THE recording of "Frantic" was interrupted by last year's Roxy reunion tour. "A great experience" for Ferry, it also gave him valuable enforced time away from the album.
"It was great to take the energy of that tour, and some of the players, and ride on it. Colin Good, the pianist on the tour, produced it with Rhett Davies, and we reworked and remixed some stuff I'd initially done with Dave Stewart. I always find Bob Dylan's songs very poetic, and "Don't Think Twice" was done very simply and live, which is quite unusual these days. I'm always building these collages of sound, but it was great for me, as a singer, not to have to compete with a hundred other instruments."
"In days gone by, there was a king/ A fool for love, and all it brings" ("Fool For Love")
The French mediaeval-sounding song, "Ja Nun Hons Pris" - written by Richard The Lionheart - serves as a brief prologue to "Fool For Love", which has a kind of courtly feel, conjuring up other-worldly images of dragons and unicorns.
Elsewhere, there are namechecks for "iconic figures" "James Bond, Jackie O, Johnny Ray, Garbo", while "Goddess Of Love" muses over Marilyn. "For me to write something sparked by Monroe was long overdue - she was the ultimate goddess of the silver screen."
Another inspiration is Leadbelly, whose blues classic "Goodnight Irene" is interpreted here with Cajun musicians. "He's the first person I remember ever hearing on the radio as a young boy. It had a huge effect on me. Such yearning and longing in his voice. The love of the blues has stayed with me ever since."
The search extends into futurism on "Hiroshima", which probes a science-fiction cyberpunk world and also pays homage to the "nouvelle vague" films of Alain Resnais. Yet perhaps "San Simeon", a return to the scene of the beautiful crime that was Roxy's "In Every Dream Home A Heartache", paradoxically represents Ferry's most daring imaginative leap. "The bulk of those lyrics were written some time ago; some were from verses I left out of "Dream Home" - I never threw them away. The song is inspired by Orson Welles' movie Citizen Kane, with a castle haunted by the ghosts of a thousand Hollywood parties."
Timely and timeless, Bryan Ferry's music continues to seduce and surprise. Frantic is a lush rush.
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