When Bryan Ferry lamented, in 1973’s “Mother of Pearl,” “If you’re looking for love in a looking glass world/It’s pretty hard to find,” he had not reckoned with how easy the looking would become. Twenty years later, on the cusp of his fifties, the former Roxy Music singer-songwriter released the most insular solo album of his career. He had already exhausted the patience of some reviewers. “Ferry seems increasingly like Narcissus, enraptured by his own reflection in the pond—and the bottomless depth below,” Rolling Stone’s Anthony DeCurtis hissed about 1987’s Bête Noire.
Yet to gaze so intently at oneself bespeaks not just narcissism but also confidence. Ferry had spectacular hair and he knew it. Teased and moistened by expert hands, Mamouna is the album equivalent of Ferry’s bangs: singular, an occasion for envy and amusement, an essential component of his mythos—and often genuinely beautiful. This three-disc set includes that 1994 album; previously unreleased tracks Ferry had recorded for a project called Horoscope; and demos, some of which date back to 1989. “The demos I do tend to become the masters,” he explained to Creem in 1993. “They’re on the same tape, and more foliage just grows around them.” Of course the package is excessive—do Ferry fans expect minimalism? He’s a foliage guy.
Horoscope was meant to be Ferry’s new album. He fucked up: He should’ve known not to release the title before the product. That old devil, writer’s block, paralyzed him; the lyrics, which he’d spent years paring down to pointillist suggestion, were a problem. He had no manager and no producer. For a hoarder confronted by the possibilities of 56-track recording, it must’ve been like Narcissus walking into a funhouse. Flailing, he resorted to a tested strategy: He and new producer Robin Trower, of Procol Harum, knocked out a covers album called Taxi, notable for a shivery essential version of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” and an “All Tomorrow’s Parties” whose lounge-pop vibes might’ve birthed Air. Rejuvenated, he returned to his original material, now called Mamouna, Arabic for good luck, of which he’d been in short supply.
There is nothing remotely Arabic or Middle Eastern about Mamouna; there is nothing remotely human about Bryan Ferry, this Holy Spirit of Divine Melancholy. But hiring Trower made an important difference. Mamouna has a crispness. The guitars and keyboards don’t flicker and dissolve, as on Boys and Girls, or clang and chime, as on Bête Noire—Trower centers them in the mix. Most importantly, Ferry doesn’t peek from behind the beats like he had done to coquettish effect since 1982: He’s upfront and declarative, taking advantage of his upper register before rust enfeebled it. Consonants matter again. “I wanna be just everything/More than you need/I wanna hear you call’/Nothin’ but me,” he declares on opener “Don’t Want to Know” over David Williams’ Chic-indebted riffing, and he doesn’t let up.
Unencumbered by generic sessioneers who might play “better,” Mamouna makes a strong case for Ferry as a musician. “Don’t Want to Know” begins with what sounds like sonar and what the credits cutely call “sonic emphasis,” provided by Brian Eno. Reuniting in the studio after bumping into each other on holiday (“very Somerset Maugham,” Ferry quipped), he and his erstwhile bandmate compete to come up with the coolest keyboard parts: Ferry’s synth-oboe, plus a piano hook conjuring The Exorcist theme (Ferry as an amour-obsessed Pazuzu?), versus Eno’s sampled film dialogue on “Your Painted Smile” (Ferry wins). “I could never be the one,” he moans, without irony, on the title track, a worried mid-tempo shuffle with Shaft rhythm guitar, synthesized choirs, and lovingly drawn-out syllables attempting to summon The Beloved by sheer force of ardor. It fades into the ether as buoyantly as “Over You,” with a piano coda of beguiling concision.
One way to listen to Mamouna is to consider the songs as structures around which “foliage” gathers. Another way is to read them as palimpsests on which Ferry rewrites his evocations of reckless but never quite hysterical desires. The “chained and bound” line from 1985’s “Slave to Love” floats into “Mamouna.” The “Live to Tell” chug (courtesy of Madonna co-producer Patrick Leonard) of Bête Noire’s “The Name of the Game” gets repurposed as “Which Way to Turn.” The acoustic and synth basses on “The 39 Steps” recall “The Chosen One,” also from Boys and Girls. But “The 39 Steps” is the superior take: Ferry sings through gritted teeth as the track accumulates momentum while Eno’s gahoozits flicker like porch lights in fog. Trower and Neil Hubbard’s guitars sound aggrieved. There’s an extraordinary moment where Ferry swaps his anguished flutter for a growl at the end of the line, “Let’s make a move!” Some fragments (like an early version of “Your Painted Smile” with guide vocal) suggest that Ferry could’ve eked out a sideline as a film composer.
Unfazed by developments outside itself, Mamouna plays like a speech by a cult leader. It has incoherences, like “N.Y.C.” (called “Desdemona” on Horoscope), a garbled take on Tutu-era Miles Davis, or an amelodic nothing called “Gemini Moon.” The sight of guitarist Phil Manzanera and reedman Andy Mackay in the credits should quicken no pulses; Ferry’s practices reduce them to contributors as interchangeable as Nile Rodgers and “syn-sax,” respectively. Eno does co-write the anguished shimmy of “Wildcat Days” (Eno’s instrumental credit: “sonic distress”), a wee thing, but if it led to the far better “I Thought” on 2002’s Frantic, then it was worth it. Other ideas, like a nine-minute re-make/re-model of Roxy’s “Mother of Pearl” recorded for Horoscope, make me wonder why Trower didn’t walk.
A middling critical response and okay sales did little to advance Ferry’s reputation as rival David Bowie was finding a new audience in Nirvana fans and Britpoppers. The Horoscope tracks, at least three of which are earlier drafts of finished Mamouna material, went on ice until 2015’s Avonmore, when “Loop de Li” made an appearance with a vocal that sounds like it was grafted from an early-’90s recording. There he was again, 21 years later, chipping away at new structures based on older ones.
There’s a special thrill when an artist whose catalog you’ve gorged on springs a new album on you, and I took to Mamouna hard. On his spring 1995 tour, he sported a fabulous poofy white shirt and, of course, a keytar—the only performer I’ve seen take the instrument seriously. His band played a double-digit-length version of “The 39 Steps” that teased out its white funk possibilities. Three years away from realizing in which direction my lusts pointed, I studied Bryan Ferry because his vision of romance lacked corporeality; his hesitations and shudders corresponded to desires I had no wish to see gratified, much less defined. A manifesto, a last will and testament, Mamouna delineates a worldview that turns loucheness into a singular kind of self-help. If Ferry’s sighs and chord changes made him a better boyfriend or husband, then the obscenity of the album’s budget was pocket change. But then he never has seemed to need other people much.
