I’ve heard it said that, while other rock bands trashed hotel rooms, Roxy Music redecorated theirs. This aphorism pops into my mind as Bryan Ferry gives me a tour of his beautifully appointed west London recording studio. Guiding me from room to room, the musician and former Roxy Music frontman points out items of particular personal significance – a photograph of the warehouse he lived in when he moved to London in 1968, his piano (very grand), artworks by art school friends Mark Lancaster and Stephen Buckley. There’s a Warhol Marilyn on the wall, JG Ballard novels on the bookshelves and a Vanessa Bell biography lying on the coffee table. I take it all in, a forensic scientist trying to solve the impossible mystery of how he writes songs; how these treasures have fed into the distinct atmosphere of his music as a kind of collage or constellation of influences.
It’s always interesting to see where your favourite artists and writers work. This particular studio visit is even more intriguing than usual because Bryan Ferry is something of a mythological figure – an exalted agent of glamour, poetry and sensuality. It’s hard to imagine songs such as In Every Dream Home a Heartache or Mother of Pearl being composed by human hand, they’re more like direct downloads from god or outer space. Indeed, when Roxy Music made their first television appearances in 1972 – decked out in eyeshadow, lurid satin, leather, sequins, feathers and animal print, with Brian Eno manipulating a space-age synth like he’s at the helm of the Starship Enterprise, and Ferry with his odd intonation and otherwordly pallor – they looked and sounded like they’d just landed from another planet. Now, as I sit next to him on a floral three-piece suite, Bryan Ferry seems like an earthling after all. Yet – unexpectedly diffident and, at 79, still handsome – he retains his power to fascinate.
His latest album feels like a departure from anything he’s done before. Loose Talk is a collaboration – a ‘conversation’ – with the writer, painter and performance artist Amelia Barratt. The album consists of spoken-word monologues written and delivered hypnotically by Barratt and set to charged music by Ferry. The result is intriguing: Barratt’s ‘micro-fictions’ describe everyday moments with a kind of hyperfocus that elevates them into another realm. Her delivery is poised and measured, while the music is stirring and emotional. “I’m very fussy, particularly about voices,” Ferry tells me. “But Amelia’s voice is very good and seems to go really well with the music – they both benefit from each other. The fact that she’s a woman who writes from a female perspective and is also a different generation for me – that’s interesting. So there are lots of differences, but I recognise the same kind of creative drive. She’s dedicated, as I was, and am.”
The pair met when Ferry went to see one of Barratt’s readings. He offered her the use of his studio to record an audiobook, which led to him inviting her to contribute some lyrics to a piece of music he was working on. This eventually evolved into Big Things, the opening track on Loose Talk. “I like the mood of Barratt’s writing. There’s a kind of haunting quality and yet it’s all everyday things which somehow she puts a twist on,” Ferry says. “There’s also this kind of humour there, and it’s soulful.”
With Barratt based in Glasgow, the pair largely worked remotely and separately, sending their contributions back and forth. While the project was a move away from art school for Barratt (she graduated from the Slade in 2016), for Ferry, it felt like something of a return. “I feel, in some ways, like I’ve gone back to my art school roots,” he says. “Roxy felt very much like that at the beginning. So it’s interesting to work with somebody who’s more recently gone through the art school experience.” Ferry himself emerged from a febrile fine art department at Newcastle University in 1968, having been taught by British pop art pioneer, Richard Hamilton. “I used to attend his tutorials on a Monday,” he recalls. “I was certainly in awe of him because he was so intellectual and yet he was cool and was connected to Marcel Duchamp. He was very inspired by American imagery from advertising and the movies, as I was too.”
“I hate analysing what I do. At the end of the day, there will just be something and you can’t figure out why it works, but when it does, you just are thankful” – Bryan Ferry
Cinema is also important to Barratt. The album’s atmosphere feels noir-ish at times, as if she’s a private detective narrating an unfolding case. Listening to Loose Talk, the songs have a way of augmenting your environment, lending your surroundings a heightened, cinematic quality. Speaking to me separately at a later date over Zoom, Barratt recalls, “When Bryan sent me the first one back, I was walking along the road in Glasgow, I had it on my headphones and it was amazing because of the industrial grit of the city – the concrete and the shimmering rain. I’ve always wanted to work with writing in a way that’s wider than certain spheres, like the art world or the world of poetry. So straight away, I knew this was it for me, it felt new and exciting.”
Did the knowledge and weight of Ferry’s songwriting affect how she approached this project? “I tried to take out the cultural significance of this person and just be in the atmosphere [of his work] because it’s so strong,” she says. “I tried to treat it like my previous collaborations with other artists. I suppose it’s about finding common ground that you can build trust on. In this case, I already knew his music really well but I combed through and listened to everything he’d made again, immersing myself in that world. It’s like tuning into somebody. I try to imagine that there is a world that we’re trying to create together.” For Ferry, there’s also a kind of intuitiveness or ‘tuning in’ about songwriting, and he’s keen to preserve its unknowableness. “I hate analysing what I do,” he says. “At the end of the day, there will just be something and you can’t figure out why it works, but when it does, you just are thankful. When I’m making music, I kind of zone out… where was I, where did I go, and where did it come from? And so, it’s a bit of a mystery to me. And, in some ways, I like to keep it a bit of a mystery. I like mystery.”
While Barratt purposely avoided studying his lyrics as she wrote (“I think that might have been a distraction for me”), Barratt can retrospectively identify a few ways Ferry’s influence as a popular culture icon has perhaps unconsciously manifested itself. “Looking back at all the texts, I’ve realised there are details of clothing – the cut of a garment or the texture of a fabric. I also love clothes, but I wonder if there’s something that’s seeped in from how Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry are these great wearers of clothes. I like to think that drifted in.”
Over the years, Ferry has undoubtedly embodied and codified a definitive perception of glamour and style. I’ve always believed glamour is a crucial dimension of their work, but he resists this idea. “I like rough edges… even though I have a tendency to smooth them out,” he says. “But I do come from the North. I come from very basic background and I felt, I guess, from about the age of 16, that you’ve got to make your own life. A lot of people who ended up being called glamorous – obvious people like Cary Grant, and Noel Coward, people who became what you’d call ‘cultivated’ – had rough beginnings. But I feel them to be stronger for that. Discovering art and words and music gave me somewhere to go with an appreciation for beauty in its various forms.”
“I like rough edges… I come from very basic background and I felt, I guess, from about the age of 16, that you’ve got to make your own life” – Bryan Ferry
While he slightly rebuffs my preoccupation with his glamorousness, surely he can’t deny being a sensualist. “I guess a lot of the people I’ve really loved have a sensual quality. I mean, the way Billie Holiday sings, for instance, right? And other heroes of mine, like Charlie Parker, the tone [of his saxophone] is just so beautiful… the curves and then the spiky bits. It’s feeling, but kind of sculpted and shaped. There’s a sensuality in that.”
Barratt interprets this sensuality as being connected to desire – a guiding force behind both their work. “I often think a lot of good writing is about what people really want, their desires. I think about that while I’m writing,” she says. “And there is this sense of longing and mystery in Bryan’s work, which really speaks to people.” Ferry echoes this, emphasising the importance of emotional resonance. “There has to be an emotional base. That’s the thing. Otherwise, it’s just like a bit of decorative wallpaper or something,” he says. “There’s room for [decorativeness] too, but I like the work to make people feel something.”
Even now, with such a vast back catalogue, Bryan Ferry is still experimenting with new ways to make people feel grand soaring feelings. In a collage of music, poetry and art, his collaboration with Amelia Barratt takes this into a thrilling new realm. “Loose Talk is opening a different door and a whole new part of my career, so that’s exciting for me. It feels like an adventure.” And something that really stays with me are his parting words: “Everything must feel like an adventure, even when you’re talking to people, going out for dinner, anything – even if it’s people with people you’ve known for years – you must never know quite what’s going to happen to you next.”
Loose Talk is released via Dene Jesmond Records on 28 March 2025.
