bryan ferry - avonmore

Avonmore is rapidly becoming one of my favourite Bryan Ferry albums. It took a little while but it's one of those albums that really does improve dramatically with repeated plays.

 

It's much better than my first impressions led me to think. But also it's far less of a new album than I first thought, with, I reckon, just two recently composed songs out of ten!
 

The good points first - it sounds terrific, the musicianship is as slick and fluid as you'd expect and the tunes themselves have sneaky little hooks that really lodge themselves in your brain. I do wonder about Ferry's ongoing quest to lose himself entirely within a cocoon of backing singers, and a cast of thousands of musicians, but the overall impression is still one of a cracking album, albeit led by one of the world's shyest men.   
 

On the downside, it sounds remarkably similar to 2010's Olympia, to 1994's Mamouna, to the unreleased Alphaville (1997) and Horoscope (1990) too. But that's because many of the tracks have actually been recorded, constructed and layered over the last 25 years. Albums like Frantic from 2002 or Dylanesque from 2007 had more of an organic band feel, genuinely sounding like a smallish group was actually playing these songs together in real time. But here we are back once again to Ferry lost in the studio surrounded by hundreds of hours of recordings of hundreds of musicians and painstakingly stitching them all together to produce a swirly densely layered patchwork. And quite clearly much of this album has been recorded over the past  25 years. Guitar licks from Nile Rodgers recorded in 1990, nudge against licks from Oliver Thompson recorded 20 years later. Indeed one of the guitar players, David Williams, sadly died about ten years ago - yet here he is, all over Ferry's new album! 

 

"Loop De Li" and "Midnight Train" are little altered from their original forms on Horoscope, the unreleased album recorded between 1989 and 1992. There are more overdubs, more of those seemingly endless little guitar licks and riffs, a newer breathier vocal in the up to date Ferry style and a good number of extra backing vocals - but the basic rhythm tracks for these two are the same as those laid down in 1989. Over the years Ferry has actually mined Horoscope extensively - "NYC", "The Only Face", "Gemini Moon" and "The 39 Steps" were reworked for Mamouna and the updated version of "Mother Of Pearl" was issued on a film soundtrack ten years later. Now we have "Loop De Li" (called "Your Love Has Died " on Horoscope) and "Midnight Train" which only leaves one track from Horoscope ("Death Of Me") that hasn't been eventually issued. And to be honest I'd argue that there are lot of elements of "Death Of Me" in the cracking Avonmore song "One Night Stand".  

 

Other reworks on Avonmore include a number of songs that originated during the Taxi sessions of 1993. Fed up with getting bogged down in Horoscope Ferry decided to record an albums of covers quickly and with minimum of fuss - so Taxi was recorded, mixed and released within six months! That's incredibly fast for Ferry! He recorded many more covers than he needed - the wonderful version of "Send In The Clowns" on Avonmore is just a mildly updated version of a 1993 recording. And various other Taxi era tracks have been used over the years - for example "All Along The Watchtower" on Dylanesque, "Goodnight Irene" on Frantic, "One Night" on Olympia. But the Taxi sessions also succeeded in getting his own songwriting going again and there were a good number of unreleased new songs recorded during 1993 - they are mostly unfinished with fragmentary vocals or la la la murmuring, but three of them have now been finished - a lovely ballad now called "Lost", the sharply rocking "Driving Me Wild" and the very catchy "Special Kind Of Guy". But all are still very recognisable from their 20 year old original forms.  
 

So that leaves us with just three tracks that originated in the last few years - "Johnny and Mary" is a cover of Robert Palmer's song, recorded last year with Norwegian DJ Todd Terje. On Ferry's new album it's been slightly remixed.
 

The title song - "Avonmore" is the hardest song on the record, with some cracking lead guitar work from Oliver Thompson. He co-wrote the track which is how I know it's quite recent as Ollie was a member of Ferry's band between 2007 and 2011 - and that's very recent in Ferry terms. The only other new song is the unusual "Soldier of Fortune" which was written and recorded with Johnny Marr, who has guested at a number of Ferry's live shows over the last couple of years. Marr also worked with Ferry on Bête Noire back in 1986, but apparently this is a newly written song.
 

So it may be Bryan Ferry's new album, but only two genuinely new tracks have been written since 2007 (plus a cover recorded last year) and the remaining seven songs were actually begun between 20 and 25 years ago! 
 

But, ultimately, does it matter? For everyone but the hardcore Ferry fans these are technically new songs, the album hangs together remarkably well, and it sounds superb, Ferry is out there plugging away, doing more publicity for this album than he's done for years, the live shows are still enjoyable and well attended, he looks good, and, although he's lost a fair bit of vocal range, he still sings well.

 

By any standards he's keeping very busy, for a man of 69 he's doing remarkably.