Caught in the Carousel

The Twenty-Five Year Seduction: Bryan Ferry’s Boys and Girls

By Thomas Cooney

Bryan Ferry

The landscape of Spain zipped by, so much of it reminding me of California; every now and then a castle (invariably the color of sandstone) would appear on the horizon or atop a hill and I would remember how far away I was from California.

I was in a tiny Seat Polo (a car that made the Yugo seem ostentatious) sitting next to Jean-François. We were newly best friends (if one can be such a thing) and we were stuck in the backseat, my brother driving and Susan or Beatrice in the passenger seat, speeding westward through the heart of Spain toward Figueira da Foz in Portugal. This was 1985 and the Walkman had already evolved from a status symbol to an appendage. You always had it on your person at all times, not unlike the aged with their medications. If you were a college student studying abroad, the ability to have music of your choosing, at your disposal, was so fantastic as to be sexual.

Jean-François and I had tested into the same class at the Unversidad de Salamanca, and we found ourselves sharing a desk on the first day of the summer term. When he learned I was from Los Angeles, his first question was if I knew Robbie Naish? Who? A windsurfer extraordinaire. No, I reported, I was quite sure I didn’t know Robbie Naish. Did I know Michael Jackson? Was his next question. No, I answered, but I know where he lives.

He and I had disappeared into our Walkmans in the back seat. I had already scoffed at his Duran Duran and he had already been perplexed by my Bryan Ferry. Even then I knew how much influence Ferry had had on Duran Duran (and Spandau Ballet and Depeche Mode and OMD and Ultravox and Icehouse) and I thought to tell him that. However, even though only twenty at the time, I already knew about my annoying tendencies by then, and I just kept quiet.

My brother had surmised the drive to be two hours at most, and Jean-François had left his other tapes in his overnight bag, which was in the trunk (along with a large bar of Milka chocolate given to him by a new suitor). Three hours in and we were still in Spain. The car had no air conditioning and the heat made sleep impossible. If I couldn’t get some much-needed rest via sleep, I was at least going to slip into a finer Eden.

Only a month earlier, Bryan Ferry’s first album after the official disbanding of Roxy Music was released: Boys and Girls. On my way to Spain, I flew first to London and had the great good fortune to arrive in that town while Ferry’s album and the first single, “Slave to Love,” were atop the charts. I remember sitting in my Russell Square hotel, reading one of those great British music magazines of that time, perhaps Melody Maker. Ferry’s latest was the feature story, and it included quotes from disparate sources: critics, former bandmates, other musicians. The one that struck me was from a journalist; the name escapes me, but the quote never would: “Boys and Girls is Ferry’s epitaph.” For a day or two, I had mistaken “epitaph” for “death knell” or “Waterloo,” and walked through London outraged and, yet, still hopeful that it had meant that the album was a crowning achievement. Because even though I had only had the album for less than a month, I knew my very life would never be the same again.

Still in Spain. I had just slid down the elegant silk of the fourth track, “A Waste Land,” a transitory gem, when Jean-François nudged me. Did I want to trade cassettes? For the reader of a certain age, there were few dilemmas as frustrating as whether or not to use the Rewind or Fast-Forward on your Walkman. To employ either option was to suck the juice out of your batteries. In a pre-Global Economy, those “AA” batteries were obscenely costly. You ended up listening to mix tapes you made because you knew you’d like every song and wouldn’t have the need to forward through any track. But still there was the issue of tape length. Even on an album where you love every song, there is a different playing length on sides. Side 1 of Boys and Girls clocks in at 19:28, while Side 2 is 19:02 (it is a nearly perfect album on all fronts) and so the wait for the tape to end on each side is a matter of seconds. But if, as in this case, it mattered to me that Jean-François hear the album in its full gorgeousness, sequential and all, it would have meant a rewind through four songs! So I did what many of us did in the day: I rooted around for a disposable Bic pen, and, inserting it cap-first, spooled the tape back to the start. This probably upped my friend’s expectations too much; I didn’t care. This album was a heavyweight. Released as it was in the middle of the decade, it had already seemed to announce itself as the album that would define a certain quiet and dark elegance of a decade too often mired in demonic shoulder pads and angled hair and bright jewelry, all of them shaped like rudimentary geometry.

Bryan Ferry

It was April of 1983, perhaps May. I had come home from school, turned on MTV before even putting my backpack away and I immediately encountered a song and video that, for me, more than anything that would come thereafter, changed the landscape: David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance.” The sound was big, the video exotic and curious, the Thin White Duke glamorously coiffed and disaffected. That summer from him we would also get the equally engaging “Modern Love” and “China Girl.” There was a new world to escape to where exoticism was somehow both the everyday and the exotic.

In fact, Bowie wasn’t the first such tourist, he just made the splashier arrival. Duran Duran’s videos for “Hungry Like The Wolf” and “Save A Prayer” were Indiana Jones-inspired eye candy; the songs themselves, however, were a little thin; they were bamboo rafts that wouldn’t withstand the slightest riverbank scree. Duran Duran and Bowie seemingly had the same travel agent whose Filofax probably looked like: Bowie/Australia, DD/Sri Lanka; Bowie/Vietnam or Shanghai, DD/Caribbean. The message not of the works themselves, but of the medium, was that we had an arrived at an age of escapism and image-making. Budgets for music videos seemed to rival those of films; video directors soon had their own credit line on the MTV slug at the beginning and end of the video clip.

And for all the money in the world just then, I would have placed my bet on Bowie setting the standard for the rest of the decade. Meanwhile, however, that other glam icon, Bryan Ferry had his videos shot on lethargic soundstages (“More Than This”) or staid English manors (“Avalon”). Exoticism for Ferry only mattered when an “r” replaced the “x” in the word as he strolled Pigalle in a handsome trench with all the smolder of Alain Delon. In fact, the opening of the video for Roxy Music’s brilliant “The Main Thing” from 1982 features the erotic fishnetted legs of four ladies. The legs move to the infectiously sensuous beat of the song, and then when the lyrics kick in, the ladies’ sole audience member—Bryan Ferry—turns to face the camera: “Look at my heart, there’s a soul on fire/You could take me even higher.”

When the decade hit its midpoint in 1985, the music was still finding its way. Punk and New Wave (and its sibling, New Romanticism) started sharing the same hotel if not the same hotel rooms. What was a safety pin through the nose or ear of a punker was a broach that a New Romantic would wear on his Nehru jacket without a hint of irony. The gel that kept the mohawks of the punkers sharp, high and rigid was lent to the New Wavers and, combined with a hair dryer, every one was well-coiffed. Now and then a pop act would try and break into the more cutting-edge movements, but they were invariably using hair mousse and thus couldn’t be taken seriously.

Chrissie Hynde once opined that the Pretenders and Elvis Costello were the real punk rockers, because they stayed in the shitty lodgings while the Clash and the Sex Pistols were living large. In fact, many of the “punk” bands were all about image. One reason that Ferry and Roxy Music were so universally admired by many in the punk movement was that Ferry never denied the marriage of image with music. The idiosyncratic Roxy Music album covers alone are perhaps the most famous example of this (not that idiosyncrasy alone is worthy of merit . . . Journey album covers tell you that).

And so, in June of 1985 when “Slave to Love” that first single from Boys and Girls came out, it had a darker side to it than pretty much all else by the now-myriad New Romanticists. Few things were more telling than Ferry’s accompanying video. For while aforementioned other giants of the decade were globetrotting, Ferry was returning, as if to announce that at its midpoint, the decade had already been conquered. In fact, in the video his arrival (on a private jet) is met with enthusiasm reserved for a man like him; a man for whom if it had not already existed, the word “paparazzi” would have to be invented.

Few things are snarkier than British music critics. But few things are more predictable as well. For what they hate most of all is success beyond that which they themselves believe they gave (or see themselves having been responsible for). Once Ferry had achieved the status of legend in the UK it was time to tear him down. Among other silly names, he was called (not very imaginatively, one might add): Bryan Ferrari. But regarding the critics looking to attack his lifestyle by attacking his music, it was clear that they just didn’t get it.

In 1974’s groundbreaking “Mother of Pearl,” Ferry leads Roxy Music through one of the earliest free-style singing that would eventually morph into rap. By all accounts, there were no lyrics at the ready, Ferry just rattled off: “Well I’ve been up all night/Again?/Partytime wasting is too much fun/Then I stand back thinking/Of life’s inner-meaning and my latest fling/It’s the same old story all love and glory, it’s a pantomime/If you’re looking for love in a looking-glass world/It’s pretty hard to find.” In the ensuing four minutes he makes nods to Canadian Club, Zarathustra, dilettantes, Korean cover girls, quilted mattresses, the future with a capital “F,” (and still finds room for a flick of castanets). These things were aspired to; they were on the cusp of being obtained or attained.

Interview in and interview out, it’s always been clear that Ferry has wanted to be seen as a formidable lyricist. It’s easy to see how in his later work, the lyrics seem too focused on the despair and ennui that he has trademarked. But I don’t know of a musician who can so effortlessly reach for love while fully aware that it is the flip side of a despair that can too easily turn dangerous. Ferry’s perfected-despair is a one-hit of the crack pipe, one snort of the white line, one needle in the sweet spot of the vein.

Bryan Ferry

I had finally wound the tape to the start of side one; Portugal was still Xanadu as far as we were concerned, and in only a matter of seconds, Jean-François took the headphones off. “Bizarre,” he said, the French accent softening the “i” in the word and making it as exotic as the music to which he was referring. The song was “Sensation,” and he hadn’t been listening for more than fifteen seconds. It’s no exaggeration that by that time I had already heard the album between seventy to 100 times. I knew what he meant by “bizarre.” The song starts with what sounds like a group of violinists doing last-minute tunings as the guests of the party for which they’ve been hired mingle in the next room. The murmured voices, however, seem haunted and not celebratory; they belong to ghosts. Soon the drum beats in, a pick at a guitar inviting the drum to a duet and then the floodgates open and the moment between the two instruments is taken over by so many disparate elements. It was the most beautiful chaos I had ever heard up to that point in my life. Ferry starts in: “Never seem to touch” and a chorus of background vocalists keep him from going off the rails and guide him back for the next word: “temptation/I didn’t feel enough/motivation.” What happens next in the song is, for me, the single most brilliant moment in the history of popular music. Ferry sings the next line: “Then I hear your call/ Sensation/and I need it all.” At 1:14 in this song, on the word “call” Ferry pitches his voice somewhere between Tiny Tim and Robert Plant and lets loose the sexiest vocal moment in music. In one word in just over one second, Ferry is able to get more emotion than most singers manage in their entire careers. It is hope, despair, dejection and disappointment all in one syllable. And in that moment, Ferry creates the persona for the album, a persona that some critics perhaps found hard to reconcile with the real Ferry.

In Boys and Girls, Ferry—arguably the handsomest, coolest, classiest, and inarguably the most fashionable man in music—is a haunted creature. A soul in tatters. Staring more often from the outside than the inside, wanting more than being wanted, moonlit more often than sunlit. These nine songs are dispatches from the emotional front in the most universal war man has ever known.

“Sensation” slows down, and its finely tuned violins fade out and give way to a shimmering thump of the drum that starts “Slave to Love”: “Tell her I’ll be waiting/In the usual place/With the tired and weary/And there’s no escape.” Though a near-perfect, radio-friendly song for the times, it is the least successful track on the album. And this is because Ferry seems to have so perfectly hit every one of the song’s nails right on the head that it almost seems machine-like, lacking the risk of imperfection; the vulnerability. A Bryan Ferry who is not vulnerable, is a rather simple character, offered at a discount in your favorite record store: Spandau Ballet’s Tony Hadley, Ultravox’s Midge Ure, Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon, ABC’s Martin Fry; David Bowie, Robert Palmer.

There is a certain sound to the drums on this album; they sound, for lack of a better word, chunky. It’s as if the drums’ skins are an inch underwater and the crisp rip of the drum is made a tad rococo. Perhaps this is in answer to those geometric-shaped relics of the ‘80s, known as drum machines. It seemed that back then, musical camps were split and there was no homogeneity; this could best be seen in the drummer. Drummers were either the sweatiest member of the rock band, the one who was the more likely to have a mustache, or the one who needed a solo to feel validated. His counterpart in the new wave camp was the one most likely to have been the second choice for keyboards, and, five years prior, the first person to have volunteered to dissect the frog in your high school science lab. But I’ve gone off topic. Here’s the point: it is those drums that start off the third track, “Don’t Stop the Dance,” and a second before you can register worry as to where this might lead, a second drum (or is that a keyboard mimicking drums?) comes in and seems to compete for the melody until Ferry comes in and seduces it all into submission: “Momma says truth is all that matters/Lying and deceiving is a sin/Drifting through a world that’s torn and tattered/Every thought I have don’t mean a thing.” He will later go on to echo a classic: “Momma says only stormy weather/Don’t know why there’s no sun in the sky/Footsteps in the dark come together/Gotta keep on moving or I’ll die.” This is all set to a harnessed and delicate melody that will split apart again three tracks later in “The Chosen One.” “Don’t Stop the Dance” is so sinuous that the much-maligned saxophone of the 1980’s has received a respite from beer commercials, courtesy of David Sanborn, and it pesters the melody from the sidelines. Move along, move along.

There is a brief, and utterly beautiful interlude “A Waste Land,” that serves as a gorgeous segue into one of Ferry’s most urgent, arresting songs, “Windswept.” Here, Sanborn’s saxophone is necessary to push the melody into line as Ferry himself threatens to become undone. He is not the seducer here, but the seduced: “Oh baby, do it again and again/I can hear nothing, windswept is the sand/Oh baby, show me more/I can see nothing, windswept is the shore.” If a voice were ever silk itself and not silken, then this is it.

Bryan Ferry

Five months later in that same 1985 and we still haven’t reached Portugal. Just kidding. In early December of that year I was in my first real bout of hypochondria, and for Christmas I asked for the brand new CD Walkman. If I was going to die soon, I wanted the best sound available when I listened to Boys and Girls until death arrived and cleared its throat. Two months before Christmas I bought Boys and Girls on CD (though the medium was useless to me at that point), and stared at the lush packaging and perfection of it. If late Roxy and post-Avalon Ferry are often maligned for the music being almost over-produced, there is not too much to disagree with. But when the criticism takes it a step further and accuses the work of being so over-produced as to suck any life out of it, that criticism is off key; it misses its mark. Even when Roxy Music was a louder, more muscled live act than even The Who, Ferry was referred to as the only rock star who—instead of trashing a hotel room—would rather redecorate it. He was always a meta work-in-progress, a Warholian legend in his own mind until he achieved that status in the minds of the cognoscenti.

Ever since I can remember, I have been fixated with the exotic. Jungles, masks, elephants, monkeys, Florida Presidential ballots. Christmas night in 1985 I was somehow still alive and aboard an Air France 747 on my way to the town Bujumbura in the small African country of Burundi. The trek would require stops in Paris, Nairobi and Kigale and would last close to fifty hours. This inner-jackass had with him the Boys and Girls CD and his brand-new CD Walkman even though at that nascent stage, said device couldn’t run on batteries. (The device that made that possible came six months later and you wore it around your shoulder like a colostomy device. Six “C” batteries lasted about ten songs.)

So bringing the CD player was a waste. I was not, however, stupid enough to have left the Walkman and tape behind. Boys and Girls had become my bible. Side Two of the album is darker still, more brooding. It’s erotic and sagacious and I can think of few times when an artist has been so in control of his craft. That which Ferry had been constructing for the first five songs was now perfected and he was gonna drive that magnificence straight into the head of anyone willing to take such a journey.

Two years after the release of the album, Robert Palmer, writing in the New York Times noted: “Thematically, Boys and Girls was a meditation on Mr. Ferry's customary concerns—love, obsession, civilization and its discontents. Musically, it carried his preoccupation with sonic density to extremes; some of the arrangements featured what sounded like two complete rhythm sections, playing in elaborate counterpoint. As usual, the complexities were so subtle that they were inaudible to the casual listener. But the more one unravels the music's densely woven textures, the more detail is revealed; Boys and Girls, which seemed like a letdown after the indelible lyricism of Avalon, has held up very well.” Nowhere is this sonic density more on display than in “The Chosen One,” and no place was better suited to fall in love with Side Two of the album than one of the darkest countries in that darkest of continents. Years later the Eleko tribe of Kinshasa became a Bryan Ferry cult. They believe that he flies overhead at night and consults with witch doctors. There is something spellbinding about the man.

There are three to four people in my life about whom anything I write is somewhat of a love letter. Shortly after we arrived in Portugal, Jean-François made a call to his parents to let them know that the Great Portuguese Trek Across Spain of July 1985 had ended and he was safely in a hotel with, among other things, a pair of loafers soaked in melted Milka chocolate. A night or so later, Jean-François told me that while talking to his parents, he learned that he was moving to central Africa in September where his father would be working for UNESCO. Before I could even figure out what that meant to me, he told me that he had already spoken to his parents about me and—even though I didn’t know Robbie Naish, windsurfer extraordinaire—he had asked them if he could invite me to spend a month or so in Africa with them.

Ferry’s “The Chosen One” is almost tribal. The haunting chorus made up of such fantastic backing vocalists—Alfa Anderson, Michelle Cobbs, Yanick Etienne, Colleen Fitz-Charles, Lisa Fitz-Charles, Simone Fitz-Charles, Virginia Hewes, Ednah Holt, Fonzi Thornton, and Ruby Turner—are the ghosts of “Sensation” come to life. Coming in at every repeat of the song’s title, they shepherd the listener into the darker world created and owned by Ferry: “Gold and Silver walk the main street/Sons and lovers learn to suffer/Born in shadow where we first met/Dreams that money cannot offer.” Musically, the song is a near-flawless construction of melodies perched atop other melodies, all held in place by Andy Newmark’s insistent drumming. I would listen to this song again and again in the dark night of Africa, calmed by the storms instead of the other way round: “World of pleasure and danger/Take my spirit—I must follow.”

Bryan Ferry

The storm clears and the next track is the album’s zenith: “Valentine.” Ferry has been known to both disparage songwriting at the same time that he can opine that he’s never been fully appreciated as a songwriter. This latter comment was made in reference to the brilliant and overlooked lyric from Roxy Music’s 1979 “Manifesto” from the album of the same name:
I am for a life around the corner/that takes you by surprise
            That comes leaves all you need/and more besides
            I am for a life and time by numbers/blast in fast ‘n low
            Add ‘em up, account for luck/you never know
            I am into friendship and plain sailing/through frenzied ports o’ call
            O shake the hand to beat the band/with love is all
            Or nothing to the man who wants tomorrow/there’s one in every town
            A crazy guy, he’d rather die/than be tied down
            I am for the man who drives the hammer/to rock you till the grave
            His power drill/Shocks a million miles away
            I am for the revolution’s coming/I don’t know where she’s been
            For those who dare because it’s there/I know; I’ve seen
            Now and then I’ve suffered imperfection/I studied marble flaws
            And faces drawn pale and worn/by many tears
            I am that I am from out of nowhere/to fight without a cause
            Roots strain against the grain/with brute force — you’d better
            Hold out when you’re in doubt/Question what you see
            And when you find an answer/Bring it home to me

Six years later, the minimalist in Ferry has won out, evidenced in “Valentine”: “Tell me something I must know/the burning question why/Half a man is twice as much/When he’s on the line.” There is a crisp, washed melody to match the lyric, with only the twangy guitar work of Mark Knopfler to hint at anything other than flawless. Ferry does, after all, love to study imperfection.

So smart is the lyric of the song that when the track surrenders (in a flourish of guitars and drums and keyboards) and disappears into the crashing-in drums of “Stone Woman,” the magic is carried over. And it is so strong a remnant that the chorus of “Stone Woman” becomes more than just a chorus, it becomes a manifesto in and of itself: “Let’s be cool about it/Oh we’re cool about it now.” There is virtually no way to read that lyric and assign it anything but silly braggadocio. And yet it works. It builds from a mantra to a philosophy (though this is impossible to achieve outside of the album). The truth is that “Stone Woman” couldn’t have worked early in the album; it might have been so heavy a stone as to sink it. But here, this last breath of perfectly-gauged funk and slinky sophistication with its use of the Knopfler guitar sound again to hint at outskirts and landscapes, sits as if on a throne. When Ferry sings, “Diamonds, they’re your only friend tonight” he needn’t say more. But he does and it’s a wonderful stanza: “What do you see in the street tonight, nothing/But another heartbreak hotel/Stranger — you’re the only friend tonight/Pick a number and ring the bell.” (It has been debated whether Knopfler played guitar on these two tracks or whether he played on one while Ferry mimicked the sound on a keyboard for the other track; to the ear, they are almost identical and are perfectly meshed into the tapestry of each song.)

For the first five months of my affair with Boys and Girls, I never felt a deep attachment to the title track that closes out the album. But Africa in December, along the equator, is hot, steamy, damp and dark. A place where cults are born. “Stone Woman” fades into a quiet abyss, from which a foreboding keyboard comes out of the shadows and fills the canvas of the night with gravitas. I had spent all those months troubled by this song for its funereal subtext. But now, I reveled in it. “All the sin that I can take/But you don’t even know my name” Ferry sings, while David Gilmour’s guitar pleads from the outer edges. But the slightly tempestuous protest doesn’t seem to matter. Shakespeare once wrote: “Our revels now have ended . . . We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” and Ferry, a true, undeniable genius, knows what to do with the cues that orbit around him. The last minute or so of the song repeats the title over and over, “Boys and Girls in love.” The breath of the rhythm gradually slows down, slower and slower until, just before it can die, Andy Newmark rips three final bangs on the drum, and the night is closed down.

Ferry may very well be the most apolitical popular musician over the past fifty years. He seems insistent, in his own music, to keep returning instead to that same political arena of the heart time and again, even though he’s lost most of the battles, and will probably continue to do so no matter how handsome and seductive a soldier he might be. And perhaps, to many fans and critics, that gets in the way of assigning to Boys and Girls the too often overused term “masterpiece.”

Perhaps I am over-praising Boys and Girls. Perhaps the album means so much to me because it fused with a time in my life when the world finally opened up. I was twenty, in college, fortunate enough to have the money to study abroad and to then take a quarter off from my studies at UCLA to voyage to Africa. Perhaps. But why then, it must be asked, was Boys and Girls remastered and re-released in 2000 on its fifteenth anniversary and given an SACD remastering and re-released again in 2005 on its twentieth anniversary? Could it be that—even now on its twenty-fifth anniversary—there is little doubt that it is the sonic masterpiece of that much-maligned decade? Each of the re-releases does not include previously-unreleased material or updated liner notes. There are no changes in the packaging and look of the album. The re-releases focus on expanding, defining, anchoring and memorializing that gorgeous night music.

When the immortal Cezanne was ushering in a cloisonisme-fueled post-Impressionism, it was in response to where he saw Impressionism going, or, more urgently, he saw a need to rescue Impressionism from itself. What Cezanne did, and what he influenced countless others to do, was make sure that contours had responsibilities again. The paraphrase that has made its way into lore is that Cezanne was so enamored of all that gorgeous ethereal beauty at the heart of Impressionism, that he feared it would continue on until the brushstroke degenerated into shapeless globs before steaming away to nothingness. If Avalon is the Impressionist masterpiece of popular music, then how amazing it has been—and how lucky we have been—to witness that artistic giant, Bryan Ferry, offer up in its wake his true masterpiece, Boys and Girls, in an utterly successful endeavor to use its nocturnes and its slinky darkness to render itself a tour-de-force and at the same time serving to valet Avalon into solidity again. At the final struck note of Boys and Girls, it’s clear that Bryan Ferry has finally tacked down the night. This permanent gorgeous blackness.