“Star,” Bryan Ferry’s first original song in 10 years, stuck in my head from the moment I heard it last summer. Based on a sketch from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and featuring the words of the visual and performance artist Amelia Barratt, it fuses the past and future in a seductive mix. So seductive that Valentino’s Alessandro Michele used “Star” in a campaign video at Christmastime, its electronic rhythms providing the soundtrack for a group of pretty young things in Michele mufti out for decadent night at the club.
It was a mere prelude. Tomorrow, Ferry is releasing an album of songs with Barratt, Loose Talk, which feature his music, some of it lifted from unreleased demos of his own that go back decades, and her spoken word vocals. It’s unlike anything else in a 50-year oeuvre that dates to Roxy Music’s dazzling self-titled debut in 1972. Ferry is a songwriter whose lyrics Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon compared to “open-heart surgery.” Let’s say he’s rather particular about his words, but here he gave Barratt the scalpel.
“I’m so old now that I can try anything,” laughs Ferry, who will turn 80 in September, on a Zoom call from his home studio in London. “I mean I’ve wanted for a long time to do more instrumental things—for years. And when I met Amelia and heard her texts and her delivery of those texts, I thought they would be great to try with music. Perhaps it gives her writing a bigger platform, and it’s given me a lot of freedom as a musician.”
Before my first listen I was skeptical, preferring sung lyrics to the spoken word. But Ferry’s compositions, which were polished in the studio, are as beguiling as ever, and they complement Barratt’s observations, which tend to the economically sublime. “We’re going to have to start tightening the taps, tying up the live wires, and cutting the white noise out,” she says on “White Noise,” a song based on a demo from the early ’70s. “I work very much by instinct and feeling, rather than over-intellectualizing,” says Ferry. The music is very spare, very sparse, just me on piano and a bass player, Alan Spenner, who played with a lot of feeling and very few notes. You can feel there’s a sort of passion there lurking underneath this everyday, kind of wistful set of words.”
