Bryan Ferry’s favourite lyric of all time: “I’m obviously a fan”
Despite their futurist glam swagger, Roxy Music always had one foot in the pop culture of yesteryear, their self-titled debut a shimmering, retrofitted pastiche of our collective heritage beamed from the future, Kari-Ann Moller’s 1950s pin-up pout on its glamourous cover, ‘2HB’s Humphrey Bogart references, and the suite of musical nods on album opener ‘Remake/Remodel’ riffing everything from The Beatles to Wagner.
Eschewing the double-denim seriousness that clogged up the charts at the time, frontman Bryan Ferry, along with David Bowie’s Martian alter-ego and T-Rex, sought to forge a new and exciting slice of pop-rock which was unapologetically aimed for ‘the kids’, let the students have their Yes!
Glam, however, was entirely indebted to the trends of their adolescence. Bubblegum pop, 1960s girl groups, and rock ‘n’ roll all lovingly appropriated by the UK, and subsequent the US, glam wave. Ferry’s love and fascination with Bob Dylan was evident from the very first single off his very first solo record, covering The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan‘s ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, twisting the original’s solemn warning of apocalyptic demise to a perversely strutting croon.
Ferry would recall in a 2007 interview with The Guardian, “at university when Dylan was playing his acoustic guitar, and you had all these students wandering around with a Dylan album as an accessory. I was into Black American music and I wanted everything to be electric, and I didn’t like folk—a bit tame for me. But then I heard ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and it made an incredible impact, not just on me but on music itself, and I realized how clever Dylan was to bring Greenwich Village beat poetry into rock ‘n’ roll.”
Dylan’s poetry would follow Ferry throughout his career, inspiring further covers of his beloved folk singer. Ferry’s sophomore solo LP Another Time, Another Place featured an affectionate stab at ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’, and tackled both ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ and ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright’ on ’02’s Frantic. Ferry’s Dylan fandom would reach its apex on ’07’s Dylanesque, an entire album devoted to Dylan interpretations.
Back in ’06, music and entertainment store HMV began a ‘My Inspiration’ marketing campaign, featuring everyone from Michael Eavis to Dizzee Rascal offering lyrics or poetry they’re inspired by the most. Dylan chose a Robert Burns passage, and I’ll give you one guess who Ferry selected: “The motorcycle black Madonna/ two-wheeled gypsy queen/ and her silver-studded phantom cause/ The grey flannel dwarf to scream/ as he weeps to wicked birds of prey/ who pick up on his bread crumb sins/ and there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden”
’65’s ‘Gates of Eden’ from Bringing It All Back Home is a curiously surreal piece in Dylan’s wieldy songbook. Depicting a nightmarish search for the elusive ‘paradise’, Ferry included the song on his Dylanesque record, imbibing the piece with a deeper submersion of haunting trepidation. When asked if he knew of Dylan’s opinion on his numerous covers, Ferry remarked: “I’m obviously a fan of his music and his writing. I’ve never met him, but I don’t really have much of a social life. I don’t meet many people as such. It’s surprising perhaps that I’m very private. I guess Bob Dylan is too, obviously. I haven’t met him, but I’ve enjoyed interpreting the songs very much.”
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