To be Bryan Ferry in 1974 was like being Bob Dylan in 1965, Clark Gable in 1939, and Oscar Wilde in 1895. He commanded his space, he bulldozed the rickety fence between sincerity and irony for a generation of acolytes, and his hair was fabulous. Running a parallel solo career while singer-songwriter-keyboardist for Roxy Music, Ferry released six albums in just two years. This solo live performance, recorded weeks after the release of Roxy’s fourth album Country Life and six months after his second covers collection Another Time, Another Place, captures Ferry and backing band in top form. No audible laryngitis here—Ferry’s vocal attack shakes the rafters. Expect improvisation and Live at the Royal Albert Hall, 1974 will disappoint. Novelty, though, it’s got—Ferry sounded like no singer in rock.
Leading the album with his cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” works as manifesto and adrenaline pumper. On 1973’s These Foolish Things, the song was fit for a Las Vegas floor show, stuffed with frantic brass and fruity backup vocals; the performance is a dissertation on finding the Mel Tormé in Mick Jagger. The Royal Albert Hall version applies a gutbucket rock approach, thanks to bassist John Wetton and drummer Paul Thompson. Always the art student, Ferry reveled in the contrast: the white tuxedo-clad dandy arching languorous quotation marks around the devil’s music. Yet he cared too. Over Eddie Jobson’s watery Fender Rhodes—one of the few concessions to the times—Ferry unleashes his most empathetic high notes on the first third of Another Time, Another Place’s self-written title track: a valentine to the records he grew up loving and whose rebellious spirit he’d honor by rewiring them.
But Ferry also possessed an actor’s instinct for understatement. Girl group and Motown hits moved him as much as the rock numbers. Although the live takes on the Paris Sisters’ “I Love How You Love Me” and Smokey Robinson’s “The Tracks of My Tears” don’t differ much from his studio ones, their professions of vulnerability aren’t what audiences expected from white male rock singers. Most impressive is his insistence on keeping the feminine pronouns intact on Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party”; David Bowie may have proclaimed the Church of Man-Love a holy place to be, but Ferry’s identification with the desires of young women went beyond queerness into symbiosis; for the length of a 45 rpm single, Ferry and those female characters share a commonality.
Concluding with the title track of his first solo album, an English standard from the 1930s, Live at the Royal Albert Hall, 1974 captures an artist reclaiming an earlier era’s detritus as his own. Ferry opened his mouth and dozens of heirs spilled out, few with his knowledge of R&B and fewer with the wisdom to posit themselves as the essential secondhand man: a conduit for a generation’s teenage pop dreams. He revolutionized the pop song by remaking/remodeling it as Pop Art: a readymade comprised of avant-garde electronic stylings, effects-laden guitars, mournful oboes, and lyrics that embraced romantic obsession by mocking it. So much labor because he believed obsession deserves cool appraisal, too. Singing about foolish things meant he believed in them.
