A few months ago we lost the prolific bass player Herbie Flowers and I presented a show on Forest Radio of the top 30 most popular songs he played on which garnered lovely feedback from listeners who hadn’t realised he played on so many popular songs. This week’s choice from Kev B is another that went fairly unnoticed because the single wasn’t a massive hit and nor was the parent album which saw Herbie play on two of the tracks.
It’s well known that County Durham-born Bryan Ferry was a school teacher in a girl’s school, but what is possibly less well known is that he was fired for holding meeting for the kids which involved music-listening sessions. Nothing untoward at all, but the school didn’t like it. Clearly, maybe subconsciously, that is where he wanted his career to head. Whilst at school his interest, particularly in jazz music, began as he used to buy jazz magazines with money he’d earned from his paper round. He also had an interest in art and after leaving school went to study art at Newcastle University. One or two of his paintings found their way into the Tate Gallery in the early 1970s.
He also joined a band called The Banshees, nothing to do with Siouxsie, then onto a band called The Gas Board. With an equal interest in art and music he moved to London in 1968 and continued teaching art, as well as pottery, at Holland Park School and performing music too.
In 1970, he formed a band with the bass player Graham Simpson who he’d been at art school with and also a member of The Gas Board. Ferry placed an advert for musicians to extend the line-up and saxophonist Andy Mackay was the first to reply and recruited. Mackay also owned a synthesizer and brought in another friend of his from University, Brian Eno, to join the band. Ferry came up with the name Roxy after he and Mackay were making a list of cinema names and chose Roxy explaining that it had a sort of resonance and also didn’t actually mean anything at all. Prior to recording their first album, they learned that there was an American band of that name, so decided to add Music after the word Roxy so it sounded a bit like rock music.
They signed to the Island record label and released their debut eponymous album in 1972 which featured no hit singles, although their debut single, Virginia Plain, did appear on the American release. To heighten their profile, they released Virginia Plain as a single in the UK and it peaked at number four. The following year, their classic line up was Ferry, Mackay, Phil Manzanera on electric guitar, Paul Thompson on drums and Eno on synthesizer and they released two albums that year, For Your Pleasure with Eddie Jobson replacing Eno, and Stranded which contained the single Street Life.
That same year, Ferry embarked on a concurrent solo career with equal success. With hindsight, it was a wise move as Roxy briefly split between 1976 and 1978 which was when Ferry released three more solo albums, Let’s Stick Together , In Your Mind and the one that contained this week’s single choice, The Bride Stripped Bare.
The title wasn’t a reference to his former girlfriend, Jerry Hall, who had left Ferry for Mick Jagger the previous year, it was named after The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, an art piece by the French painter Marcel Duchamp. The only single lifted from it was Sign of the Times. Ferry had bought a luxury home in Bel Air, Los Angeles with Jerry Hall and in 1978 he decided to retreat to it for a while.
In the UK, the music scene was changing; it was the end of the punk era and new wave and a mod revival began as well as disco coming into its own. Ferry said, “I wrote Sign of the Times when I was out in LA, but that song was much more about what I was reading and hearing about the punk movement than was happening back in the UK. That whole punk period was a strange mixture of pro and con for me. Some of those bands kind of wanted to get rid of the past, but some of them had also really liked Roxy. I still had plenty of that spirit within myself, and I guess I wanted to illustrate that.”
Chris Thomas was the producer on a couple of early Roxy albums as well as some of Ferry’s solo material and he also produced the Sex Pistols’ first four singles, Anarchy In The U.K., God Save The Queen, Pretty Vacant and Holidays In The Sun, but not Sign of the Times.
The album was recorded at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland in the winter of 1978 and produced by the combined efforts of Waddy Watchel (the guitarist on the album), Rick Marotta (the drummer), Steve Nye (the pianist) and Simon Puxley and Ferry. The atmosphere was melancholy owing to his recent split from Hall, but Sign of the Times found him in a more reflective mood. It had a very diverse collection of tracks which is exactly what Ferry intended, but not what the fans were used to. In a 1978 interview he said, “I wanted it to be extracts, if you like, of various styles and moods and to get into the art-conceit of the title from which it was taken.” That may explain by it dropped off the chart after just five weeks. It was also his last solo album for seven years as Roxy Music had reformed.
Roxy Music split up again in 1983 and two years later Ferry continued his solo career and over the next 30 years would release a further 11 albums, his biggest being 1985’s Boys and Girls which reached number one.
His last studio album was Bitter Sweet in 2018, but in 2020 and 2021, two live albums both reached number 18 on the UK album chart. He also tried his hand at acting because in 2017, he appeared in a German television series called Babylon Berlin in which he portrayed a cabaret singer.