BRYAN FERRY & AMELIA BARRATT
Let’s Stick Together
If you thought Bryan Ferry was easing into semi-retirement, forget it. For his first album of new songs in more than adecade, he’s teamed up with performance artist Amelia Barratt for the remarkable genre-shiftingLoose Talk. The pair tell us of their shared bleakness and mischief.
JOHN EARLS
Bryan Ferry’s first album of new material since 2014, Loose Talk is described by latest collaborator Amelia Barratt as “a conversation between two artists”
©Albert Sanchez
Next to the vintage Trident mixing desk at Bryan Ferry’s magnificent studio opposite the Kensington Olympia exhibition hall, a simple sign about four inches square states “BIG WIN” in capitals, in the font you might see on a fairground test-your-strength machine.
Ferry is pleased when
Classic Pop
’s reporter asks him what it does.
“Well, sometimes I do have a good idea,” he grins. “When I do, that’s a big win.” He presses the sign, so that BIG WIN is lit up like a torch. It’s such an unexpectedly... cheap... effect, Ferry guffaws delightedly at how the sign upends the otherwise exemplarily classy console room.
Being shown around Ferry’s studio is an incredible privilege. Forget yachts and pink poodles, more popstars should pour their wealth into a bloody great big studio in one of the swankiest parts of central London.
The studio’s reception area has a huge pink neon Roxy Music sign and a large coffee table, immaculately bedecked with every possible book on Ferry and Roxy.
It also allows Ferry – dressed as casually as Bryan Ferry surely ever gets, shirt collar peeping out under a comfy plain jumper – to demonstrate where he’s happiest. “I’m in here all week,” he says, as he settles into an upstairs study for our interview. “I’d have everyone working at the weekends if I could, but they refuse.” Another delighted chuckle. For a singer generally portrayed as pop’s suavest gentleman of leisure, it should be noted that Bryan Ferry is comprised of at least 75% mischief.
That playfulness is at the core of Ferry’s latest album. His first record of new songs since
Avonmore
in 2014,
Loose Talk
is a collaboration with performance artist Amelia Barratt. They met in 2019 at an exhibition by prominent artist
Stephen Buckley, as Barratt explains: “The art world is ultimately pretty small, so you see the same people at private views. Bryan and I had some mutual friends, so we were introduced. That’s when I found out Bryan has a background as a painter, which was the beginning of us realising we have some overlaps.”