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| INTERVIEWS Bryan Ferry and the boys were back in town this week, to re-form Roxy Music. PETE CLARK asked why, London Evening Standard, 14th February 2001 |
T is on occasions like this that
you realise that pop music has lost a lot of its former pomp. Three founder
members were present to announce that Roxy Music were to re-convene for a
50-date tour, getting on for two decades since they had unplugged the amps on a
glorious career.
The venue was the ballroom in
the Savoy Hotel, and the event had attracted well over 100 journalists
brandishing cameras, microphones and even, in a touching nod to the good old
days, notebooks. Questions were fired at the threesome and, in the way of events such as this, the questions were mostly blanks. There was great interest in Bryan Ferry's attitude towards air travel after his terrifying experience, captured on camera for every newspaper in the world, when a lunatic went berserk on his plane and broke into the pilot's cabin. Ferry, needless to say, kept his cool. These press conferences used to be commonplace, now they are rare. It is true that no information of interest has been gathered at such an event, but I am nostalgic for them all the same.
After most of the Press had melted away, I was awarded my 15 minutes of vicarious fame. Ferry, together with Phil Manzanera and Andy Mackay, had retreated to a room behind the ballroom's stage where they were holding court in a corner, which was closed off by black curtains. Ah, the mystery!
I was greeted by three tall men, immaculately suited and booted, two of them sporting correctly knotted ties. They looked as relaxed as could be expected given the extraordinarily artificial manner of the encounter. The first question suggested itself immediately, even though they had probably heard it 100 times that afternoon: why have you decided to get back together after all this time?
Ferry sucked reflectively on a throat sweet before giving his considered reply. "Well, the cynics would say it was for the money, of course." The three of them seemed to find this idea amusing. "Actually, some body did come up to us and make us an offer, and it was the first time anyone had done it in a properly organised manner," he continues. "When they put it like that, we couldn't think of any reason not to do it." It seems that the idea may have taken root in Ferry's mind a while ago. Last year he played around 70 gigs as a solo performer, and decided to include some old Roxy Music numbers in the set. "The resonance from the audience, the warmth that came over from them for these songs - not only the hits, but some of the more obscure stuff - made me aware at first-hand of how much public interest there still was," he recalls. "Another factor was that this year seemed to be the right time - it is 30 years since we got together."
Phil Manzanera agrees that there is a lot of goodwill out there waiting to be tapped. "We suddenly thought that there were all these Roxy songs and many of them would never be heard live again, which seemed such a waste. There's lots of great songs on the albums apart from the famous ones, and the majority of younger people probably wouldn't be familiar with them. There's a lot of curiosity simply because we've been mentioned as an influence by so many groups over the years people like Radiohead, Pulp and Moby."
The mechanics of touring, needless to say, do not fill them with enthusiasm. Ferry mentions the problems of touring when families are involved and Mackay trumps him by mentioning that his youngest child is three. Manzanera views the prospect philosophically: "I don't think you could indulge in the silliness you did before, because you can't physically do it."
Knowing them to be veterans of the touring game, I ask them if they will have any special requests for backstage treats, a phenomenon known as the "rider". Mackay laughs and confesses that he can never think of anything in the way of an exotic tit bit or special bottle. "The problem with riders," he confides, "is that one night you might feel like a bacon sandwich and note that down. After that, for every night of the rest of the tour, a bacon sandwich appears before every show." "Perhaps we could have 50 different riders for 50 different shows," suggests Ferry. He pauses to think about it. "I think I'll settle for a bottle of mineral water."
The three rockers don't know who else will be with them on stage, to play the bass and drums. But they are confident that this will not be a series of tired retro-shows performed by men going through the motions. "The songs are there," insists Manzanera. "If we play them well and get the right textures and atmospheres, the magic will be created. Once you get on stage, you can't hold back, it's all or nothing. We are not going out there to try and conserve our energies. We are all committed musicians. This is what we do."
One final question which demands to be asked of such a bunch of committed sartorialists is this: what are you going to be wearing, what is to be the look? "Well, what about this?" laughs Ferry, motioning towards his smart shirt, jacket and tie. "Oh, I don't know. We'll think of something."
BACK| Once more for your pleasure Roxy Music are reforming for a 50-date tour. Are you sure that's wise, David Sinclair asks Bryan Ferry The Times, 16th February 2001 |
ew decisions in pop are more time-sensitive
than the announcement of a reunion tour. Make your move too quickly, and it
looks like an act of desperation (as in Happy Mondays with the taxman on their
tail); leave it too late, and the moment has passed (who needed the Sex Pistols
in 1996?). Do it too often, and it degenerates into a soap opera (Deep Purple,
Crosby Stills and Nash, The Who). But there is no doubt that the announcement of a Roxy Music tour this summer, 18 years after the group played its last gig, has been executed with immaculate timing. The band is probably at the peak of its mythic status, while even the fates conspired to put the singer Bryan Ferry on front pages across the world little more than a month ago, when he was photographed on a British Airways flight moments after a madman had attempted to seize the controls, sending the plane into a near-fatal dive.
"I should have announced the tour that day," Ferry jokes. "That would have been the sensible thing to do."
With his tan, manicured hands and shock of mysteriously windswept black hair (he's been sitting in a hotel for the past hour), the 55-year-old Ferry is every inch the style icon of all those upmarket glossy magazines. His movements are languid but slightly fluttery as he reaches for a white napkin with which to twist open a bottle of fizzy water. So is this reunion a high-minded artistic statement or one last throw of the dice? The collaboration with core Roxy Music members Andy Mackay (54, saxophone, oboe) and Phil Manzanera (50, guitar) is limited to a 50-date world tour, ending in September after which Ferry plans to release and promote a new solo album almost immediately. The electronics wizardry of Brian Eno will be absent from the mix, as it has been since the stage-shy sonic innovator left the band in July 1973.
There is no plan to write, record or play any new songs, and it would seem that the tour is primarily an exercise in nostalgia. Does Ferry know how much money he stands to make from it?
"I hope we're going to make some money from it," he says. "We will be playing arenas, rather than the smaller theatres I've been playing. 1 thought it would be nice to get up on a bigger platform again. But it's not as though I've turned to it in desperation. My last solo album [As Time Goes By] actually did very well. But Andy and Phil are both keen to do it, and I can't think of a reason not to do it this year."
The problem with reunions, as everyone from the Velvet Underground to the Eagles has discovered, is that even if you are successful in recapturing the musical essence of a bygone era (no mean feat), the tensions or dissatisfactions which split the band up in the first place never take long to re-emerge. Ferry is candid about why the group broke up in the first place.
"I suppose it was me being difficult. I'd just got married and I didn't want the touring lifestyle any more. And I wanted to experiment with working with other people. But it's different when you're playing in a proper group in which the responsibilities are shared, because then other people feel free to debate the merits of the music a bit more. If you're simply hiring people, you don't get that frisson from playing with your equals in a band. A little bit of creative conflict can be a good thing."
Apart from Eno, virtually every musician who passed through the ranks (about a dozen bass players alone) has applied to rejoin the band, and it is rumoured that there has already been a little "creative conflict" between Ferry, Manzanera and Mackay over who should be installed on drums: the hard-hitting rocker Paul Thompson from the first line-up, or the fiddly funkmeister Andy Newmark from the more mellifluous Avalon era. But isn't Ferry himself in danger of blowing his middle-aged cool by returning to some of the more explosive material from the first two albums?
"It's great doing those high-energy things. Virginia Plain is still a lot of fun to do now. And the For Your Pleasure period I'd have to say is my favourite era. I just seemed to write some of my best songs at that time. It doesn't feel odd singing them now, at all. From an early age I loved Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra, so I don't equate good music with youth or youth culture at all." "It's not about the money with those guys," says John Giddings, who is promoting the tour. "They are the rock aristocracy. They just want it to be done right. They don't want to look stupid."
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