It’s been eight years since Frantic, the last album of Bryan Ferry originals. The one before that, Mamouma, came out in 1994. Before that, Bete Noire in 1987. Bryan Ferry is a man who takes his own sweet time, a studied aesthete, the kind of perfectionist who probably drives engineers to tears and record company executives to the brink of self-harm. Time passes differently in the Ferry-verse. His music exists in a sort of hermetically sealed quarantine zone where even the bass drum pedal wears Patrick Cox shoes that never go out of style.
At one stage Olympia looked like becoming a full blown Roxy reunion album, Eno and all. Tantalising as that may have been (although to be honest it was a tad less tantalising after last month’s rather flat Electric Picnic set) there can be no doubt that this is the quintessential Ferry solo artifact. Tracks like the windswept ‘You Can Dance’, ‘Alphaville’ and ‘Shameless’ pick up exactly where Boys & Girls left off in 1985, yet curiously don’t sound dated.
It’s an obvious parallel, but the production is the aural version of a soft focus fashion shoot in which craggy but handsome geezers moody about the fake-rain drenched streets in Armani while slinky backing singers in little black numbers wiggle along to elegant, sophisticated rhythms and real or ersatz Manzanera guitar lines. The effect is somewhere between Patrick Bateman and Leonard Cohen, and might be tagged and bagged and (designer) labelled as 9½ Weeks musical wallpaper if not for a crucial element: Ferry’s voice.
Dylanesque and As Time Goes By testified to a gifted interpretive singer. Here, on songs like ‘Reason Or Rhyme’ and ‘Tender Is The Night’, that quiver in the throat still translates to a shiver down the spine. The suave poise has given way to the vulnerability of a 60-something playboy. ‘Heartache By Numbers’ is a lovely ladies’ man’s lament that marries stadium sounds to big ‘60s pop choral arrangements. ‘No Face, No Name, No Number’ could be a wayward Lennon tune. And a version of ‘Song To The Siren’, written by Tim Buckley but transformed by This Mortal Coil, pays respects to the song’s original melody and basic construction but decorates it in threads that are unmistakably Ferry’s own.
Be advised. Here’s a man with enough self-awareness to play Mr Silky String in Breakfast On Pluto as a sleazy Roxy caricature one moment, and distinguish himself with honours on the Sea Chanteys collection the next. Olympia might be dressed like a million dollars, but the man in the suit can still draw a tear or two.
Key Track: ‘You Can Dance’