For Your Pleasure

Mother of Pearl – Part 1
Mother of Pearl – Part 2
Mother of Pearl (Ferry), Recorded September 1973
Mother of Pearl Lyric (Ferry)

Well I’ve been up all night (again?) party-time wasting is too much fun.

‘Mother of Pearl’ appeared as the penultimate track on Roxy Music UK #1 album Stranded (1973). Commonly recognized as one of the most assured and satisfying songs in the Roxy canon, the track concluded an LP that had already showcased some of the band’s best work including ‘Street Life‘ (UK #1 single), ‘Just Like You‘, ‘Amazona‘, ‘Serenade‘ and ‘A Song for Europe‘ before landing magnificently on ‘Mother of Pearl‘. Album closer ‘Sunset‘ would provide a stunning epilogue to Stranded, wrapping neatly Ferry’s concerns with mortality, the role of art, love and obsession, constructed identities, theatricality and camp – all designed by a newly anointed pop star ambitious to satisfy sensation-hungry audiences.

‘Mother of Pearl’ is milestone recording for Roxy Music due to its pitch perfect presentation of these ideas, delivered via a striking and original three-part structure (Party/Comedown/Epilogue) and an alternating savage/sublime arrangement composed and played by band members Phil Manzanera, Paul Thompson, and guest bassist John Gustafuson, with major contributions from producer Chris Thomas and band multi-instrumentalist Andy Mackay (who largely sits this one out). These ingredients are capped by a career-high performance by lead Roxy singer-songwriter Bryan Ferry, an artist so on his game in 1973 that he co-wrote and recorded Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure, Stranded and released his own hit solo album These Foolish Things – an astonishing work-rate that culminated in the peerless and lasting achievement of ‘Mother of Pearl’.

II. Comedown: Lyrics, Vocals

During last month’s ‘Mother of Pearl’ deep dive (ah hem) we explored the hard-rocking Party opening section (Part 1) and the sublime Comedown backing-track laid down by Roxy Music and producer Chris Thomas (Part 2). We now arrive at what many consider the key ingredient to ‘Mother of Pearl’s success: Bryan Ferry‘s lyrical and vocal performance, recorded, as legend has it, in a single take during the late hours of an unusually warm London September night. In his book Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, music journalist Simon Reynolds succinctly writes:

‘Mother of Pearl’ would be a fabulously beautiful and inventive piece of music on its own, but it would be empty without Ferry’s words and his vocal performance…

Simon Reynolds  (“Glam”, p 362).

I thought [Bryan Ferry] was the most exciting singer that I’d heard. His voice had limitations, but what he managed to do with it was beautiful, I mean, b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l. For me it covered the whole emotional spectrum, and I just couldn’t get enough of it.

Kate Bush

For the first major iteration of Roxy Music (’72-’75), Bryan Ferry‘s vocal style and on-stage persona was, as Roxy observer Paul Stump puts it, “often over-emphatic”: “When one expects a top note from Ferry it often arrives in exaggerated vibrato or in a semi-spoken form.” Ferry agrees: “I tend to be very woo woo woo!” he once admitted (humorously). Yet, as all Roxy fans know, Ferry may have a technically limited range but his ability to convey menace, wit, longing, obsession, menace (or even joy) is one of the many pleasures of listening to Roxy Music. This impressive range covers a wide span of human experience and emotion, from the icy tenor of For Your Pleasure‘s ‘Strictly Confidential‘ to the despondent hedonism of the sex doll fiend in ‘In Every Dream Home, a Heartache‘, to ‘Bogus Man‘s multi-tracked heavy-breathing predator, or pushing further on Stranded as the baleful suitor (‘Just Like You‘), laid-back hipster (‘Amazona‘), romance ballader (‘Song for Europe‘), and onto the narrative pièce de résistance of ‘Mother of Pearl‘. A truly impressive array of characters and narrative performances, particularly for rock as distributed and digested in 1973 (true, Bowie was treading similar territory at the same time, but Bowie’s take was one character per album, not necessarily one character per song). Andy Mackay once noted, due to Ferry’s persona-adopting irony-laden narratives, Roxy Music did not necessarily communicate a wide emotional range (“such as sentimentality”) – yet the opposite could also be said: to get under somebody’s skin, to inhabit who they are, to portray an emotional point-of-view within a pop music format is a sincere attempt to capture the breadth of the human experience with the bonus for the listener being highly visceral and vastly entertaining.

The heavily-stylized vibrato changed over the years of course, from the slightly hysterical pitch used Roxy Music (“shake your head girl…“), to the richer (and better recorded) vocal performances on For Your Pleasure and Stranded, in particular the rich baritone Ferry used on ‘A Song for Europe‘ (“Here as I sit at this empty cafe..”). Performing and recording provided more experience and therefore more more options and by Stranded Ferry was increasingly committed to presentation of character through vocal and lyric, adopting personas in the same manner of presenting a play or a film:

With every song you play, … you take an aspect of yourself and either simplify it or ham it up. To some extent it’s like method acting. In an hour and half show you go through a lot of different moods, one right after the other… You say to yourself, how does this song go? Oh yeah, then you get into a role for it and leave that role when the song ends.

Bryan Ferry

The 2nd splendid part of ‘Mother of Pearl’ – the Comedown – finds Ferry’s narrator in a contemplative mood: the Party is over, the girl has gone home (presumably), and the party animal contemplates his loneliness from the vantage point of success – there is no fretting over jobs, no immediate Monday morning commitments, just a philosophical, even spiritual – perhaps comically so – review of where his life is going, where his dreams have taken him, and how he’s spending his time:

Well I´ve been up all night (Again?) party-time wasting is too much fun
Then I step back thinking of life´s inner meaning and my latest fling
It´s the same old story all love and glory it´s a pantomime

Ferry amusingly quotes from Humphrey Bogart‘s classic Casablanca as Sam sings and plays sings ‘As Time Goes By‘ (“It’s the same old story/A fight for love and glory“) and it sounds like the our hero has been at the bar a lot recently. The mock-shock of “Again?” is well-positioned and hilarious, sounding like an ex-wife or trusted friend trying to tell you something that you should already know (but won’t admit). And in a sense this is what ‘Mother of Pearl’ does throughout its 6:52 duration – bouncing as it does from thrill to comedown, from comedy to despondency as we consider the contradictions of replaying those oft-repeated stories of our lives (that “same old story“).

“Again?” is also the last voice we’ll hear from the opening party scene, that multi-tracked demented high society rave-up: from here on it’s all pantomime as Ferry acts out for us in the privacy of his personal drama the disappointments, the loss of innocence, the deflated sense of self in a world that contains no more heroes and, subsequently, no more starry-eyed dreams. Against this backdrop, then, the search for love is only the first in a series of disappointments:

If you’re looking for love in a looking glass world it’s pretty hard to find

In Johnny Rogan‘s salacious (and entertaining) Roxy Music biography Style with Substance there is a finger-wagging chapter called “False Images and Lost Goddesses” where Ferry is accused of having the “unfortunate habit of associating with publicity-seeking glamour girls who hardly fit the Virgin Mary image attributed to them in his songs” (ibid). Roxy girls Kari-Ann Mueller, Amanda Lear and Playmate of the Year (1972) Marilyn Cole are presumably the publicity-seeking glamour queens in question yet it’s hard to see where any of these young Roxy models could be idealized as the Virgin Mary … Certainly none of the album covers nominate them for saint-hood as they radiate desire and attraction, from Pop Confection, to Femme Fatale, to Damsel in Distress …

The Roxy aesthetic has always preferred a certain sleaziness in it presentation of sex and relationships – Roxy songs are riddled with affairs, betrayal, vanity, histrionic emotion, exaggerated posturing and breakdown. With Roxy, lovers and partners are marketable and replaceable, and once spent they become destined for the scrap heap:

Just looking through an old picture frame
Just waiting for the perfect view
I hope something special will step in to my life
Another fine edition of you
A pin-up done in shades of blue

‘Editions of You‘

Career girl cover exposed and another slips right into-view
Oh looking for love in a looking glass world is pretty hard for you

‘Mother of Pearl‘

Who in this age of Tinder, Bumble, or OKCupid would not agree that this carte du jour aspect of modern dating or match-making was identified, in part, by Ferry in the early Roxy songs. “Popular, transient, expendable, low cost” was how pop-art teacher Richard Hamilton explained the packaging of desire to the eager young art student – and the student responded in kind with music that celebrated Hollywood glamour – (“take two people, romantic/Smoky nightclub situation”); the pin-up lifestyle (“oh the way you look/make my starry eyes shiver”), and irony at a very cool distance (“she’s the sweetest queen I’ve ever seen (CPL593H)“). Clearly, Ferry also nailed the second half of Hamilton’s pop-art manifesto by producing music that was “young, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business” (Hamilton).

By the time of Stranded though there is a shift away from equating romance with consumerism, as Ferry cashes in his chips and leaves the more disposable aspects of the pop-art movement behind, moving with conviction towards something classic, even heroic: ‘Just Like You‘, ‘Psalm‘, ‘Serenade‘ and particularly ‘Song for Europe‘ show increasing maturity of social observation and narrative detail, with the sense that the writing is now being composed and applied in the manner of a Romantic painter. Ferry’s theme is still his attraction to glamour and beauty (“Serpentine sleekness was always my weakness“) but just as paint is slowly absorbed into canvas, the issues of light, colour, and how one perceives and composes those elements becomes the subject of the work. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see the first glimpse into Bryan Ferry’s future solo career, with each subsequent album vying for the status of hard-won masterpiece, a prime example being the luxuriant and densely layered Mamouna – a record that took eight full years to satisfactorily get down on tape. Seductive. Addictive. And just out of reach.

Divine intervention always my intention so I take my time
I´ve been looking for something I’ve always wanted but was never mine

“Divine intervention” is a good gag on a track full of good gags, but the longing of “looking for something” that was “never mine” is emotionally grounded. Here we see Ferry shifting the focus away from the lover as flesh and blood subject – the magazine pin-ups of Roxy Music and ‘Virginia Plain‘ are gone, as are the women of ‘Pyjamarama‘ and ‘Just Like You‘ with their “secret lives”, and emotional detachment (“Quicksilver baby/so hard to pin down“). Instead Ferry cannot take his eyes off the real prize:

But now I’ve seen that something just out of reach – glowing – very Holy grail

Ferry uses the Grail myth to poke fun at the worth of his own obsessions (“my own predilections“) as they remain stubbornly “out of reach.” And what might those obsessions be? If women were the only problem then this would be Roxy choice cut ‘Casanova‘ (next album, next set of problems). If proving strength and heroism was the objective, then the Grail image would suffice. But there is grit in this song, a substance that Ferry is trying to get hold of in order to make something beautiful. As cultural critic Simon Reynolds observes of 20th century art, its makers and its audience:

Sophisticates are too clever to fall for the illusion any more, but secretly wish they could be fooled. What tantalizes is the remembrance of a long-gone possibility of absolute enchantment and entrancement.

Simon Reynolds

Now too clever to ‘fall for the illusion’ anymore Ferry, the craftsman, song-writer and master illusionist (“you get into a role”) is chasing down his material for Stranded, honing his craft in order to deceive and seduce, and ultimately, produce something beautiful and long-lasting.

And so what serves ‘Mother of Pearl’ so well is this focus on the powers of attraction, the bringing attention to the illusion-building process itself. Like the substance found in the natural world that gives Stranded‘s penultimate track its title, mother-of-pearl (or nacre), is a multi-coloured iridescent substance found in the internal layer of shells and oysters. This nacre stuff is secreted when grit or sand gets inside the shell. As a result, grit and dirt are the critical base materials needed to create bright shiny attractive sheen – the glamour effect. In this light (pardon the pun) we can intuit Ferry’s true intent: ‘Mother of Pearl’ does not actually celebrate the pearl, nor the diamond, nor the jewel, nor even the pin-up girl or Beauty Queen – Ferry is mesmerized by the transformative power of glamour as process: the creativity that builds beauty from grit, the craft that turns the ordinary into the extraordinary, the sweat that builds a song into masterpiece.

I don’t think there’s one spare syllable in those lyrics that Bryan wrote that he wouldn’t have been happy with

Chris Thomas

Right from the get-go ‘Mother of Pearl‘ transforms mundane reality into shimmering fantasy. We arrive at our destination having set off on the sidewalks of ‘Street Life‘ (“come with me cruising down the streets“), encountering a multitude of adventures along the way, meeting amazon beauty queens, fashion-house ladies, televangelists, even Lady Luck herself (“Who knows what you’ll see, who you might meet“), until finally we arrive at our Party destination and step into a world of physical change and thrilling action (“Turn the lights down“/”walk a tight rope“/“take a powder“). Drugs. Sex. Glamour. In an instant Ferry shifts us from dull grey to heightened effervescence – where everything is “glowing“/”lustrous“/”shimmering” – and he doesn’t stop for a breath as we move beyond ‘Virginia Plain‘s ‘Flavors of the mountain streamline’, past the stars in the sky (“higher than the milky way“) and ever upwards toward heights of luxury dreamed of by the many, yet experienced only by the few:

Fall on feather-bed quilted faced with silk softly stuffed eider down

‘Mother of Pearl’ transports us into the world of the glamorous and the very rich: Ferry’s obsession with the upwardly mobile – in particular the self-belief and posturing needed to move from working-class hero to jet-setting rock star – has been an essential Roxy trope, providing Ferry with some of his greatest insights: early cut ‘Beauty Queen‘ dazzles in its rags-to-riches story as Ferry recognizes in Valerie a mirror-image of his own dreams:

Swaying palms at your feet
You’re the pride of your street..
Gold number with neighbours
Who said that you’ll go far
Maybe someday be a star

‘Street Life‘ famously tells us to skip the road well travelled (“Pointless passing through Harvard or Yale/Only window shopping – it’s strictly no sale“) and throughout the Roxy canon those who scratch and claw their way to the top are given particular attention – like the dig at For Your Pleasure Roxy cover girl Amanda Lear in Pyjamarama “(They say you have a secret life/Made sacrifice your key to paradise“). Secrets around Lear’s past and sexual identity (see here) provide Ferry with-the-diamond-in-the-rough narrative so clearly influenced by his own working-class upbringing, the coal miner’s son, industrial Newcastle’s own pride of the street. (Sorry Sting, get your own fan blog).

Golden girls Valerie and Amanda aren’t the only rags-to-riches Roxy ladies Ferry draws attention to, the theme reaching somewhat of a peak on Stranded. The game is afoot for the female subject of ‘Psalm‘ as the narrator denounces the social climber for switching beliefs as easily as trying on a new pair of shoes: “Try on your love/Like a new dress/The fit and the cut/Your friends to impress“. Meanwhile the lover in ‘Just Like You‘ refashions herself – according to taskmaster Ferry – with all the skill and trickery of the seasoned alchemist:

Through alchemy iron turns gold
Quicksilver baby
So hard to pin down
Oh when are you coming around?

‘Amazona‘ takes the quicksilver change a step-further as Ferry assumes the role of enchanter and magician, assisting his pupil in their desire to re-make and re-model:

Hey little girl is something wrong
I know it’s hard for you to get along…
But your castles in Spain
Still maybe realised

“Castles in Spain” is Fool’s Gold, a trap of false illusions. Yet Ferry presses on regardless, having been there himself, his rough exterior softening, the magician behind the curtain:

Little one, take my hand
I’ll try to help you there
I’ll take you there

Ferry then takes this glittering “jungle music” (his words) and bakes the themes of change and dream fulfillment directly onto the Stranded album sleeve itself: rags-to-riches cover girl Marilyn Cole was internationally famous at the time of Stranded’s release, having been named Playboy’s magazine’s January 1972 Playmate of the Month, as well as their 1972 Playmate of the Year, the only Briton to hold that title (Wiki). Her rapid rise to fame in two short years – 1971-1973 – mimics exactly Bryan Ferry‘s own whiplash climb to stardom as cultural icon, solo artist, and Roxy Music front-man. Ferry grew up in the “gritty North”: his father tended horses as a farm plow-man – and later, during the depression, tended to coal mine ponies. “We didn’t have a car or a telephone or a fridge…” notes Ferry. “We lived in a Coronation Street-type terraced house” (Wheels). Compare this with supermodel Marilyn Cole as she echoes in a separate interview the same humble beginnings, almost verbatim: “I was born in a Coronation Street house,” says Cole, “Two up, two down, outside lav” (see: ‘Just Like You’: Stranded Cover Art).

Such a bright hope, right place, right time
What´s your number? Never you mind

By placing his female doppelganger on the cover, Ferry presents along with Cole both sides of the glamour paradox – the excitement and pull of the new generation glitterati – (“me and you, just we two/Got to search for something new“) – while simultaneously showing the same superstars as ship-wrecked, beached, inviting yet vulnerable, awaiting rescue. If you look closely you’ll see Cole holding a crumpled white lily at her side – the lily a symbol, for many (at weddings and funerals at least) of lost innocence, of purity in passing.

Take refuge in pleasure just give me your future we’ll forget your past

The grit in the shell creates a picture of dazzling glamorous seduction, an ideal of beauty created by mother-of-pearl, that strange substance that shimmers and shines in its fantastic unreality.

Virtually imperishable, nacre exists right on the edge of the organic and inorganic, the mortal and the deathless. It suggests that there is something life-denying, or at least life-freezing about glamour.

Simon Reynolds

You may be stranded if you stick around
And that’s really something

‘Street Life‘

Bryan Ferry invented the fictional dance The Strand for his fictional characters and his audience to dance to, and in doing so drew attention to the constructed (and repeatable) nature of trends, music, glamour, and ideas. Yet, the more the artist became adept at pearl making, the more he recognized he was becoming trapped by it. At the 3:18s mark ‘Mother of Pearl’ picks up some considerable musical heft as the whole business of star-making and image creation comes under blistering attack:

With every goddess a let down every idol a bring down
It gets you down

There is real hurt here as the disappointment of finally meeting his artistic and musical heroes gives way to reality – these are, after all, the beautiful people that were so critical to Ferry’s conception of Roxy Music in the first place – “I’ve always been star-struck, basically” Ferry told Rock Scene magazine in 1973, “Hollywood has always been Mecca” (Ferry). A meeting between Roxy Music and art superstar Salvador Dali in 1973 was a disaster – “Dali seems to have deteriorated into someone who hangs around with bands just to get publicity. His current output is quite meagre” Ferry noted testily at the time. (Roxy manager Mike Fenwick scribbled ‘Asshole’ on the forehead of a Dali photo that appeared in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine not long after).

This business of suffering false-idols is essential in ‘Mother of Pearl’ and throughout each stanza the lyric is saturated with the visual imagery of Gods, divinities and/or Olympians as the search for perfection goes “on and on” (and on):

Divine intervention always my intention so I take my time..

But now I’ve seen that something just out of reach – glowing – very Holy Grail ..

Thus: even Zarathustra another-time-loser could believe in you ..

You’re highbrow, holy with lots of soul melancholy shimmering...

You can see that “Holy grail” glowing like a cheap effect in a Monty Python movie – but the sentiment is real, as “Zarathustra” is deemed a loser and every goddess is labelled a “let down”, every idol a “bring down”. This is the reality. Ferry dreamed a dream called Roxy Music to get away from the dirty, gritty industrial North, and when the dream became reality it not only failed to satisfy but remained, like the Holy grail, stubbornly out of reach: “It gets you dowwwn” the singer intones bitterly – the vocal emphasis on “dowwwn” bearing the weight of the disappointment. (That’s three “downs” in two sentences!).

III. Epilogue (Acapella)

But that’s how it had to be; better to seek and not find than to not seek at all. Moreover: the search for the thrill of it all was also the artist’s search for his material.

Simon Puxley (Rex Balfour), The Bryan Ferry Story

Though often seen as a song in two parts (Party/Comedown) there is actually a third section in ‘Mother of Pearl’, though short, that is striking, even chilling, and provides a final answer to the question posed at the beginning of the song. (“Have you a future?”). Recognizing that his new found skill and craftsmanship (not to mention fame and celebrity) necessitated the forfeiture of a degree of “absolute enchantment”, Ferry bears witness to his own loss of innocence and writes it into the very fabric of Stranded. Those ‘flavours of the mountain streamline’ as dreamed of in ‘Virginia Plain‘ are past him now, the bright lights no longer confuse, and the gulf between what’s real and make-believe has narrowed, leaving less artistic freedom and, worse, the unmistakable dread of having reached an aesthetic conclusion. What next? Have you a future? (No/Yes).

The language of glamour (“glowing“/”shimmering“) is reduced by the end of ‘Mother of Pearl’ into language that is cold, sunken, lifeless: his “submarine lover” no longer shines beyond the stars or the milky way, but is caught in a “shrinking” “detached” world of “lonely dreams“. By the song’s conclusion, the seductive music is stripped out. The vocal is naked, the singer alone. Sensing the game is up, the narrator goes on and on anyway, for the obsession, the work, is all he has, is all he’s ever had…

Oh mother of pearl I wouldn´t trade you for another girl

Oh mother of pearl I wouldn´t trade you for another girl

Oh mother of pearl I wouldn´t trade you for another girl

Credits: The one-of-a-kind Mata Hari, exotic dancer and accused French spy decked in jewels and attitude (re-visited); Roxy Music PR shots; Bryan pin-up from an internet fan (he dances and sings); a mother-of-pearl watch design; shots from Ferry‘s Mamouna-era video Your Painted Smile (the obsession goes on and on). And finally Ferry as seen by Mick Rock; and Candy Darling as seen by Andy Warhol. This entry also owes much credit to Simon Reynolds and his brilliant book Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy.

Sophisticates are too clever to fall for the illusion any more, but secretly wish they could be fooled. What tantalizes is the remembrance of a long-gone possibility of absolute enchantment and entrancement.

But the search for perfection
Your own predilection
Goes on and on and on and on..

Next: The brilliant Stranded coda – ‘Sunset‘. See you soon!

A Song for Europe (Ferry/Mackay), 1973
A Song for Europe, lyric

‘Stranded’ moved us into different territory.
Phil Manzanera

In early Fall 1973, just before the recording of The Third Roxy Music Album Stranded, the members of Roxy Music were reviewing career options: continue working under the successful group banner (highly recommended), or disband and pursue solo careers (recommended only if your name is Bryan Ferry). Phil Manzanera voted to continue (“I hadn’t had my fill yet of being in a rock n roll band yet”). Andy Mackay was skeptical and considered joining Mott the Hoople (not recommended). Bryan Ferry knuckled down and said Roxy would only continue “on his terms” (“I’d been nursing the idea for Roxy since 1964-65,” he told the NME, confirming authorship). The outcome was a mix of compromise and creative fiscal necessity: management pointed the lads in the direction of Brian Eno and Basing Street Studios in order to kick-start solo careers (Mackay didn’t waste a second, recording In Search of Eddie Riff at the studio with Paul, Eddie, Phil and Eno). They were also encouraged to work with Ferry on composing and recording the new Roxy album. Manzanera offered the music for ‘Amazona‘ and received a co-credit and solid reviews. Mackay offered the music for ‘A Song for Europe‘ and created an instant Roxy Music classic. (Oh, and a co-credit too). Compromise, evidently, had worked.

During our review of ‘Serenade‘ we noted how, without a vocal, melody line or lyrics to play to, the typical Stranded backing track of drums, bass and keyboards was carefully layered and recorded by producer Chris Thomas (“we’d build up these backing tracks to flesh it out, and that was always tremendous fun. Then Bryan would come in at the end and put his vocals on”). Imagine then Andy Mackay offering up the music for Song #6 (original working title for ‘A Song for Europe’), and Ferry jotting down impressions and ideas on first hearing: “Andy came to me with the basis of ‘Song For Europe’. It’s so much more musical than any of the things that I’ve written” (Ferry). And while the music sounded “very European” to Ferry, the resulting track is less a direct ode to the city and more about the sensory impact of Andy’s original music: in short, ‘A Song for Europe’ is Ferry’s lyrical expression of love to the beautiful composition that Andy Mackay had presented to him.

I. Moments Lost in Wonder

Scratching the idea of logical narrative such as had been seen in ‘In Every Dream Home‘ or even ‘Serenade‘, Ferry chooses to tell a different story in ‘A Song for Europe‘, one that is self-consciously sensual and direct. With its elegant piano and haunting atmospherics, ‘Europe’ defined for audiences the template for the Roxy Music ‘State of Mind’. A marked shift from the more difficult (for some) and esoteric aspect of the Roxy canon – as found in ‘The Bogus Man‘ or ‘For Your Pleasure‘ –  ‘Europe’ neatly dove-tails Ferry’s ground-breaking recent solo work – most notably the jazz-tinged lounge lizard treatment of ‘These Foolish Things‘ – into a more accessible and inviting (warm, romantic) elegant musical tapestry.

Musically, ‘A Song for Europe’ is built on the European folk tradition of sentimental crowd-pleasing ballads and, at face value at least, presents a conventional song structure. Indeed, in his excellent book on Roxy Music, “Unknown Pleasures”, Paul Stump identifies the track’s structural pattern as the typical ABABCB (verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus). Yet if you read the full lyric (posted in its original 1973 format at bryanferry.com) and recall your own experience of the track, you may agree that ‘A Song for Europe’ is in fact more nuanced this. Based on a i–ii dim–V–i  chord progression, and set in the key of A-minor (musical characteristic: “tender, plaintive, graceful in character, capable of soothing”), ‘Europe’s structure is closer to Ferry’s verse-only preference for songs that contain a build-and-release strategy, with the release – when it comes – typically coming from Manzanera and Mackay band solos (with heroic efforts from Eno on earlier Roxy recordings). Bearing this in mind, ‘Europe’s structure therefore contains a typical Roxy bait-and-switch maneuver, closer to an irregular AAB-C-ABAA structure:

Verse I (A): Here as I sit at this empty cafe, Thinking of you
Verse II (A): Though the world is my oyster, It’s only a shell full of memories
Chorus I (B): Now only sorrow no tomorrow, There’s no today for us nothing is there
Bridge (C): [instrumental]
Verse III (A): These cities may change but there always remains, My obsession
Chorus II (B): I remember all those moments, Lost in wonder that we’ll never find again
Verse IV (A), Latin: Ecce momenta Illa mirabilia/Quae captabit In aeternum
Verse V (A), French: Tous ces moments perdus dans l`enchantement, Qui ne reviendront jamais

In short (if we’ve got this right), the AAB-C-ABAA structure provides tension but no relief sing-along chorus as in ‘Hey Jude‘s fade-out). No resolution then for the considerable build-up of emotional angst, so distraught in memory that the English language cannot express the intensity of the emotion expressed. Andy Mackay does justice to his composition by wailing acute pain on saxophone, responding in kind to the heightened emotion, forever trapped in time like the Napoleonic palaces of Paris or the ancient cobbled streets of Rome. Not exactly conventional as advertised (typical Roxy), but certainly attractive and inviting nevertheless.

While Andy composed the music, the band justifiably cited Eddie Jobson as a key contributor to the ‘A Song for Europe’s success (really, a perfect blending of Mackay, Ferry, Thompson and Jobson’s peak-Roxy musical skill and taste). Ferry’s judgement of Jobson‘s musical skill as a replacement for Eno cannot be faulted (despite the cloak-and-dagger drama of his replacing Eno), as it is the classically trained Jobson who provides the symphonious attention to detail needed to pull off the conservative yet keenly felt film-noir atmospherics of ‘Europe’, a fact duly noted by Roxy Music band members:

Eddie Jobson did a great job, playing synths, violin, and even some piano, bringing a different kind of musicality to the project – for instance, his superb, classical-style piano-playing on ‘A Song For Europe’.
Bryan Ferry

You know, Eddie’s a very good musician, obviously things like ‘Song For Europe’ benefited hugely from having Eddie play keyboards on it.
Andy Mackay

You know, having Eddie Jobson was fantastic, so we were sort of stretching our musicality and of course, ‘Song For Europe’, now that’s the sort of track that couldn’t have been done in the previous years.
Phil Manzanera

And Jobson‘s own recollection of the performance provides insight into the measure of importance he brought to ‘A Song for Europe’s birth and recording:

I played the piano alone. Everything else was overdubbed to the piano, including the drums, timpani, and the electric piano, which I also played. Andy came up with the basic chords. Phil added some nice George Harrison guitar. The piano approach was European classical mixed with a little Charles Aznavour lounge. Remember, this is only two years after I was a strictly classical player: I hadn’t quite figured out how to play rock yet.

Eddie Jobson

Roxy Music has constructed the modern English equivalent of the wall-of-sound. Added to the thick mix is the unique voice of Bryan Ferry, who sounds alternately tormented (“Psalm”), frantic (“Street Life”)… He delivers his consistently clever lyrics in the most disquieting baritone in pop.

Paul Gambaccini, ‘Stranded’ Review, Rolling Stone

II. The World Is My Oyster

“Roxy songs are not easy to cover” said Andy Mackay with typical insight in 2012. “Whether that’s because we make them very distinctive and there’s nothing left for people to sort of drag out of them, or whether it’s because Bryan’s lyrics are kind of so wonderful and sort of important, without Bryan singing them, maybe they just don’t work.” Wise words indeed. If you did want to cover a Roxy track, ‘A Song for Europe‘ would seem a safe bet: the pacing and sentiment welcomes the jazz lounge guitarist or the pub playing piano populist, allowing lots of room for emotion, vocal emphasis, for expression of personality. Until you get to the drama. And the angst. And the poetic exaggeration (“and the bridge.. it sighs”), the French, the Latin … And then you realize you better have some heft, some balls, to pull it off (so you choose to play ‘Yesterday’ instead).

In sharp contrast to the freaks and schizophrenics presented on previous album For Your Pleasure (‘Strictly Confidential‘/ ‘Dream Home‘/ ‘Bogus Man‘), with ‘A Song for Europe’ Ferry jumped at the chance to fully inhabit a character that was graceful, stylish and elegant, manifesting an erudite sensibility that was comfortable with cultures from around the world and great architectures from the past. As a result, the world of ‘Europe’ is instantly attractive to the listener even though the narrator is consumed by romantic despair. The first twelve seconds of the song introduce a new mood and setting for Roxy Music listeners – “Here as I sit at this empty cafe / Thinking of you” –  the musicianship is gentle and precise, haunting and haunted (0.0-0.12): 

The musical expressiveness of these opening bars (beautifully played by Jobson) is matched by a stirring yet world-weary vocal introduction by Ferry, who establishes himself one of the greatest pop baritones of his generation – a Matt Monroe or Frank Sinatra – and also one of the finest English lyricists working in England in the 1970s (a remarkable achievement for the time as few popular singers also wrote their own material. See: ‘These Foolish Things’). With a ‘A Song for Europe’ Ferry paints a picture as vivid as it is unbearable:

Here as I sit at this empty cafe
Thinking of you
I remember all those moments
Lost in wonder that we’ll never
Find again

The feelings are sober and clear (“empty cafe”) and the emotional state is underlined by the phonetic stumble on “Thin-k-ing”, while the yearning is conveyed by the consonant stretch in “rememmber”, “momments”, “wonnnder” and “nevvver”. From cold introspection to astonishment (“lost in wonder”) to despair and back again – all executed in five concise and perfectly chiseled lines. (“The best lyricist in Britain,” said producer Chris Thomas of Ferry. “I’m certain of it, I mean who else is there?”). And who are we to argue..

Though the world is my oyster
It’s only a shell full of memories
And here by the Seine Notre Dame casts a long
Lonely shadow

Now only sorrow no tomorrow
There’s no today for us nothing is there
For us to share but yesterday

The enunciation and expression of each word is teased out by Ferry and dramatized to fully capture every drop of hard-won emotion. “Lonely shadow” paves the way for the internal rhymes of “sorrow” / “tomorrow” while other verses rely on a two syllable emphasis (“to-day” / “noth-ing“) before resolving to a dramatic three syllable punchline, such as the classic “but yess-ter-daaaaaiiy” – which Ferry knows is so good that he uses “yesterday” twice to conclude two different verses, as the memory soars into the lonely shadows, with no one to hear the emotion but us listeners, the fully engaged audience. 

Since the age of 10 I had loved music so much, and had absorbed so many influences from so many genres, that I was bursting with ideas, and now I felt I had an audience who was willing to listen to them.
Bryan Ferry

“I often see a song in the same kind of structure that one sees a drawing,” Ferry explained to interviewer David Tipmore in 2019, drawing shapes in the air by way of example. “Our first single, ‘Virginia Plain,’ was based on a watercolor I once did. Ideas for songs come very quickly to me, very easily. The thing that takes all the time is refining the idea.” (Village Voice). Upon hearing Andy Mackay‘s chord structure for ‘A Song for Europe‘, the ideas clearly came thick and fast for Ferry. On the one hand there was the jokey idea of Old Europe as portrayed by the  balladering pop stylings of Charles Aznevour (“France’s Frank Sinatra”), a singer who had considerable success in the UK for the song “She” (which enjoyed a head-shaking fourteen week run in the charts). With typical dry wit, Ferry was also calling out a major TV show of the times – The Eurovision Song Contest (Concours Eurovision de la chanson) – a yearly held music competition whereby European regional juries decided a song and performance winner from entries across Europe. The punchline for Roxy fans was that in its early incarnation the show was known as “A Song For Europe“. In addition, Britain was considering membership into the European Market around the same time (a membership that was recently just given away on a whim) so punning on songs about Europe was particualry au courant.  It would take Bowie a further three years to state that the “European canon is here” (1976), but Roxy were already projecting (and playing up) the European zeitgeist in 1973/4.

It also made sense to pay homage to the locals as Roxy Music enjoyed a large and loyal following in Europe (see: Roxy Mania), having failed in their early days to secure an audience in the American market. As Andy Mackay later observed: “Roxy always were and to a large extent still too weird for mainstream American touring…We chose to make things happen in Europe where we built big following really quickly and spent our time there” (Quietus). By 1973 Roxy had already toured Germany, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, France and England with only a few dates in the USA. (E.G. records founder David Enthoven: “the Americans didn’t fucking get it at all”). 

More compelling as a source of European influence for Roxy Music is the fact that that Mackay‘s chord progression provoked a typically artisan response in Ferry, inspiring an outpouring of European cultural influences and moods. Roxy observer Michael Bracewell cites this approach as the “musical and stylistic epitome of modern cool – the term ‘cool’ being used here in its old jazz sense as the possessor and purveyor of a personal style” (Bracewell). Thus Ferry hears Mackay’s chords and melody and conjures the image of an ex-pat American in Paris and in doing so retraces the steps of his heroes, the American jazz legends of the 1950s – Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Sony Rollins, Art Blackey, Ella Fitzgerald – all of whom gained regular employment in Europe when Chicago and New York couldn’t always pay the bills – and who recorded some of their greatest live recordings at European venues such as the famous Club Saint-Germain and the Paris Olympia Theatre. To our ears ‘A Song for Europe‘ conjures the mood of Miles Davis’ classic Kind of Blue, or more specifically – the 1957 Miles Davis French recording Ascenseur pour l’echafaud (Elevator to the Gallows), where, in the words of jazz critic Michael G. Nastos, the recording strives to evoke the smokey haze and “Sensual nature of a mysterious chanteuse and the contrasting scurrying rat race lifestyle of the times, when the popularity of the automobile, cigarettes, and the late-night bar scene were central figures.”

The words ‘automobile’, ‘cigarettes’ and ‘late-night bar scene’ had better strike a chord with Roxy Music listeners or we’ll send you directly back to Spandau Ballet starting school. And so Ferry invites us into this jazzy European milieu and does not let go:

Though the world is my oyster
It’s only a shell full of memories
And here by the Seine Notre Dame casts a long
Lonely shadow

My ‘oyster’ (cunnilingus in all but name), enables Ferry to give shape (head?) to his “shell full of memories” while Notre Dame – the ‘Lady of Paris’ – sits eternal and stony faced, surrounded by her fortress of crypts, bells, clocks and gargoyles, overseeing the endless inadequacies of her city’s inhabitants. This striking metaphor – one of Ferry’s best – provides ‘A Song for Europe‘ with a shot of gothic darkness – a throwback to the darker corners of  For Your Pleasure – that ultimately saves the song from falling into cheap melodrama, as Ferry equates the failed romance of “no tomorrow” with spiritual and creative death. Charles Aznavour, take note..

For all of its hip puns and cultural references, mood-making and film noir atmosphere, ‘A Song for Europe’ is, in effect, a gift for the fans. Yes, the song and the Stranded album overall established Ferry’s career image as a man who personified “the classic European notion of the doomed romantic” (NME) and who perfected the “elegant…seductive croon” (Allmusic) that would ultimately lead to the global success of Avalon and the singles  ‘More Than This’, ‘Take a Chance with Me’ and the title track ‘Avalon’, with its pop video farewell to grand European eloquence, the white tux and Roxy Music itself.

What makes ‘A Song for Europe’ so special for the Roxy Music fan-base, though, is this sense of the track being a gift, a shared experience – and a farewell to the first phase of the band’s development. Working towards their first co-credit, Ferry listened to the music Andy Mackay composed and in turn painted for us his own private movie. The objective – as always with Roxy – was fantasy projection: you see on the picture screen a fantasy of your grander self and your engagement with the sensations of your stylized, heightened emotions. “Here as I sit in this empty cafe” you fantasize, for this is your story, your own projected self flushed with emotional sensitivity, exaggerated romantic despair (“And the bridge, it sighs..”), as you become the poet you always knew you would be…

I remember all those moments
Lost in wonder that we’ll never
Find again

On a final note it is worth noting that the “we” in the second line is important: Ferry often gets knocked for avoiding emotional depth due to his work being filtered through an ironic set of signifiers, allusions and puns. Be that it may, he is also brilliant emotional dramatist who takes pride in reflecting back to us our own greatest desires, moments, and failures. And he gets it right too: when my own failures stare me in the face I seek out an alternative world, a world of heightened emotion and drama, for in my loneliest moments I too am dying of endless, eternal heartbreak – in Latin and French, of course..

Next: Party time! Peak Roxy and ‘Mother of Pearl‘

Credits: Firstly, a big thank you to Fly Garrick over @ glamazonaroxymusic for applying just the right amount of red tinge to our gargoyle friend over at Notre Dam; Stranded promo; a song for europe art and music exhibition curated by Thibaut de Ruyter, designed by Büro Otto Sauhaus in Berlin (see the exhibition’s song listing below); Eddie Jobson 1974 with uncredited photo Notre Dam; sheet music shot ‘A Song for Europe’; amazing uncredited picture found at BableColour (will track that down and provide more details); old Eurovision Song contest poster BBC; nightshot Notre Dam with Miles Davis and the cover for Ascenseur pour l’echafaud

‘A Song for Europe’ exhibition tracks:

– Holly Johnson, Europa (Spoken Word), 2014
– Kraftwerk, Europe Endless, 1977
– Steve Reich, Different Trains: Europe During the War, 1989
– Asia, Countdown to Zero, 1985
– David Sylvian, Café Europa, 1999
– Phantom/Ghost, My Secret Europe (Piano Version), 2003
– Kate Tempest, Europe Is Lost, 2016
– Allen Ginsberg, Europe! Europe!, 1959
– Serge Teyssot-Gay – Georges Hyvernaud, Leur Europe, 2000
– Nena, Das Land der Elefanten, 1984
– Randy Newman, Political Science, 1972
– Gianna Nannini, Ragazzo dell’Europa, 1983
– Europe, The Final Countdown, 1986
– Noir Désir, L’Europe, 2001
– Max Richter, Europe, After The Rain, 2002
– Roxy Music, A Song for Europe, 1973

Psalm – Part 1
Psalm (1973)

I. The Beautiful Idea

In The Red Hand Files Issue #130 (January 2021), Nick Cave provided insight into his personal connection between religion and creativity:

William Blake said ‘Jesus is the imagination’ and these words have always resonated with me. They have bound together the notion of Jesus and the creative act, and lifted it into the supernatural sphere.

A large part of the process of songwriting is spent waiting in a state of attention before the unknown. We stand in vigil, waiting for Jesus to emerge from the tomb — the divine idea, the beautiful idea — and reveal Himself.

One day, you will write a line that feels wrong, but at the same time provides you with a jolt of dissonance, a quickening of the nervous system…This is the idea to pay attention to, the difficult idea, the disturbing idea, shimmering softly among all the deficient, dead ideas, gently but persistently tugging at your sleeve — the Jesus idea.
Nick Cave

Much of Bryan Ferry’s writing occupies the same territory, anticipating the ‘jolt of dissonance’ that accompanies the appearance of the ‘beautiful idea’ – that mysterious and hard-won insight that begs for inclusion in a song. (Ferry: “I believe each line must have a punch of some sort and that, strategically, certain lines should give the listener a specific jolt”). The selection of material and subject is vital to Ferry, but the singer also presents in his work a humility at the mysteriousness of writing and creating. Just as we can locate Jack Torrence’s writer’s block as the true terror in Kubrick‘s The Shining (“all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play…”), so too Ferry delights in describing the terror of the blank page, of not finding the right words at the right time (see: The Bogus Man), of not being articulate or insightful, of having to wait on an artistic revelation before the deadline, of not receiving the beautiful idea, the Jesus idea.

Question [Interviewer]: What sorts of things guide your songwriting? And are you a disciplined writer, or . . .

Answer [Ferry]: Oh, I have to be dragged to it by wild horses; I find it very painful, very hard work. The tunes tend to come much more readily than the words; the words are a bit of torment, ’cause I’m quite particular about words, and I love words.

Haunting me always are the voices
(Tell us are you ready now?)
Sometimes I wonder if they’re real
(Ready to receive you now)
Or is it my own imagination?
(Have you any more to say?)
Strictly Confidential

Discussing ‘Strictly Confidential’ in June 2018, we tracked the Bryan Ferry persona across the first three Roxy Music records and two non-album singles:

I. (Roxy Music/’Virginia Plain‘): The dream and drive for Fame. The mask is donned for the first time. You become someone else. Many possible futures.

II. (‘Pyjamarama‘/For Your Pleasure): Fame arrives. The effects, shocking. Audiences love you (UK). Promoters hate you (US). You arrive at your Hollywood Promised Land and experience disillusionment. The constructed Roxy state-of-mind – the dream mask – is becoming real, attaching itself firmly to the surface of your skin, like fingernails digging into flesh. There is a mix of happiness, anticipation and pride – and also fear and uncertainty about future outcomes. Decisions are made.

III. (Stranded): “Roxy Mania” takes hold in Europe. The mask settles, inseparable from your own skin now. Human relationships disappoint. All that remains is aesthetics, the striving for the perfection in art that you cannot find in life. You reach for another cognac, stranded.

While an over-simplification, the journey above tracks decently enough as narrative, bringing us squarely to ‘Psalm’, the last song on the original first side of Stranded. The end-stop is fitting as ‘Psalm’ feels like a culmination of sorts: just as For Your Pleasure closes on goodbyes (“ta-ra”), ‘Psalm’ is a set-piece designed to rid its author of the rigors and stress of intellectual analysis and art theory in favor of harnessing a greater range of musical and emotional expression in his work.

As a result, the first set of songs on Stranded are obsessed with the subjects of change and transformation. Street Life announces “now I’m blinded, I can really see”; “this brave new world’s not like yesterday”; “back to nature boys/Vasser girls too”. While Romantic classic Just Like You is concerned with “shifting planets”; “alchemy iron turns gold”; “chameleon color”, “seasons change”; “everything changes” and so on.

And then Amazona turns up, the no-zone that serves as a holding place, where “everything is nice”, contains no fear, “no doubt”, “no fall-out”. The literary academics call this the liminal space – the “space where you have left something behind, yet you are not yet fully in something else. It’s a transition space”. Ferry opens the first side of the album with a warning – “you may be stranded if you stick around” – and closes it with an invitation for him (and us) to transcend our condition, to join him in a leap of faith:

“Why don’t you step through the mirror and see?”

Amazona
Getting closer
Soon you’ll see
Journey’s over
We’re almost there!

So many questions: Where is there? Paradise? Heaven? (“Is there a heaven?/I’d like to think so”). Or is this an attempt at epiphany (“now I’m blinded I can really see”), a leaving behind of the tortured thinking soul in return for a glimpse of Jesus emerging from the tomb. Does ‘Psalm’ attempt to harness and re-create the beautiful idea, the “universal, eternal Mind, or Spirit” that William Blake called the Imagination? If so, then ‘Psalm’ is the destination, and you and I are almost there..

II. Believe in Me

Retaining a typically warm ambience that is so common to Stranded, ‘Psalm’ starts calmly enough with church-style organ and a pleasant eight note refrain in the key of F Major (musical characteristic: “Controlled calmness/religious sentiment”) provided by the ever-tasteful and talented Eddie Jobson. Emerging from the shadows, Ferry’s sunken vocal begins with:

Try on your love like a new dress
The fit and the cut your friends to impress
Try on your smile square on your face
Showing affection should be no disgrace

Ferry pitches tone and diction perfectly for the Sunday pulpit: clarity of language (“love/smile/affection”) is backed with simple rhyming couplets (“dress/impress”; “face/disgrace”). As a result, both narrator and Roxy Music create an atmosphere of inclusion and calm: The church organ soothes and oscillates within the hall. The congregation assembles, eyes focused on the televangelist out front: this is more of a rock star performance than is usually given credit for (a connection that clearly pique’s Ferry’s interest), as the televangelist (“tele” = television/ “evangelist” = preacher) combines the classic TV / glamour / commercial motifs that are the foundations of the Roxy Music aesthetic. David Bowie turned the rock star pulpit into a display of fascistic power and influence (“This ain’t rock n’ roll – this is genocide!”) whereas Ferry sees the power opportunity as a pull towards existential questions of how to live our lives in this new age (“Penthouse perfection/But what goes on/What to do there/Better pray there”). No matter: this was brave new world thinking in 1973 and neither glam superstars or the public knew where it was going to end up. (At a guess, somewhere around 2020).

Having honed his writing style across two albums, Ferry presents a favorite narrative point-of-view technique in the first stanza, addressing someone off-screen in the second person (You): “your love”, “your smile”, “your friends”, “your face”. For today’s sermon, the girl from ‘Amazona‘ is in attendance (“Sometimes paradise around your corner lies”). The man at the pulpit may be calm and welcoming in tone, but he engages in a brittle attack, disapproving of the appropriation of love and religion as a fashion statement (“try on your love/like a new dress”), identifying this church-goer as little more than a devotional groupie seeking attention and admiration like those fashion house ladies from ‘Just Like You’ chasing “last year’s fab-rave” (JLY).

Try out your God hope He will send
Kindness from strangers on whom you depend

This is delicious stuff, as Ferry recreates the stock-in-trade Roxy Music male persona – men who are calm and seductive on the surface but stick the knife in for the romantic kiss-off: “I’ll move up close to you/I’ll use you and I’ll confuse you//Still you won’t suspect me” (Ladytron). “As destiny wills it so seasons will change/Just like you.” (JYL). In the end justice usually prevails as the male protagonist is left in the cold with his stylish suits, wall-coverings and G-Plan apartment.

“Believe in me”
Once seemed a good line now belief in Jesus
Is faith more sublime

“Believe in me” contains multitudes: it’s the end-game to the arguments the heated lovers always have; it’s the televangelist’s call to his obedient and willing congregation (arms raised – “believe in me!”); and it is one of the key tenets of Christian thought, the sum of the teachings of the Gospel:

For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

John 3:16

The phrase is also a signal of change: One of the fun aspects of Ferry’s writing is that he enjoys teasing the reader with diverse persona and different narrative points-of-view. In Roxy Music, narrators are typically unreliable (‘If There is Something‘/’Chance Meeting’), and shift and turn and reveal secrets over the course of a song. The male narrator will dig in by scolding the love object (“Try on your love like a new dress”) yet by song’s end he often appears foolish (“I may seem a fool to you”) and winds up castigating his own self (“I can’t see the Lord short of perfection/I’ll try to be good”).

In this regard, ‘Psalm’ replicates the narrative design of ‘Pyjamarama‘ (Roxy’s second Top 10 single) wherein Ferry stages a Noel Coward comedy of manners in the same spirit of the play Private Lives. Jealousy, envy, lust, (maybe) love, retribution and punishment are doled out over several verses as we witness a subtle but gradual shift from female to male incredulity. (“They say you have a secret life”/”I may seem a fool to you”). 

And so, shifting focus, in the fourth stanza the girl from ‘Amazona‘ is practically forgotten:

“Believe in me”
Once seemed a good line now belief in Jesus
Is faith more sublime Head in the clouds
But I can’t see the Lord short of perfection
I’ll try to be good

“I’ll try to be good” is cute (and funny), yet more compellingly, it also reveals a considerable shift in perspective. Earlier in the sermon our Evangelist had taken a hearty crack at the ex-lover (“Try out your love/Try out your God”) yet by the fourth stanza he is gradually turning the gaze inward, beginning to recognize his own failings (“I can’t see the Lord”). A transformation is taking place – a conversion if you like – a movement towards that “faith more sublime.”

There could be a question mark here (“Is faith more sublime?”) in order to support the previous album’s key existential consideration “Is there a heaven?” (In Every Dream Home). The poetic notion of the Sublime is extremely important in this verse, as Ferry and writing partner Simon Puxley (PhD in Literature and Philosophy) understand and apply the concept of The Sublime to their religious poem ‘Psalm’.

The ‘Sublime’ has three distinct connotations: i) as adjective, sublime identifies “excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe”. ii) As verb, sublime occupies a chemical process “of a solid substance change directly into vapor when heated, typically forming a solid deposit again on cooling.” iii) As archiac term, sublime “elevate to a high degree of moral or spiritual purity or excellence.

By asking is “faith more sublime” Ferry uses one of the key concepts of English poetry and delivers neatly in one package the three key themes of the Stranded triptych: Beauty. Transformation. Perfection.

III. Hanky Panky

In a July 1974 interview with New Musical Express  journalist Nick Kent, Bryan Ferry commented on his admiration for religious poets and their artistic intensity:

It’s strange how the most degenerate kind of characters can flirt with religion… What’s always interested me is the gradual process of a lot of poets and the phases they go through. Like intense love poetry, over 20 years or so it can become stranger and stranger, and more introspective, until it reaches this amazing religious intensity. John Donne, for instance, was always the most amazing one for me.

Bryan Ferry

When considering an artist’s work, it pays to take note of their heroes: for Ferry, Richard Hamilton and Marcel Duchamp provided the pop-art ambition and technique for Roxy Music, ‘Virginia Plain’ and ‘Do the Strand’; the Hollywood glamor of Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart and Greta Garbo were the inspiration for a new rock n’ roll  ‘cinema’ music, and so on.

“When writers are mentioned,” Kent writes, “[Ferry] names Proust and F.Scott Fitzgerald. His favorite poets appear to be T.S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath, with John Donne taking pride of place”.  And so we map these influences in the work:

• Proust: Monumental, difficult, stream-of-consciousness (see: ‘Song for Europe‘);

• F.Scott Fitzgerald: Gatsby, America, the New World. Adjective; meaning excessively extravagant, cool, stylish. (See: um, BF’s entire career).

• T.S Eliot: Modernist. The Waste Land. ‘April is the cruelest month.’ (see: ‘Just Like You‘).
  

• Sylvia Plath: Confessional poetry. American. Alienation. Self-destruction. Suicide. (see: ‘Strictly Confidential‘).
  

Kent continues: “His admiration of the metaphysical strain made me remember a conversation I once had with Eno, when the latter stated his contention that our Mr F. would reach a peak of creativity and then crack and become totally committed to some organised religion”. 

Ferry replies: “I could see myself perhaps falling into that.”

Kent continues:  “Ferry after all could be seen as a direct inheritor of the whole John Donne school of hedonistic wit which consequently turned to religious fanaticism as the years took their toll.”

Ferry replies: “It’s a very interesting process isn’t it? All these gay blades getting up to the incredible hanky panky when they were young – but who at the same time wrote very moving love poetry until they ultimately approached religion with the same fanatical zeal.”

Ferry’s hero John Donne was a metaphysical poet of considerable intellect and passion, but the pull for modern audiences (and Ferry) is the peculiar juxtaposition of the profane and the secular. Biographers tell us Donne’s life had a painful trajectory: “frustration in hopes for courtly preferment, an intense love life with some rough patches, and at last settling into the godly role he played so well as a prominent minister in the Anglican Church. In short, Donne went from sinner to near-saint.” (Sense Sublime).

The “amazing religious intensity” that Ferry so admires in Donne is presented in ‘Psalm.’ Moving through the song, His Eminence The Most Reverend Ferry gains increasing ecclesiastical emotion and energy:

I’ll stand at His gate
I’ll wait for His sign then I’ll walk in his garden
When it’s my time

No longer preoccupied with previous concerns (no withering ‘Just Life You’ failed romance; no Church girl’s Sunday fashion pose) the narrative becomes pure Southern rock n’ roll – the Reverend shares the pulpit with Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard and Elvis.

Nearing death’s vale
He’s here by my side
He leads me to paradise
A mountain so high

The change is startling: you find yourself rooting for the great dirty rock n’ rollers of old – those degenerates that “flirted” with religion and genuinely feared the consequences of having lived a life of sin. Jerry Lee went to Memphis after being booted out of Bible school for boogy-ing up a hymn during worship services (The History of Rock & Roll, Volume 1). At 14 he was called The Killer. At 22 he took a took a shine to his future teen bride Myra Gale Brown, first cousin removed, marrying her at 13 (while he was still married to someone else). Jerry Lee occupies a world of “snakes and swamps, sweltering heat, Pentecostal Christianity and fear of sin” (The Guardian). This too is the world of ‘Psalm‘: swampy, stranded, awaiting rescue – just like the girl on the cover. The degenerate sings the Lord’s praises in an attempt to avoid the clutches of hell..

Don’t be afraid just treasure His word
Singing His praises I know that I’ll be heard


Ferry clearly identifies with these rascals, the pulpit poet John Donne (“the most amazing one for me”), and Elvis (“I was, and always will be a fan”). The fact that Ferry uses ‘Psalm’ and religious hymn as a continuation of the rock n’ roll spirit (“I’m always juxtaposing contrary elements. It’s kind of a perverse streak in me”) is at the heart of where Stranded‘s experimentation stands.

In 1970, Jerry Lee was served with Myra Gale Brown’s divorce papers. In a last-ditch attempt to bring her back, The Killer went to her church, Brother E.J. Davis’ Church on Highway 61 South in Memphis, and played an hour’s worth of gospel, having announced that he was giving up on worldly music, and was embracing the Lord:

Forget all your troubles you will feel no pain
He’s all that you need He’s your everything
When I’m feeling all at sea deliverance is that distant shore
I will not be worried someday His house will be my home

This is the story ‘Psalm’ tells: From disdain (“Try out your God”), to self-realization (“I can’t see the Lord short of perfection”), to full-blown belief (“His quiet waters will never run dry”), to final break-through, religious epiphany (“for evermore”) – the degenerate’s transformation is complete. No longer stranded, but transformed – as William Blake was, as John Donne, Jerry Lee  – from sinner to near saint, The Reverend is also saved, in art at least, For evermore…

For evermore for evermore for evermore for evermore
For evermore for evermore for evermore for evermore
For evermore for evermore for evermore for evermore

Part IV. I Would Like to Be a Saint

A large part of the process of songwriting is spent waiting in a state of attention before the unknown. We stand in vigil, waiting for Jesus to emerge from the tomb — the divine idea, the beautiful idea.
Nick Cave

To discuss ‘Psalm’ in terms of irony, or its opposite, is reduce the song to its formal properties: the track is, after all, a religious psalm, both in form and intent. That’s the gag. Or that’s the earnest struggle. Either way, ‘Psalm‘ (like all great Roxy songs) accommodates your personal preference.  Not so much a ‘message’ song as a revelation song, ‘Psalm’ traces and re-enacts the discovery and arrival of the beautiful idea, words captured in time, for evermore. (Words that will outlive it’s creator). John Coltrane did the same thing with A Love Supreme – his hymn to God and Spirit. On a 1966 tour of Japan, Coltrane was asked what he wanted to be in 10 years. He replied, “I would like to be a saint.” And so they built a church for him in San Francisco (that is still open). The Church of St. John Will-I-Am Coltrane (www.coltranechurch.org).

Nick Cave too sought the same engagement with Jesus and the Imagination as Coltrane. On Cave’s beautiful ‘O Children‘ the horrors of the Gulag are detailed for the (now) old men who perpetuated the original crimes. “Forgive us now for what we’ve done/It started out as a bit of fun.” Children are taken by train to the concentration camps to be gassed. On the terrible journey Cave urges them to sing, sing:

O children
Lift up your voice, lift up your voice
Children
Rejoice, rejoice

And lo and behold a conversion takes place – “We’re happy, Ma, we’re having fun!” – as Cave imagines them away onto a different train, away from this hell. Saved for evermore in song.  “Is that such a stretch of the imagination?” Cave asks, and we dare not argue.

Conversion, change, self-invention, frustration (“stranded”): no one would make an argument for a fully conceived, unified concept in Stranded, but there is an ambience and mood that yolks the disparate elements together. Endlessly fascinated by modes of perception, Ferry delights in showing us how different characters (bogus men, creeps, poets, lovers) process information through their ragged, even sleazy, version of the world. Just as a playwright lays down multiple versions of themselves, Ferry adopts a religious persona for ‘Psalm’ that teases out connections between faith and fashion, propaganda and pop, between those lacking conviction, between the faithful and the faithless. There is existential angst to be sure – the peering towards the threshold (“far beyond the pale horizon”), is tantalizing, but the way forward is unclear, no closer to resolving the problem of being “stranded between life and art” (Gestrandet an Leben und Kunst”: from the German stanza of Bitter Sweet).

And so ‘Psalm’ ends the first glorious period of Bryan Ferry’s writing. After ‘Psalm’ we get a song-cycle less concerned with dreams turning to reality, dream homes turning to heart ache, or questions regarding the existence of heaven. Instead there is a reduced scope, with Ferry narrowing his concerns down to – in the words of Roxy artist and friend Nick de Ville: “I’ve got this problem. I’m writing this pop song”. The bright lights and the harassing phone calls are now a fact of life: the pale horizon has been crossed over. The state of being stranded between life and art is grudgingly accepted. Art, life, religion – offer no escape. As a result, there is less to say and – by the time of 1982’s Avalon – lyrics are largely superfluous, the music having to bear the weight of the Imagination.

‘Vigil’ implies watchfulness. Anyone trying to attain perfection is faced with various obstacles in life that tend to sidetrack him. Here, therefore, I mean watchfulness against elements that might be destructive-from within or without.

St. John Will-I-Am Coltrane

Next: post-conversion blues: The end of another affair? Serenade! 

Credits: The Church of John Coltrane; Jesus steps from the Tomb, Red Hand Files Issue #130 (January 2021); tranquil Ferry, Amsterdam 1974; ‘Veiled Virgin’, Giovanni Strazza ; fellow degenerates John Donne, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bryan Ferry seek salvation.

Titbits