Bryan Ferry
Life before Roxy - Early Days
Bryan is born on the 26th September 1945 in Washington, Co. Durham, England. The World War has been over for six weeks. It is now the nuclear and jet age. He is the son of miner, a member of the working class, born into rationing and shortages and the brave new world of Britain's first majority Socialist government. Rock 'n Roll is yet to be born. Real jazz is a Black man's music, unknown to most.
Education starts at five years old. Squeaky chalk on dusty blackboards. Television is a thing for the future. But there are films at the local cinema - Bogart and Bacall, perhaps. There are books and poetry and pictures. There are scratchy 78s from the thirties and forties. The urbane Cole Porter, rhapsodic Gershwin, the 'dangerous' Charlie Parker.
In the fifties, kids play football in the Washington streets. There are no replica shirts but each one is a Roker star or a hero of the Gallowgate End. The men go down pits, drink 'heavy' in the Miner's Club, cough coal dust from their lungs. On the rivers, the last big ships are being built before shipbuilding goes East.
The North East is dying. It will take many of a generation with it. Those who want to get away do it through fantasy now, and by breaking the barriers later.
September 1964 - Bryan goes to Newcastle University to study Fine Art as R&B, Soul and Motown sweep Britain. Bryan absorbs the rhythms and sounds in the Club-a-Gogo. Then, while Tyneside's own, 'The Animals', top the charts with 'House of the Rising Sun', Bryan gets involved with 'The Gas Board', a band of fellow undergraduates with a shared passion for black American music of the 50s and 60s. Two band members are to feature later in Bryan's Roxy days, bass player Graham Simpson and John Porter, then on guitar.
More about Gas Board 
Graham Simpson
Born 1943. Grew up in Manchester, Bristol and Edinburgh. Taught to play violin and cello, learned to play the guitar. Whilst studying English at Newcastle University fell in with Bryan Ferry and helped form 'Gas Board'. After university, moved to London in order to become full-time musician. Citing the Beatles and John Coltrane as his main influences, he played in a variety of groups including a band called 'Cock-a-Hoop'.
1969 - Ferry in London. A frantic time of hard work, creative output and deep planning. The rent is paid by diverse day jobs: van driving, antique restoring... he's even allowed to teach ceramics in a girls' school in Hammersmith, West London. But evenings and weekends he steps out of the work clothes and becomes "The Artist". Exhibitions of his ceramics are mounted at the Thomas Gibson Fine Art Gallery and the Piccadilly Gallery. And, all the while, he gives structure and technique to his piano playing and song writing... and weaves complex schemes around a radical new concept for a rock band.
But the day jobs aren't going well. Bryan's association with both the girls and their school is unceremoniously terminated when it appears he is more interested in broadening their musical minds than expounding on the finer points of pottery. If the the Ferry/Simpson axis is to become a force in world music (and if, rather more pressingly, their rent is to be paid in the near future) urgent action is needed. There is an album's worth of music written, all that is needed is a band to play it. The search for compatible musicians intensifies.
Then a name is raised by friends - the name is Mackay and he may own or even be able to play a synth...
To Part Two of 'Life Before Roxy'
