Big news: Roxy Music are touring (Europe only, so far) and Bryan Ferry has got a new album coming out in October. Ferry is another of the great songwriters whose beginnings were influenced by disciplines outside of music - in this case, visual art. He studied with Richard Hamilton (who's been called the English Warhol) at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, but eventually opted for music, luckily for us. Of course, his work is deeply rooted in the visual: glamour, style, and the emotions that they simultaneously express and mask. Perhaps no recording artist has ever explored romance, in all its facets, as deeply as Ferry.
I mentioned on Sunday that Ferry (like Lou Reed and Ian Hunter) was greatly influenced by Bob Dylan, as both a writer and a vocalist. Of course, he's made no secret of the fact - recording cover versions of many Dylan songs and eventually releasing an entire album of them: Dylanesque (2007). You can clearly hear a similarity in tone (by which I mean attitude) to Dylan on many of his performances, especially the early ones. As well, many of his early lyrics feature a relentless verbiage that is, well, Dylanesque. Check out "Do the Strand", for an example. As time went on, he became more economical with his language. A good example is "Avalon", where a fairly innocuous story of romantic indecision is punctuated with the single word from the title, which opens a window into a world of romance (in its broadest sense) and imagination.
Over the past few years, Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry have finally received some of the credit they've deserved for a long time: some writers have said that they're second only to The Beatles in terms of influence on British rock music, which sounds about right to me. But there's one thing that always bothers me when I think about Ferry and Roxy: when people are asked to name their favourite album, no one (that I know of, anyway) ever chooses mine - Siren from 1975. Tomorrow, I'll try to explain my reasoning.