Bryan Ferry Quotes

I rate Morrissey (Steven Patrick Morrissey) as one of the best lyricists in Britain. For me, he`s up there with Bryan Ferry.

Loneliness is a crowded room, Full of open hearts turned to stone, All together all alone

Hey what's the matter baby? said my wife, propped up on the bed. I'm a fucking vampire! I cried, thinking of Bryan Ferry and his bursting flowers and his prancing horses and his flight of swallows and his hedged swimming pool and his lovely wife. No, you're not. Come here, she said. I crawled onto the bed and she pulled the covers away. Listen, she said. I put my ear against her distended stomach, her knapsack, and listened. I could hear little trapped people swimming around within. They are eating me from the inside, she said. Lucky them, I said. I'm serious, she said. But she had fallen asleep and I crawled off the bed across the floor, up the wainscot and along the paneled ceiling. I pressed my ear to the ceiling and listened. I could hear people gathering on the floor above. The ceiling vibrated. I recognized the voices as past collaborators, going back many years. They sounded fatigued as if depleted of oxygen, maybe, or as if someone has siphoned their blood away. I could hear them sobbing and cursing and consoling each other. I fell asleep.

Loneliness is a crowded room

But when you get music and words together, that can be a very powerful thing.

Loneliness is a crowded room.

Bryan Ferry: I have terrible memories of it all going wrong. I’d put together an all-star band, and the set was fraught with problems. We had David Gilmour on guitar and, poor David, his guitar wasn’t working for the first couple of songs. With his first hit, the drummer put his stick through the drum skin. And then my microphone wasn’t working, which for a singer is a bit of a handicap. A roadie ran on with another mic, so then I was holding two mics taped together, and I wasn’t really sure which one to sing into. It was a great day, though.

It was fun for a while, but there was no way of knowing.

My wife and I had come to visit Lucy Ferry. Bryan was away on business. I was relieved. Who wants to meet their childhood heroes?

Other bands wanted to wreck hotel rooms; Roxy Music wanted to redecorate them.

Despite such setbacks, Bowie’s brief career as a mod was crucial, for the youth movement established all the essential principles with which he outraged Britain in 1972. In most respects, glam was modernism pushed to the max, and it’s no coincidence that the founding troika of glam—Bowie, Bolan, and Bryan Ferry—were all definitive mods (the only difference in philosophy was that the mod ideal was exclusive, aimed only at peers, whereas glam was designed to be publicized—knowingly pimped, with an ironic giggle).

Bryan Ferry would abandon overt glam threads in favour of classically tailored tuxedos, US military uniforms and an infamous gaucho look. Ironically, Ferry then began to draw a considerable gay male following while Eno, slavered in cosmetics and done up like a camp Christmas tree, became – much to his own satisfaction – an unlikely object of lust for legions of adolescent girls.

Bryan Ferry: ‘It’s always sad when I go back to Newcastle and see that certain places don’t exist any more. But it’s great that one shop – which was very important for me also – is still there, in a wonderful old arcade, with extravagant tiled floors, rather like the Bond Street arcades. It’s a shop called Windows, which is a family music shop and the only place you really go to buy records. The windows are full of clarinets, saxophones, electric guitars – a proper music shop, which sold everything. But just to see a trumpet in the window – a real instrument, to look at it and study it!

Roxy Music became, as Bryan Ferry would observe in 1975, ‘above all … a state of mind’.

In a 1975 Playboy interview, David Bowie caused a furore when he opined that ‘Hitler was the first rock star. He staged a whole country.’ Oddly, Bryan Ferry would get into similar hot water in a 2007 interview with a German newspaper Welt Am Sonntag, in which he praised Nazi iconography as ‘just amazing’ and ‘really beautiful’ and was later forced to make a public statement of apology.