Humanizing The Vacuum

Exhaustion, boredom, a Campari and soda guzzled backstage – Bryan Ferry can no longer sing. At last night’s Fillmore Miami Beach performance in support of an album he supposedly cut last year called Olympia, Ferry confronted the problem with admirable forthrightness: when a Roxy Music number demanded high notes he could no longer hit or a complex harmonic shift for which he couldn’t squeeze sufficient air from his lungs, he would nod or point towards one of the pairs of backup singers positioned stage left and right and they’d take over. After all, Ferry is in his mid sixties, and, besides, even during his Roxy days he projected an air of baffled amusement onstage; he has never been one of those introspective artists who discover a talent for the outsized gesture before an audience. Ferry saved his passion for his records. If someone can link to a classic Roxy or solo live clip in which he inhabits the song as fully as he does in the studio, by all means. As I’ve pointed out a couple times over the years, there probably has never been a more boring major rock and roller than Bryan Ferry: not one memorable exchange with the press, no quips, no reading suggestions that send you running to the library. No wonder Ferry reveres T.S. Eliot: as turbulent a private life as Ferry no doubt endures you will look towards the work in vain for a single autobiographical crumb.

Still, the rather well-paced show confirmed Ferry’s oddball grace. He may condescend to the yeoman work of album promotion, but the audience still felt affection for him, going so far as to regard the slinky writhing dancers and black and white clips of anodyne lovers that looked like Armani ads as evidence that this man incarnates romance. Capital-r-Romance is more accurate. Ferry’s most lasting contribution to rock is illuminating the lengths to which we’ll soar for the sake of a fantasy, the depths to which we’ll sink to believe in a myth; belief in a god is redundant when, as the man himself wrote in his greatest song, “the search for perfection/your own predilection/goes on and on and on and on.” He may have found a dram of it in his backing band. Chris Spedding brought his expert twang and slide talents, the man known in Roxy circles as The Great Paul Thompson drummed with unexpected vibrancy and force, and a snake-figured young man with long center-parted hair named Oliver Thompson proved as apt an effects man as Phil Manzanera or Neil Hubbard were. Ferry himself played more keyboard than expected, including an elegant variation on his solo in the otherwise vacuous “My Only Love” (for which Ferry has had an undue regard in the last ten years). As for the ostensible purpose for this tour, it got a couple of airings: the galumphing “Alphaville” and a solid “Reason or Rhyme,” the best song on Olympia.

But if you’re over, say, forty-five you pay sixty dollars so that you and your sweetie can sway to “Avalon” and “Don’t Stop the Dance,” jab your fist to “Let’s Stick Together” and “Kiss and Tell,” or chant “Love is the Drug,” all of which were performed after intermission in what amounted to a victory lap. The artist’s freshly moussed hair accounted for the sudden vibrancy of these performance after a rather sleepy first half in which the pair of Dylan covers and appearance of 1972′s “If There is Something” were the highlights, especially when Ferry, with admirable poise, ceded the most impassioned, ludicrous verses of his career (“I’d put roses ’round your door, sleep in the garden/growing potatoes by the sco-o-o-o-o-o-r-r-e!”) to one of the backup vixens. Don’t call it humility though – the Love God merely demonstrated how thoroughly his fans had absorbed his prayers.