I’ve always been in love with Bryan Ferry.
When I was 8, he appeared in a French mini-series called Petit-déjeuner compris, where he was playing himself, that is a rock star who had a crush for the owner of the hotel where he was staying with his band while on tour in Paris. At the time, I had no idea who he was, but I just found him extremely dashing and never forgot him.
(and no, everything wasn't beige in 1980 Paris)
Later, I got used to see Bryan on tv from time to time, always dressed in dark suit, singing covers (Lennon’s Jealous Guy) or uninteresting songs (Slave to Love) with a velvety voice that always secretly charmed me, no matter how bad the song was.
When, in 1990, I became really interested in indie music, non-punk Seventies music was still hold in contempt in the alternative music milieu I frequented, since for most of us, non-punk Seventies music = Genesis, The Eagles, Supertramp or Dire Straits, and David Bowie was this guy with weird eyes and pastel jackets dancing in the streets with Mick Jagger.
But then, one night, I heard Life on Mars on a classic rock radio and couldn’t believe my ears. Was it really the same Bowie I knew? With the help of my boyfriend’s father records collection, I realized that the 70s have not only been about an hotel called California, endless guitar solos or songs about wizards. Remember that was before the Internet: one had to listen to actual records or read books to find out stuff.
But I had to wait until Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine and its OS that featured Roxy Music’s flamboyant first single, Virginia Plain (1972) to connect with Bryan again.
However, despite my crush on him, his music (and certainly not his political views) or Roxy Music’s never became a favourite, and that’s why hearing Roxy Music’s Out of the Blue yesterday on the radio came as a revelation: this is the foundation of one of the most influential song of the 21st century, Radiohead’s Paranoid Android (1997). Out of the Blue’s influence is also very obvious in their hit Just, released 2 years earlier: at time, this is basically the same song.
It took me 14 years to connect the dots, and thanks to a media dinosaur par excellence: the radio. How un-modern is that?
