Caught in the Carousel

The minute glam, style, rock-icon Bryan Ferry dashed onto the stage at Oakland's decadent Fox Theatre (and it seems all the conjugations of dash belong to Ferry), it was quite obvious that no one needed to tell Mr. Ferry that the '80s are hip again. The thick sexy riffs of 1982's "The Main Thing," sent the sea of ardent fans into a state of rapture. Ferry's legendary voice was up to the challenge of the quavering required by the sensuous build of the song. After a prophetic cover of "I Put A Spell on You," Ferry returned to the 1980's with two of the three songs from his 1985 tour de force Boys and Girl: "Slave to Love" and "Don't Stop the Dance," saving the title track for the fade out of the first half of the show.

That fade out, however, was flirtatious. The story has it that in the very early 1980's, Ferry's wife at the time, Lucy, begged him to cover Neil Young's "Like A Hurricane." Ferry invented the cover song as pop art, coining them "ready-mades." His version of "Like A Hurricane" this night was an astonishing shred of seven minutes of intense turmoil. On the back screen were images of J.M.W. Turner masterpieces of shipwreck. The painter that Ferry started out as is never far from the stage. At song's end, it was unclear who it was that needed the intermission, Ferry or the audience.

To say Ferry is smart is to say that Hitler liked his moustaches small. An intermission seems to elevate a concert to a cultural event one step higher on the ladder. But, at 66 (and still better looking than you could ever have been) Ferry knows the real trick is to make only a half-hearted attempt to disguise the fact that an intermission halfway through saves the guaranteed exhaustion and fade out of a full concert before encores.

Bryan Ferry

Returning to the stage, the band played a long swirling rendition of "Tara" the final song on Roxy's final album Avalon. Since the song has no lyrics, it was only at the very end, that Ferry himself returned to the stage. The disturbing urgency of his convictions that he displayed in "Casanova" in the show's first half were to come back with more bite in Roxy Music classics such as "Editions of You," "Love is the Drug," and especially "Bitter-Sweet" from Roxy's brilliant and controversial 1974 album Country Life. This is somewhat of a landmark tour for Ferry. The Oakland show was the last stop before Ferry returned to the UK to receive CBE honors from Queen Elizabeth. His latest album, Olympia, received a surplus of rave reviews, and the accompanying high art series of photos of Kate Moss are following the tour in certain cities: you could see Ferry in a music hall or an art gallery. So perhaps nothing—nothing—was more satisfying than the inclusion of "Bitter-Sweet." There's almost no way to interpret this song of twisted, glamorous love as anything other than a love affair finding its bloom in the smoky pre-WWII nightclubs of Weimar Republic Berlin. Over five years ago, Ferry was quoted expressing his admiration for Nazi architecture and its artistic manifesto. For this, Ferry was removed from international ad campaigns for Marks & Spencer and forced to make apologies and statements. (If he'd been an American, he'd have been forced to take sensitivity workshops.) Such a farce to coerce an artist of the highest order to explain his appreciation for the seductive power of art—when executed correctly—and the ability it gives the individual (or the organization; the cult) such powerful tools to carry out the message of its mendacious platforms and ideologies. The idea that art isn't sinister or that art isn't anything but Monet's fucking floating gardens is best left between the pages of a toddler's storybook. My Pet Goat, perhaps. Ferry sang this song with gusto and verve, his clipped German at song's end even more acidic than at its debut over 35 years ago.

If there were any missteps in the show, it was Ferry's decision to only include two songs from the new album and to do them back to back as if trying to sheepishly sneak them in. As if here were Gino Vanelli playing at a Holiday Inn Express outside of Guelph, Ontario, home-pressed CDs with Xeroxed songlists for sale next to the peanuts at the bar. Olympia is such a nuanced and textured work that I wanted to hear lots more from it and less of some others. And this leads to the one complete disappointment of the night. The minute Ferry sat at the piano and started the chords of "My Only Love" from 1980's Flesh and Blood, the rarified air around the audience deflated. Since its release, the song has appeared on every live Roxy Music or Bryan Ferry album. It's been featured in all five of his last concerts. As a result, he's taken a grand, sweeping number and played it out until it has maintained as much sincerity as a ninety-nine cent ringtone. The mind boggles at the songs that could've been played in its place.

A string of vintage Ferry/Roxy staples closed the show: "Editions of You," "Let's Stick Together," and "Jealous Guy." With a nod and a wink, Ferry coerced the band into a last romp of "Hang On, I'm a Comin'" and then, the intermission having rendered the encore superfluous, the house lights went up and the magic began its slow but sure evaporation.

—Thomas Cooney

Joana and the Wolf

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