When Roxy Music set England afire with their self-titled debut in 1972 and the maximal For Your Pleasure less than a year later, their bizarre, diffident frontman seemed less comfortable with the act than his bandmates. Bryan Ferry wore tiger stripes and devilish eyeliner, coiffing his hair a few brushes past heartthrob. Beyond the glam, you could see glimmers of another artist who came into focus on his solo albums—which he somehow recorded while his main band released five masterpieces in three years. If Ferry of Roxy Music was outlandish, alluring, even villainous, solo Ferry was a genteel civilian alter-ego. Gone were the garish outfits; the singer played it straighter, performing covers of nostalgic songs from his youth. He had initiated a long process of feeling more secure in his skin. The white coat and black bowtie he donned on the sleeve of his 1974 solo outing Another Time, Another Place became his signature costume for decades, a campy refraction of reality: This son of a County Durham coal miner had cracked the glass ceiling of the British class system.
Awareness of class always swirled around Roxy Music and the public antics of their leader. Even among his sybaritic peers in post-Swinging London, Ferry’s playboy reputation stood out—he was emblematic of new money, a scandalously quick ascent up the UK’s social strata. Roxy may have been the consummate “art school” band, but this hardly indicated born privilege. Government-subsidized art programs offered disadvantaged Brits an alternative education, a way to transcend the village or council estate. By the start of Ferry’s studies at Newcastle University in the 1960s, many of these scrappy and accomplished academies had become hubs of pop art and rock‘n’roll, an environment that introduced him to a nexus of thought about postmodernism, stardom, and fashion. He knew that flamboyance befit Roxy Music—especially when Brian Eno was a member until his 1973 departure. Yet he began to realize that this wasn’t the right look for Bryan Ferry.
At the age of thirty-nine, Ferry redefined himself on his landmark sixth solo record, Boys and Girls—but only after he remade/remodelled his whole band. He took a seven-year hiatus from releasing records under his own name following 1978’s The Bride Stripped Bare, a period that enabled him to shift the gravitational center of Roxy’s sound toward haunting pop, which felt both original and reverent of the traditional songcraft he admired. The group had a massive European hit with their cover of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” just two months after the Beatle was murdered—exactly the sort of omnipresent, generational anthem that Ferry tackled on his solo albums. He sang about romance with less freneticism and, on stage, swanned around like he had a Caesar’s Palace residency in his future. Though the sessions for 1982’s Avalon were notably druggy, Ferry tried to foster a perception as a family-focused husband in search of peace, which matched the mature tone of his new tunes. The name of Roxy Music’s opus, Country Life, had seemed like a joke when it dropped in 1974; by their 1983 break-up, the same title had become a diary entry. As Margaret Thatcher defunded art departments and wreaked untold havoc on the progressive gains of the Labour Party, Ferry basked in the Sussex countryside with his wife and growing lineage, when he was not tinkering with his music at one or another international studio. He glided toward life’s middle, posing for men’s fashion magazines and acting charming with reporters, avoiding the right-wing banter and hanky-panky (he was a newlywed, after all), but otherwise aging into the natty and cartoonish vision of refinement that characterizes his public persona to this day.
Boys and Girls came out in 1985, in the heat of such a queasy, conservative historical juncture, and it brims with a slick luxury that suffused the culture. The 38-minute collection is, if not quite perfect, a work of exquisite perfectionism. This is among the earliest mainstream pop records on which instrumental flourishes don’t seem played, as if on a cue, but placed, as if in a visual field. Each of the nine songs is like a room that you can wander, a gorgeous, ultra-designed space for daydreams. Cuts that were derided at the time for their aimlessness and repetition—“The Chosen One,” “Stone Woman”—now seem like showpieces that transform with each listen, their grooves bare scaffolding on which to hang surprising details.
On Boys and Girls, Ferry completed his molting from rock vocalist into a chanteur with an electronic edge. Roxy oriented their final few albums around rhythms that producer Rhett Davies helped them program on a rudimentary drum machine. Boys and Girls grew from similar roots: one of Davies’ beats mated with a bare-bones figure that Ferry wrote on his CP-80 electro-acoustic piano. After, they steadily adorned their demos with parts, performed by a roulette wheel of notable friends and trusted session musicians. (The guitarists are so varied they should have appeared together exactly once, at a Rock Hall induction ceremony: Nile Rodgers, Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler, among others.) Ferry gave these players latitude, creating little habitats for each of their contributions, and cobbled the recordings together in the studio with the assistance of Davies and engineer Bob Clearmountain. Instead of fine-tuning compact pop vehicles, they shaped languorous moodpieces that reveal themselves like dishes in a fancy fusion restaurant—bite by bite.
These big-budget, audiophile-friendly confections may seem earmarked for a burgeoning yuppie demographic who had retired their protest signs and wanted to lounge in rec rooms and test their stereos. Yet Ferry was hardly pandering—whether or not he had mellowed with age, he was only more intent on making art that aligned with his creative ambitions. He almost struck first single “Slave to Love” from the tracklist for being too straightforward, a song that became an enduring smash in the UK and crossed over, to a degree, in the U.S, where Ferry lacked the same magnetic relationship with audiences. The honeyed ballad’s reverberant strumming, entwined guitar solos and insistent backing vocals give Boys and Girls a welcome jolt. “To need a woman/You’ve got to know/How the strong get weak/And the rich get poor,” goes a memorable line. Ferry plays the eternal romantic, who still can’t help but make light of how a grand passion cleaned out his bank account.
Boys and Girls is Ferry’s best-selling solo full-length and his most sincere. His counterculture days were the opportunity to hone a sense of irony. On Boys and Girls, he earnestly indulged a Sharper Image vision of pop that allowed him to twist knobs and fuss with settings—in other words, to be a different side of himself. An R&B buff, Ferry evokes the Quiet Storm torchbearers like Sade and Patrice Rushen; his flirtations are airy, almost sotto voce. At certain moments, they sound textural, akin to another layer of processed guitar. The record’s sequencing resembles abstract electronic music: opener “Sensation” heats to a roiling boil that follow-up “Slave to Love” turns to a simmer. Interlude “A Waste Land” presents a chiming, Eno-esque pulse that the sullen chords of “Windswept” brush off of the disc’s surface. Each inclusion has its own atmosphere and weather, like a planet that the listener passes in close orbit.
Boys and Girls’ influence spread throughout the ’80s, particularly among artists with prior triumphs and a desire to maintain their currency in a transforming biz. A year after this CD landed on shelves, Peter Gabriel released his tour de force So, which spiked Ferry’s sultry example with the sort of skyscraping choruses that Boys and Girls largely avoids. In a track like “Windswept,” you can hear the germ of Sting’s 1987 potpourri Nothing Like The Sun, with its conception of the studio as a shiny, modern forum for a melange of musical cultures. Both of these multiplatinum platters are looser than Ferry’s, and each was more attractive to elusive markets in the U.S., where Boys and Girls went a paltry Gold. Yet, as ever, Ferry provided the blueprint: He figured out how to be a middle-aged pop singer without either capitulating to irrelevance or chasing the quicksilver energy of youth.
Ferry continued to hone this vaporous aesthetic on 1987’s Bête Noire and 1994’s Mamouna. Yet Boys and Girls has the thrill of invention, with more distinct peaks than its successors. The record’s novel sensibility lets it pull off being stiff and listless at points—an occupational hazard of penning midtempo music and also a signal of Ferry’s mindset. Boys and Girls never insists on hogging your concentration, because this disc deals in ambient qualities of experience: the slow churn of time and how it catches people in its gears, spitting them out at an older age. Ferry, down bad for most of the runtime, seems by its end as if he’s chastely riding in a carriage beside Emily Dickinson. As he croons: “Who’s that crying in the street/Death is the friend I have yet to meet.”
His father died in 1984, and the blue-collar industriousness the songwriter associated with his dad surges through these numbers. “Footsteps in the dark come together / Got to keep on moving or I will die,” he responds to a character called “Mama” on the foreboding, infectious “Don’t Stop The Dance.” The most explicit composition about being a son, “The Chosen One,” contrasts mortality and prosperity. “Gold and silver walk the main street,” Ferry intones in an early verse, but transports us somewhere existential by the outro: “take my spirit, I must follow.” Its muscular, messianic refrain—“the chosen one”—weighs heavily with repetition, like a taunt from his own ego. Ferry, circa 1985, was a craftsman and an obsessive, self-involved and single-minded, which is one way of staving off the worst of grief. Without Roxy Music to mastermind, Bryan Ferry became his primary project: a pop silhouette for a skilled artist to flesh out.
Boys and Girls graced Ferry, England’s favorite diva in a double-breasted suit, with fresh laurels and attention. Yet the record’s commitment to both precision and languidity also suggested how he might operate behind the scenes. One can imagine him as a dance producer, shrouded by the fog of the club, protected from spectators and revelers by his mixing board—after all, in the early Roxy years, he hid behind a synthesizer at the side of the stage. On Boys and Girls, this former art student figured out how to be simultaneously figurative and abstract, fleshy and incorporeal, a balance he would modulate on future releases. He stood front and center—where his fans expected to find him—and happily began to dissolve into the tableau.
