The cover Bryan Ferry is most “proud of”
Because of their art school backgrounds and high-brow, retro-kitschy presentation, Roxy Music were often presumed to be making some sort of commentary on the sounds and styles of pop music’s past, rather than declaring their fandom for it.
Frontman Bryan Ferry, in particular, was so over-the-top in the romantic crooning that he surely had to be going for satire. Or was he?
“I do wonder whether Bryan, at the time, was really aware of what he was doing,” Ferry’s former Roxy bandmate Andy Mackay told the Guardian in 1997. “The band he was in before, the Gas Board, was basically a soul band; and it’s very interesting that as soon as he got the chance to launch his solo career off the back of Roxy with [the 1973 album] These Foolish Things, he immediately did covers of all the songs by singers who he admired, which were soul songs. I think he thought he was singing one thing, but because he was English, it came out differently.”
Ferry recorded These Foolish Things right in the middle of Roxy Music’s ascent, when he was still the band’s lead singer, but also within the same summer that Brian Eno opted to leave the band after too many creative clashes with the frontman. This makes the record pretty telling of where that divide existed, as Ferry really was an honest-to-gosh crooner by heart, and was just as happy interpreting his favourite pop songs of the ‘60s as he was pushing boundaries with new electro-glam rock material.
These Foolish Things includes covers of not-so-obscure hits by the Beach Boys (‘Don’t Worry Baby’), Smokey Robinson (‘The Tracks of My Tears’), the Four Tops (‘Loving You is Sweeter Than Ever’) and the Rolling Stones (‘Sympathy for the Devil), and while the album was an early showcase for a 28-year-old Ferry as a viable pop star, it also established a format he would revisit repeatedly later in life on other thematic covers records like 1999’s As Time Goes By and 2007’s Dylanesque.
That latter project was, unsurprisingly, a collection of Ferry’s interpretation of 11 Bob Dylan tunes, but it was far from his first foray into the Robert Zimmerman songbook. Way back in ‘73, the first track on These Foolish Things was a rousing, bouncy, soulful take on ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’, a rendition that Ferry claimed, nearly 50 years later, was still the cover he was “most proud of” from across his career. It was also the first cover he ever recorded.
“I remember it was a very spontaneous way it was made,” Ferry told Vulture in 2022. “. . . I thought, I must choose a Bob Dylan song. Because he writes such great lyrics and really strong songs. I chose that one, and I worked it out on the piano — just pounding those keys. It was very different from his version. You don’t try to beat what the original version is.
“You just try to do something a bit different and take the song into a slightly different place. . . . Eddie Jobson did a great string arrangement. I remember I had really good background vocalists who worked with Dr. John. Yeah, the whole record was done with such good energy.”
As is typically the case when a musician pays tribute to Dylan, though, the man himself wasn’t firing away any letters of commendation for the effort.
“I’ve never heard back from Bob Dylan,” Ferry admitted, referring both to the 1973 cover and the 2007 covers album. “I don’t know how he feels about [them]. He might like some of them.”
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