There comes a point in every august artist’s career where they’re forced to make an accommodation with their own past, a tacit acknowledgment that anything new they release exists in the shadow of their own back catalogue. In recent years, Bryan Ferry has done just that, tending his legacy via vast box set retrospectives of his solo work; reconvening Roxy Music for a 50th anniversary tour; and releasing a cover of Bob Dylan’s She Belongs to Me that seemed to discreetly reference the subtler moments on Roxy’s eponymous debut or 1973’s For Your Pleasure.
Anniversary tours, deluxe box sets, slyly referential cover versions: these are the things almost all artists of a certain vintage and standing indulge in. But Ferry has also taken a more idiosyncratic parallel approach to his history. On 2012’s The Jazz Age and 2018’s Bitter-Sweet, he reworked his back catalogue in the style of late-20s jazz, replete with knowing references to standards of the era: Love Is the Drug in the style of Duke Ellington’s The Mooche; 1977’s This Is Tomorrow appended with a reveille that nodded in the direction of Louis Armstrong’s West End Blues.
