Departure lounge
Bryan’s ninth solo studio LP gets the deluxe treatment; adding previously unreleased ‘lost’ studio album, Horoscope.
By Andrew Male.
A step up: Bryan Ferry conjures an exquisite illusion.
Bryan Ferry
★★★★
Mamouna
BMG. CD/DL/LP
BRYAN FERRY first began work on the album that would become Mamouna in 1989. Between that year and 1993, when he released the languid covers LP Taxi, he suffered some kind of writer’s block. Sequestered in his north London studio without a manager or a producer, creating 56-track instr umentals and believing he was, in his own words, “the Duke Ellington of whatever”, he recorded an entire album, entitled Horoscope, which was finished then shelved; deemed “too fussy, too complex, too dense”. Believing the original title to be cursed and running up costs he’d later equate with director Michael Cimino’s studio-destroying 1980 vanity project Heaven’s Gate, he renamed the work Mamouna (Arabic for “good luck”) and, in 1991, enlisted the help of Procol Harum guitarist Robin Trower as producer.