Bryan Ferry and Amelia Barratt: Loose Talk review
There comes a point in every august artist's career where they're forced to make an accommodation with their own past, a tacit acknowledgment that anything new they release exists in the shadow of their own back catalogue. In recent years, Bryan Ferry has done just that, tending his legacy via vast box set retrospectives of his solo work; reconvening Roxy Music for a 50th anniversary tour; and releasing a cover of Bob Dylan's She Belongs to Me that seemed to discreetly reference the subtler moments on Roxy's eponymous debut or 1973's For Your Pleasure.
Anniversary tours, deluxe box sets, slyly referential cover versions: these are the things almost all artists of a certain vintage and standing indulge in. But Ferry has also taken a more idiosyncratic parallel approach to his history. On 2012's The Jazz Age and 2018's Bitter-Sweet, he reworked his back catalogue in the style of late-20s jazz, replete with knowing references to standards of the era: Love Is the Drug in the style of Duke Ellington's The Mooche; 1977's This Is Tomorrow appended with a reveille that nodded in the direction of Louis Armstrong's West End Blues.
Now there's Loose Talk, ostensibly Ferry's first album of new music in 11 years, but more an act of exhumation. The instrumental tracks are based on unreleased demo recordings from throughout Ferry's career, with the earliest examples dating from the early 70s. These demos were then refined and reworked in the studio, including with fresh contributions from musicians including Roxy drummer Paul Thompson.
Presumably the recordings of piano and electric piano on Big Things and Landscape, wreathed in tape hiss, are from the 1970s. Indeed, there's a certain pleasure to be had in trying to work out what era the original recordings hail from. Was Stand Near Me's strange blend of funk bass and noodling, occasionally atonal synth once intended to be brushed up for 1979's Manifesto? Were the eerie ambient electronics on Pictures on a Wall a staging post en route to Avalon's instrumentals India and Tara?
Happily, the music on Loose Talk has value beyond a guessing game for Roxy/Ferry nuts. The album is a collaboration with visual artist and writer Amelia Barratt after they apparently met at a gallery opening. She provides texts and narration, in a cool, unemotional RP voice. Their first collaboration – a track called Star that appeared on the aforementioned career-spanning box set – was based on piece of music by Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor and his regular film score collaborator Atticus Ross, and a certain soundtrack-y quality clings to the music here. Florist drifts moodily along; the more strident closing title track boasts an appropriately end-credits feel (and it opens with a clatter of drum-machine handclaps, a sound so familiar from 80s pop, and so completely absent from it in more recent years, it has a weirdly Proustian effect).
There are certainly points where Ferry's contributions fade into the realm of the characterless – Demolition or Florist could be the work of anyone – but Loose Talk is liberally studded with genuinely haunting moments, frequently when the old demos yield a snatch of vocal, as on Landscape or Cowboy Hat. Ferry's melodies are beautiful, the fact that these vocals are either wordless place-filler or rendered incomprehensible by the lo-fi sound gives them a strange quality, like memories you struggle to recall in detail.
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In a sense, Barratt's texts are vague, too. There's plenty of visual detail in her writing, but what's actually going on is usually unclear. If the sunny vignette of Holiday or the depiction of a tailor at work in Cowboy Hat seem straightforward enough, more often it feels as though something has happened out of shot, and it sounds like bad news: the narrator of Florist ends up in tears; the relief solitude provides on the title track feels unsettlingly overwhelming. Occasionally, Barratt alights on subjects her collaborator might have written about. There's something quite Ferry-esque about the vengeful siren of Stand Near Me, applying perfume before exacting some nameless retribution, or the narrator of Big Things, watching a barman flame an orange peel, a distraction from the sight of the bar's 'dreadful carpet'. But more often, the sense of imprecise dread or menace that infects a lot of her writing gives Loose Talk a noticeably different emotional – as well as musical – cast to anything Ferry has attempted before.
If the end results aren't quite as holistic as the 'duet' both parties have claimed it as, it still works. Barratt's texts are striking enough that the listener doesn't long for an instrumental version; Ferry's approach is intriguing and impressively original. It's a diversion, but one that transforms his past into something fresh.
Loose Talk is released on 28 March
Neal Francis – Broken Glass
The singer-songwriter heads towards the post-punk disco dancefloor in the company of Brooklyn trio Say She She, with entirely fabulous results.
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