by LORRAINE CARPENTER

From the flashy glam noise of Roxy Music to the veiled pop beauty of his ongoing solo career, Bryan Ferry’s flair for the debonair and the absurd has been hugely influential and widely imitated. Ferry went back to basics for his latest album, Frantic, which features a song co-written by early Roxy Music keyboardist and ambient pioneer Brian Eno. Lucky Mirror got to sit down with Ferry last summer when a promo tour brought the jet-lagged gentleman to Montreal.

Mirror: The new album seems to have been assembled over a long period of time. How did that come about?

Bryan Ferry: The bulk of the record started two years ago, after the As Time Goes By tour. I wanted to do something more rock ’n’ roll and get away from the ’30s arrangements. We started with the Dylan covers, they have a kind of organic spontaneity, but when I brought my own songs into it, they were a bit more difficult to get right, which is normal for me. We were nearly finished the album when the Roxy tour started and we had to abandon the record for six months. When we ran back to the studio, it all became rather frantic, finishing off various songs, and I decided to add songs that had been done at a different time. “Goodnight Irene” was eight years old, but it fitted perfectly into this record because of its natural sound. We had some very nice musicians on it, from Louisiana. It’s great when you find people who have an authentic voice and it works on your record.

M: How about Brian Eno? It’s been almost 30 years, but wasn’t his departure from Roxy Music fairly acrimonious?

BF: The chemistry went very bad for a moment, and then he actually surprised me and went on to do really interesting things, I’m very happy to say. But his wife was managing me for one year, about three years ago, and I visited them in St. Petersburg in Russia—she has a lot of business there—and the song came out of us meeting on that visit. I love it, I think it’s really pretty. Dave Stewart was the other collaborator, he’s very mad, actually, as is Brian and I suppose myself, so it’s good to work with characters. It’s funny how sense of humour is so important. With Eno, we’re laughing all the time, I hope we’ll do something again.

Nicotine from the silver screen

M: Hollywood glamour figures in so many of your songs. Where did that fascination come from?

BF: When I was a little boy, we lived in a mining village in the northeast of England and there was a small cinema with wooden seats, like in Cinema Paradiso. My mother used to make tea and sandwiches and cakes for the projectionist, so my big sister and I got free tickets. We used to watch films all the time. They would take you into a glamorous world, which was very different from where we lived. I still love all the artifice and glamour of old Hollywood films, the beauty of the set design and cinematography. Everybody looks great and the dialogue is much better. You do get some interesting films now—I want to see Men in Black, but it’ll be stupid dialogue and great effects, it’s a different kind of film. But I thought Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was really poetic and beautiful.

M: Did you see Velvet Goldmine?

BF: I did, I went to see it with Brian Eno, actually, they flew us to Cannes. We sat together and it was really funny, whenever one of Eno’s songs was on he would nudge me, and when one of mine was on I’d nudge him. At the end of the film everybody clapped and we had to stand up. It was hilarious, really.

M: On a more serious note, I heard you had a brush with death on a flight a few years ago.

BF: Oh, it was terrible. The plane was halfway from London to Nairobi and a crazy man got into the cockpit and started fighting with the captain and grabbing all the controls. The plane went into a big dive, came up again and went down. The pilot told me later that the assistant pilot was really a genius and if he hadn’t been, we’d all be dead, about 400 people. We were four seconds from crashing into the desert. It was like a James Bond movie, the pilot grappling with the guy, and this other, enormous American guy, like a quarterback—he was a missionary, he spent the rest of the flight being sick into a bag—but he helped to pin the guy down. He had these awful socks. But I lived happily ever after! :

At Théâtre Maisonneuve on Saturday, Nov. 9, 8pm, $75

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