Tag Archives: bryan ferry

*MUSIC, 70smusic.co.uk, On This Day

Out Of The Blue

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Paul Fitzpatrick: November 15th 2022, London.

When you go to a gig nowadays to see one of your favourite 70s bands, words you rarely want to hear are…. “and here’s one from the new album folks”.

As a case in point, I went to see the Stones this summer, I’ve seen them a few times and you kinda accept that due to their colossal back-catalogue there’s gonna be some notable omissions.
Which is why, when Mick said here’s a new song I wrote about Lockdown, there was a collective sigh, and that’s how 65,000 of us got lumbered with “Living in a Ghost Town” instead of rocking along to “Brown Sugar” or “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll”.

It wasn’t always the way though – exactly 48 years ago today on Thursday, 15th November, 1974, I sauntered out to the record store in my lunch-hour to purchase Country Life by Roxy Music, on the day of its release.

The reason I couldn’t wait a day longer is because I’d been to see Roxy a few weeks earlier at the Glasgow Apollo and they’d premiered a few songs from their unreleased album, Country Life, that had blown me away and had been swimming around in my head ever since.

Although predominantly an album band, Roxy always had the knack of releasing great singles – “Virginia Plain,” “Pyjamarama”, “Street Life” and “Love is the Drug” to name a few. The lead single from Country Life, “All I Want is You”, was no exception and was another great teaser for the album.


I’d been a Roxy fan since their first appearance on Top of the Pops with “Virginia Plain”. Their Apollo appearances for the Stranded tour the previous year had been talked about as one of the gigs of the year, so I was really looking forward to seeing them live.

The first thing that struck me was the crowd, up till then most gigs I’d attended at the Apollo had been dominated by Rory Gallagher doppelgänger’s, but this was more like a nightclub crowd, plus there was the unmistakable smell of Charlie (the perfume!) and Aramis in the air, as opposed to the usual aura of perspiration and Newkie Brown.

Roxy Music vintage 1974, was an impressive unit.
Apart from the original four of – Ferry, Manzanera, Mackay and Thompson, they’d added a couple of Prog Rock stalwarts to their roster – Eddie Jobson to permanently replace Eno and for the live shows ex-King Crimson bassist John Wetton.

On the night, Roxy got the balance just right by playing all the crowd favourites – “Do the Strand”, Editions of You”, “In Every Dream Home”, etc, whilst slipping in a few new tracks from the album.

I remember vividly a sequence of three songs that has set the bar for any gig I’ve been to since.

Bookended by “Mother of Pearl” and “Song for Europe” was a new song that I would later discover was called “Out of the Blue”, it climaxed with a magnificent electric violin solo, played impeccably by Eddie Jobson on his clear plexiglass violin, which for dramatic effect lit up the darkened stage during the solo.

I still get goosebumps when I hear the song and that violin solo.

Out of the Blue – Roxy Music

To show it was no fluke, exactly the same thing happened a year later when I went to see Roxy again, this time they were showcasing songs from their soon to be released album, Siren, which became another record that I had to go out and buy on the day of its release a couple of weeks later.

After Siren, Ferry focused on his solo career for a bit and Roxy Music drifted apart, it was probably smart timing on their part to take a sabbatical during the Punk era although we would learn that the first band Steve Jones & Paul Cook of the Pistols formed, was called ‘The Strand’, in tribute to Roxy Music.
To affirm the connection further, Roxy’s producer, Chris Thomas would go on to produce Never Mind the Bollocks.

Roxy Music reunited in 1979 with a new album Manifesto and this smoother, slicker Roxy sound peaked commercially with Avalon in 1982.
I didn’t mind these albums but they sounded more like Bryan Ferry solo albums than peak 1972-1975 Roxy to me.

I still listen to Country Life and apart from being a good album it maintains Roxy Music’s glorious tradition of featuring glamorous femme fatale’s on the album sleeve.
 
The story behind the Country Life cover is that Ferry met two girls who were on vacation from Germany in a bar in the Algarve where he had decamped to write lyrics for the album.
Ferry needed some help translating lyrics into German for the song “Bitter Sweet” and Constanze who was the sister of Can’s Michael Karoli and Eveline (Karoli’s girlfriend), not only assisted with the translations but went one better, by also posing on an Algarve beach for the album cover.

Constanze & Eveline, pictured above, 40 years later….

The gig in Glasgow opened with the closing track from Country Life, a song called “Prairie Rose”, which in hindsight was an undeniable love letter to his Texan beau at the time, the model, Jerry Hall.

“Hey, hey, you’re tantalising me“

I always suspected Jerry made a bad call by choosing Jagger over the dashing Bryan Ferry and it has to be said that Mick’s insistence on performing his new Lockdown song instead of “Brown Sugar” only supports my case!

The set list for the gig is below and there’s also a link to an audio recording from YouTube of Roxy in Newcastle on 28/10/74 which was a few days after the Glasgow gig and the final gig of the 74 UK tour….

Prairie Rose / Beauty Queen / Mother Of Pearl / Out Of The Blue / Song For Europe / Three And Nine / If It Takes All Night / In Every Dream Home A Heartache / If There Is Something / All I Want Is You / The Bogus Man / Street Life / Virginia Plain / Editions Of You / Remake Remodel / Do The Strand

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Whistling in Music

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Russ Stewart: London, October 2022

“Who’s the whistling Rufus?”

The miscreant in the 70s Bearsden Academy registration class refused to own up to the supervising teacher’s enquiry. 
Possibly unaware of Jimmy Shand’s greatest hit and hence confused by the question.

Inappropriate whistling should be a capital offence. 

It has its place…. 
Indicating occupancy in an unlocked public toilet cubicle. 
Encouraging your pit bull to relax it’s hold on a newborn’s throat during lambing season.
Or
As an expression of innocence as you stand, catapult in hand, next to a broken window.

It is never appropriate in a musical context.  Lennon, Ferry, Presley, Rod Stewart, Peter Gabriel, and Whistling Jack Smith…. WTF?

Why? 

Inability to write a lyric? 
Age shrunk vocal range? 
Can’t afford a sax player? (I can recommend a talented Western Australia resident who may have spare time when not dagging sheep in his hobby farm)

Picture Sir Rod in front of his bathroom mirror, engaged in some nasal hair husbandry. 
The tiling lends a supportive echo as he whistles a jaunty air. 
His rock and roll mojo has long since departed. 
He thinks : ‘got a potential hit here for my desiccated fans’. 

Thankfully none of my musical heroes have yet sunk to whistling. 

Todd Rundgren gets close.

On the otherwise excellent “Useless Begging” track he uses two coins to mimic a tap dance routine. 

Real tap dancing is cool. 

Executing a paradiddle in a puddle whilst rapping about one’s romantic attachments to “hoes”, and one’s dislike of law enforcement, would get my attention. 

The act of whistling looks ridiculous. 
Undignified puckering of the embouchure.
Budgie trills. 

Thankfully Roger Whittaker’s beard masked some of his facial contortions. 

A bearded Rolf Harris even indulged in a spot of whistling when not Waltzing Matilda (or whatever he was doing with the young maiden)  

Alas, the Bearsden Academy whistler remains at large. 

*MUSIC, Social life, Teenage Years

A Hard Pains A-Gonna Call

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George Cheyne: Glasgow, October 2022

By the time I turned 15 I was well on my way to being worldly wise thanks to my parents, teachers and peers.

I knew how to eat, walk, talk, do sums, kick a ball, ride a bike, swim, neck a can of Tartan Special, get myself a paper-boy job and spend my hard-earned cash on records and going to gigs.

This was all learned behaviour. But nobody – and I mean NOBODY – could teach me how to dance with a girl at the local Saturday night disco.

Sure, you could watch others up on the dance floor from the safety of the side of the hall and it looked pretty straightforward.

A banging tune, just three minutes or so to throw some shapes and find a bit of chat…how hard could it be? Nigh-on impossible for me, as it turned out.

That teenage angst has stayed with me for almost 50 years and I can’t listen to the song I had my first dance to – Bryan Ferry’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, if you must know – without regurgitating that sense of pain from back then.

This would be late 1973, so the only dance-floor experience I’d had up to this point was the school dance – a clumsy collection of classmates hurtling around a hall with no coordination or finesse trying to do waltzes and such like.

There was, I suppose, an all-male jump-around to Slade’s “Cum On Feel The Noize” at the disco, but that hardly counts.

Dancing in front of a bedroom mirror to practice my dance moves was a non-starter, so I opted for that traditional Scottish warm-up – a shared half bottle of vodka and a couple of cans of Tartan Special.

It was during this illicit booze session that my fate was sealed.

Too many slugs of voddy and coke had loosened my tongue enough for me to start singing: Oh, where have you been my blue-eyed son? Where have you been, my darling young one?

Aside from the amount of drink taken, there was no rhyme or reason for belting out the opening lines of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”. Well, apart from liking Bryan Ferry and having blue eyes of my own, that is.

It was just a random song rattling around in my befuddled mind, but it was somehow seen by my tipsy mates as a sign from the Dance Gods.

“That’s it”, I was told, “If they play that song tonight, you have to get up and dance.”

“No bother,” I said, clearly emboldened by a few more gulps of vodka.

An hour or so later we were standing around like wallflowers at the local disco as the chart toppers of the day boomed out one after the other.

The odds of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” being on the playlist shortened dramatically when, unbeknownst to me, one of my pals went up to the DJ’s booth and requested the song.

Just for good measure, I was reminded of the promise I’d made about getting up to dance to Ferry’s interpretation of a Bob Dylan classic.

A song ironically about suffering

The net was closing in. One of my mates had the decency to say he’d be my wingman if the song was played to make sure I wasn’t flying solo.

Then, to my dismay, out the speakers came: Oh, where have you been my blue-eyed son? Where have you been, my darling young one?

Gulp! This was it, no turning back. Any thoughts of not going through with it were banished by a friendly push in the back from my wingman as he steered me towards four girls already up dancing.

They were only a couple of yards away, but those few stuttering steps somehow felt like a walk to the gallows.

Target 12 o’clock high. I tried to keep my focus as beads of sweat trickled in my eyes, down my back…everywhere, in fact.

Hold formation. Shoulders back, eyes front, make eye contact and remember to smile.

Target dead ahead. Keep smiling, clear throat and say: “Uh, widjuhliket’dance?” Thankfully, the noise levels disguised my mumblings and – it appeared to me, anyway – I had bagged a dance partner.

What I didn’t have was a wingman. He’d aborted the mission halfway through and returned to base.

I risked a half glance behind me and saw him standing with the rest of them in full wallflower pose, giggling and pointing in my general direction. Cheers, lads.

My legs felt as if they had been planted in quick-set concrete and restricted my movement to the waist up.

The result was a dance style which was somewhere between a Weeble toy trying to restore its balance after being pinged with full force and a hen with two broken wings trying to take flight.

Not at all embarrassing, then. To her eternal credit, my dance partner stuck with it despite the bizarre antics of the uncoordinated 15-year-old in front of her.

The song’s lyrics flashed through my mind during the five minutes and 20 seconds of torture I’d given myself. Trust me to pick a song which went on for ever.

The blue-eyed son in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” had stumbled on the side of 12 misty mountains, walked and crawled on six crooked highways, stepped in the middle of seven sad forests and been out in front of a dozen dead oceans.

No mention, you’ll notice, of him dying on his arse on a crowded dance floor. That particular embarrassment belonged to me and it’s why I still cringe whenever I hear the song all these years later.

Ferry’s haunting voice singing: Oh, where have you been my blue-eyed son? Where have you been, my darling young one? is enough to make me know a hard pain’s a-gonna call.

Btw, if I was looking for inspiration Ferry was no help, he sits on his arse all the way through the video.… perhaps we had more in common than the colour of our eyes!
*MUSIC, 18 With A Bullet, Music, Teenage Years

Me and Mr Paul

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Paul Fitzpatrick: July 2022, London

I did a piece recently on Santana’s version of The Zombies ‘She’s not There’, and someone followed up by asking what my favourite 70s cover version is.

I tend to go with my gut reaction on these type of things otherwise you end up trawling through your music library, second guessing yourself and choosing songs on the basis that they have a bit of street-cred.

My initial pick was a song I first heard at my local youth club, although I have to admit that I wasn’t even aware it was a cover version at the time – Matthews Southern Comfort’s version of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’.

On reflection, I decided that I couldn’t choose the Joni cover, because at its core, the definition of a great cover has got to be when an artist takes a song you’re already familiar with, puts their stamp on it, and makes it even more listenable than the original.

That helped me to narrow it down to my next gut choice – Billy Paul’s version of Elton John’s ‘Your Song’ .

I can remember the first time I heard this track like it was yesterday, I’d come back from a party as you did in those days, to the realisation the morning after, that half your records were missing, replaced with other peoples discs…. the time honoured tradition of writing your name on the record label or cover seemed to make no difference and searching in vain for your Roxy Music – ‘Pyjamarama’ single only to pull out ‘Paper Roses’ by Marie Osmond was to put it mildly – a real pisser!

As it happened, following this particular party I ended up with someone else’s copy of Billy Paul’s ‘Me and Mrs Jones’ and noticed that the B side contained a version of Elton John’s ‘Your Song’.
Out of curiosity and with extremely low expectations, I put the needle on the groove, and then sat transfixed for six and a half minutes as a euphonious masterpiece emitted from the speakers.

It was hard to describe what I was listening to.
It was definitely ‘Your Song’, but not as I knew it.

Part Jazz, part Gospel, part Philly sound, It was a musical feast which had to be played again…. and again…. and a few more times after that.

I was dumbfounded, Billy Paul was a crooner, the married dude who was meeting Mrs Jones ‘every day in the same cafe‘ what was he doing ambushing me like this… with a fricking Elton John ballad?

I remember marching down to my mate Jay’s house armed with the single getting him to close his eyes as I lined it up on his record player to make him listen to it.

Jay and I had similar tastes in music but were constantly trying to outdo each other when it came to presenting new tracks. I needed to introduce him to this musical extravaganza as a matter of priority AND be there to gauge his response.

First Time Hearing – Staying Alive

Apparently gauging first responses to 70s songs is a YouTube phenomenon at the moment but we were all doing it 50 years ago.

I never get tired of listening to Billy Paul’s version of ‘Your Song’, even now.
It runs for 6 minutes 36 seconds but every time it comes to the faded ending I just want it to keep playing.

It’s a classic example of an early Gamble & Huff production driven by Billy Paul’s Jazz-infused vocals and the full might of the MFSB Philly session players, who’ve played on everything from ‘Love Train’ to ‘Disco Inferno’.


So there you have it, my favourite 70s cover.
It may not be the coolest, but it’s my choice and like Billy Paul says, he definitely ‘got a song!’

Of course there are lots of honourable mentions when it comes to great 70s covers so I threw together a quick playlist where in all cases (*bar one) the cover versions are better (in my humble opinion) than the originals.

*It’s a universal fact that it’s impossible to improve on any Steely Dan track….

*MUSIC, Fashion, What We Used To Wear

What We Used To Wear – Army Shirts

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(A look back at some of the things we used to wear in the 70’s)

Paul Fitzpatrick: London, April 2022

I’ve no idea what possessed us to wear a lot of the stuff we used to wear, however, I’m very clear about the origins of one 70s fashion trend….. step forward Bryan Ferry who against all conceivable odds managed to make the GI-Joe-look, cool.

English singer Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music, pictured in military style costume with backing singer Jacqui Sullivan at the Montcalm Hotel, London during the Siren tour, October 1975. (Photo by Michael Putland/Getty Images)

At the time, Roxy and Ferry were at the peak of their powers with a catalogue of critically acclaimed albums and a raft of memorable singles, all produced in the space of three productive years.

Like Bowie, Ferry was a bit of an image-chameleon, constantly updating his look and persona, for each album & tour.
A glam Space Cowboy one minute, a Hollywood Matinee Idol, the next.

Since his breakthrough in 72 with Virginia Plain, Ferry’s style had always been pretty distinctive, but not that accessible, and when he appeared on our screens in September 1975 to deliver ‘Love Is The Drug’ wearing a pair of khaki trousers (that we later found out were called chinos) a pristine khaki military shirt and an eye-patch (as he’d genuinely injured his eye), he finally introduced a look we could invest in…. kind of.

The TV clip showed the ladies in the audience swooning as Ferry swayed, hands in pocket, to the opening bass-line hook of ‘Love Is The Drug’.
A vision in khaki, before you knew it, a few of us were dashing off to our local Army & Navy stores in an attempt to emulate the suave Geordie.

Army & Navy stores were no strangers to teenagers in the 70s, shopping for parkas & gas mask bags and even the odd bit of camouflage but the staff couldn’t believe their luck when the army shirts that had been stuck in a corner gathering dust for years were suddenly selling like hot-cakes.

In a classic case of supply and demand, the prices for said items rose dramatically in the space of a few days.

We’d been influenced by Ferry, but we’d no idea what had influenced him to go for the US Military look, maybe it was at the behest of his latest muse, the Texan Jerry Hall who Ferry was dating and who had just featured as the latest ‘Roxy Girl’ on the cover of their new album – ‘Siren’.

According to Hall, her father had fought in the US military alongside General Patton so perhaps Bryan was dressing to impress.

Being a Roxy fan I went to see them on their Siren tour and was struck at how many wannabe Ferry’s there were in the crowd.

Sure, we had picked up on the army shirt look but others had gone the whole hog…. white dinner jackets, bow-ties, Ferry haircuts, the complete look even down to his trademark pencil-thin moustache (and that was just the girls!)…. there were even a few diehards brandishing eye-patches, not realising the poor guy had glaucoma.

As a trend the military look came and went pretty quickly, indeed, if you popped into your local Army & Navy store a few months later it’s likely you would have seen a rack full of discounted khaki army shirts gathering dust in the corner again.

That would be the last we’d see of Ferry’s changing personas for a while as he broke up the band, broke up with Hall and pursued the life of a dashing country squire…. leaving us poor buggers behind, looking like the cast of M*A*S*H

*MUSIC

You Can’t Judge A Song By Its Cover….

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Paul Fitzpatrick: London, July 2021

From the Beatles to Bowie every great artist has recorded a cover version of someone else’s songs.

In many cases you won’t even know it’s a cover, it usually depends on your musical knowledge and whether you’ve heard the original before.

For instance, until recently I had no idea that Adele’s ‘Make You Feel My Love’ was a Bob Dylan track and had previously been released by Billy Joel and Garth Brooks, well before Adele’s version attained over 200 million hits on streaming services.

Dylan’s song is now deemed to be a ‘Modern Standard’ and has been recorded by over 460 different artists, and all the while I thought it was an Adele original.

Nowadays of course I want to know every detail about the music I’m invested in, but when I was younger I couldn’t tell you if a song was a cover version or an original and to be honest it didn’t matter.
I loved Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da by the Marmalade and cared not that it was a cover and the Beatles version had come before it.

In the early 70s, Bowie with Pinups and Bryan Ferry with Those Foolish Things brought credibility to the concept of ‘cover albums’, sharing their musical influences and displaying their penchant for covers like a badge of honour.

The topic of cover versions came into my mind recently when I was listening to ‘California Dreaming’ by Bobby Womack.
I wondered how many people knew about this version and it got me thinking about my favourite ‘cover versions’ and how I categorise them.

So here’s a ‘not so deep-dive’ into the concept….

When you think the cover is the original:

I think the first time I was caught out like this was with Rod Stewart’s ‘Reason to Believe’, the B side to Maggie May.

It was one of those singles where the B side got almost as much needle-time as the A side (in fact as you can see from the image, it was the original A side, and Maggie May was the B side), but I had no idea that it was a cover version that had been released previously by Tim Hardin.

Rod went on to become quite the cover specialist…. Cat Steven’s ‘The First Cut is the Deepest’, Hendrix’s ‘Angel’ the Sutherland Bros ‘Sailing’ and Carole King’s ‘Oh No not my Baby’ were all big hits for Rod with most of his legion of fans unaware of the original versions.

Similarly, for several years I had no idea that ‘All Along the Watchtower’ by Hendrix was a Dylan song or that ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ was a traditional Irish folk song recorded by The Dubliners before Thin Lizzy made it their own.
Ditto the Isley Bros ‘Summer Breeze’, a Seals & Croft recording and Nilsson’s ‘Without You’, a Badfinger track.

The common thread here is that from Hendrix to Adele there are always tracks that I’m shocked to discover are covers. I’m not suggesting the fact that they’re covers devalues them in any way, indeed, you can argue that there’s a great skill in identifying a ‘hit’ that nobody knows about and making it your own.

When the cover is better than the original:

This is a subjective point and totally in the ear of the beholder.
There’s obviously lots of examples where a cover version is more popular than the original (see Adele above), but I wanted to shine a light on a select band of elite songwriters who are great performers in their own right but for some reason or another there’s a pattern of other artists consistently improving upon some their material….

Bob Dylan: All Along the Watchtower by Hendrix, A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall by Bryan Ferry, George Harrison’s version of ‘If Not For you’ and The Byrds classic, “Mr Tambourine Man’,
just a small selection of tracks that other artists have borrowed and updated from Dylan.

Bruce Springsteen: Patti Smith’s ‘Because the Night’, Manfred Mann’s ‘Blinded by the Light’ and ‘Fire’ by the Pointer Sisters. Three tracks buried beneath Boss anthems that became defining tracks for the artists who covered them

Leon Russell: Donny Hathaway’s ‘A Song for You’, George Benson’s ‘This Masquerade’, Joe Cocker’s ‘Delta Lady’ and The Carpenter’s ‘Superstar’.
Not one of these tracks charted for Leon but they were huge hits for the acts who covered them.

These are all great songs, written by iconic artists so it’s strange that the definitive versions of all of these classics are by other acts and not the original artist.

In some cases it seems that artists can come along, pick up a gem, give it a polish and make it shine even brighter.

Artists who make covers their own:

When Mick Jagger was asked about his favourite Stones cover he said it was Otis Redding’s version of ‘Satisfaction’, which is not a surprise as artists tend to compliment acts that reinterpret their music with a different take on the original… and this is what Otis Redding did, utilising Booker T and the MG’s and the Memphis Horns to give ‘Satisfaction’ the full Stax treatment.

Otherwise, it’s just karaoke….


It’s logical then to be able to love two divergent versions of the same song, particularly if the act covering does it in a manner that breathes new life into it.

Joe Cocker’s ‘With a Little Help from my Friends’ would be a prime example but to be fair there’s lots of candidates…

For instance, Elton John’s ‘Your Song’ is a classic but Billy Paul’s jazzy, Philly-infused rendition completely updates it and takes it to a different level.
It’s well worth a listen if you haven’t heard it before….

Likewise in the early 70s Isaac Hayes went through a phase of taking middle of the road classics like ‘Walk on by’ and ‘Close to You’ transforming them into big orchestral masterpieces lasting up to 12 minutes long.
His versions weren’t necessarily better than the originals, but they were just as good in their own way and they were unmistakably Isaac Hayes. Listen to them and you’ll see where Barry White got his schtick.

In a similar vein, Wilson Pickett’s version of Hey Jude, featuring Duane Allman’s first recording session on guitar, is also a bit special and worth checking out on the playlist.

Of course, you can also add Clapton’s version of Bob Marley’s ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ and the Hendrix versions of All Along the Watchtower and Hey Joe to this list.

Nowadays of course we’re awash with tribute albums and cover versions and songs with samples that sound like old songs, so it’s hard to sort the wheat from the chaff, but if you dig deep enough there are always some diamonds.

As is my wont, I have made up a playlist of some classic 70s based covers, many of them mentioned in this piece which you’re welcome to dip into.

It would also be good to hear about some of your favourite covers on the FB page….