Perhaps thou clutchest tickets for tonight’s sold out Bryan Ferry gig at Symphony Hall? Or perhaps there will be a few stray returns at the door? Regardless, Martin Longley caught the show up in York last Thursday night…
Bryan Ferry, Barbican, 14th November.
This was an epic show, with hardly a lax moment. The Bryan Ferry Orchestra took to the stage first, delivering reinterpretations of old Roxy Music and solo works, as found on the recent album, The Jazz Age. Ferry himself wasn’t at the keyboards, that position taken by the project’s arranger Colin Good. The idea is to deliver these songs as if they’d been penned during the 1920s, performed after the fashion of Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson or King Oliver. Sometimes the tunes emerged in a barely recognisable state, and at others they sounded oddly mutated, as with “Avalon”, which ended up sounding preferable to its original incarnation. The Orchestra also skewed towards Lana Del Ray, as re-invented for The Great Gatsby.
One thing that wasn’t apparent in advance was the impressive way that the band metamorphosed gradually into Ferry’s core combo for the evening. The man himself strolled on casually, soon joined by his two female backing singers. Horns (including a bass saxophone), banjo and upright bass were downed in favour of electric axes, and soon, the younger, rockier players took their places, with the Orchestra suddenly turning into a soulful, funky, boogie-ing horn section. Trumpeter Enrico Tomasso was reincarnated four or more decades later along the line, and reedsman Iain Dixon moved across the stage to become a kind of composite Andy Mackay and Brian Eno character, blowing highly emotive lead saxophone and occasionally either playing keyboards or robustly twisting his bank of analogue synthesiser knobs.
Ferry’s voice remains one of the best, and most distinctive, in British rock music, and his sheer joy in presenting this retrospective of his four decade success story was immediately apparent. He never ceased moving to the music, continually flexing his insectoid limbs, shimmying around the stage, and making gesticulating pictures out of his couplets.
He only sat at the keys once, playing electric piano, but his dynamic harmonica playing was dotted liberally throughout both sets. Frequent guitar solos were taken by the visually reserved but sonically gushing guitarist, Oliver Thompson, whose chemical vibration with the equally stripling female drummer Cherisse Osei was crucial to the energy of the band. Thompson’s solos sometimes impersonated Brian Eno’s synthesiser sound, and Osei’s behemoth fills lashed the band up to their highest endeavours, somewhat reminiscent of Cindy Blackman in her thundering subtlety. A few nights on the road had clearly started the process of loosening the gang up into a dangerous confidence, something that can only happen when the players are so well melded that they begin to operate by instinct.
Powerful though the first set was, the full gunning was reserved for the second half of the evening, which soon set off that special energy-ricochet between crowd and musicians, eased by the succession of signature songs, including “Love Is The Drug” and “Let’s Stick Together”, with “Street Life” and “Do The Strand” eminent for their godlike stomping, then “Editions Of You” and “A Song For Europe” allowing Ferry and his players to shine in the most brilliantly dazzling light.
Ferry had the courage to make earlier diversions, even though his cover versions are an established part of the old repertoire: John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy”, Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”, a strangely, but successfully, tipped-in Charlie Parker’s “Au Privave”, then Shirley Goodman’s “Shame, Shame, Shame”, Sam & Dave’s “Hold On, I’m Coming” and the traditional Irish folk song “Carrickfergus”, with “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” providing yet another radical time-shift. Rather than being a fidgety number-shuffle, these multiple style-aspects were all fed through the able mittens of the band, adapting a oneness of sound, in a pan-generational orgy of sonic dicing.