positively 4th Street.” Ferry takes Dylan’s wooded, urban poetry and makes it sleekly urbane and angular without losing its form or function. Despite hitting it big with John Lennon’s “Jealous,” it’s the Beatle’s jovial, jumping “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” that graces this collection, becoming an ardent lover’s plea in Ferry’s hands. Tin Pan Alley standards, Motown favorites, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You,” even Elvin Bishop’s twanging ’70s pop hit “Fooled Around and Fell in Love”—Bryan Ferry remakes and remodels them in a manner you’d truly never expect from anyone but him.
