Bryan Ferry

This is a stage trick he learnt early, and kept. The first time I met him, I actually told him I was jealous of his hair. He said, “Ah, but the shape of your head suits it,” referring to my balding, and afterwards I waltzed down the street outside his West London mews residence with renewed vigour.

At this moment, Ferry is juggling commitments for his gilded rock outfit, Roxy Music, and the preliminary engagements for a new solo record, Olympia, which he has just completed after a lengthy and painful gestation. He says that the last time he cried, he was alone in his studio. It was the moment he had finished writing the lyrics for what has turned out to be one of the last songs on the record, Reason or Rhyme. It is a song that has existed in one form or another for over five years now.

Might?

“You are so immersed in the emotion of it sometimes that your whole life will flash before you during it. Certain things make that happen. I always find songs very hard to finish. Every time I have to go back to one to finish off a lyric I think: ‘I don’t want to go back into that painful world.’ Each time that I went into the world of that song I found myself very affected by it. In one sense, that is great, of course. But it is also…awful.”

Ferry often records wearing a tie. “I like what Nick Cave once said about always wearing a suit to go to his little office to write. ‘Because it’s serious work.’ That is cool.”

Jonathan Ross nicked your hair, didn’t he?

“He improved on the model,” says Ferry. This is a kind lie that envelops a deeper truth. Everything Ross does sartorially is a genuflection at the altar of Ferry’s exquisite taste: tailor- made suits, print ties, a fondness for loafers – all are nods of approval that only serve to prove that some men have it and some do not. It is a joy to note that, starting with his hair, Ferry has never stopped caring about getting it right.

This is not the only time the subject of hair comes up in our riveting, if rambling and distinctly non-linear conversation. It’s how Ferry talks, and for this very reason, he doesn’t like doing chat shows. “I’m not awfully good at promoting myself in that sense,” he says. “I guess some people like the sense of sitting on a sofa and talking about themselves and are very prompt at remembering their anecdotes. But I always forget the good things that happen. Shocking, really. The trouble with those sorts of shows is that yesterday it was Leonardo DiCaprio or whoever, and then the next day it’s another person, and it can become a little like a celebrity carousel that you are picked off for a moment and then put back on.”

For Ferry, Ross is still preferable to one of his American counterparts. “At least you’re not freezing to death like you are when you’re doing Letterman. You know how Americans are obsessed with air conditioning? The Green Room at Letterman is like being locked in a fridge. Everybody complains about it. But it does make you dance a little more…fitfully.”

Anyhow, back to hair. The day we meet, he has just spent the morning in an edit suite in Soho, supervising and art-directing the completion of the video of the first single from his album, another in the long canon of Ferry songs about dancing: You Can Dance. Among ardent Ferry fans, there is a complicit understanding that dancing is his close lyrical metaphor for sex; in all his best songs, there is something perennially pre-orgasmic or post-coital going on, lyrically.

The video was filmed in Wilton’s Music Hall, a historic East End landmark that was also used as a location in the first video for Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax. The video sounds like comfortingly familiar Ferry visual fodder. “Cast of thousands, all kinds of girls dancing around. Which is what we like. Hair in the wind, that sort of thing. It would make a rather good hair commercial, actually.” He doesn’t mean a modern one. “I don’t think hair commercials are quite as camp as they used to be,” he mutters disapprovingly.

Ferry’s cover girls are legend. For Olympia, he has revisited the idea of sanctifying a hot model on the sleeve of a pop record, and this time it’s Kate Moss, wearing a necklace that he had brought along to the shoot. He cast her himself after his son ISAAC got him her number through a mutual friend, and Ferry spent the shoot marvelling at her on-set professionalism. “Kate is the one, really, isn’t she?” he says. He looks delighted that she chose to do it, though unsurprised.

Over the 30 years since I first came across one, I have bought every album Ferry has released as an ongoing life treat. I found three I didn’t yet own at a car-boot sale once, liked the scuffed edges of their sleeves and immediately fell in love with his intoxicating rendition of These Foolish Things. In an occasional fantasy scenario played out in my head, this is the first dance at my wedding.

I bought Boys & Girls, his most commercially successful solo record, from an HMV shop in Manchester city centre on the day it was released, poring over the sleeve notes on the 109 bus home. He made that album in a world of New York luxe. “We started recording when I was renting Bette Midler’s apartment in Tribeca. Nile Rodgers set up a studio in the corner of the loft. I used to see that wonderful photographer with the bandana on his head in the elevator. Bruce Weber! That’s it.”

He is not a modular artist. Unlike Bowie, he has never, for example, made a drum-and-bass album. You can pick out any Ferry or Roxy Music record (aside from the first three wilfully strange albums) and the impact will be similar to the others. The two words I scribbled over my notes on Olympia, listening to it on repeat the weekend before meeting him, were ‘Virile’ and ‘Melancholy. “A handsome combination, Bond,” he says when I tell him, batting back his vague embarrassment at the compliment.

Because of some exemplary DJs’ fondness for the sheen and groove of songs like Angel Eyes and The Same Old Scene, there is a rolling and slightly disconcerting effort being made at his record label to remix old, untouchable classics and sell them again to whatever audience has yet to fall in love with his work. When you have slaved over these productions, as he always does, paying attention to every tiny detail of the master tapes, it seems almost blasphemous to sully them with momentary musical whimsy. Besides, potential fans all tend to find his music eventually. Sofia Coppola opened up a raft of new admirers with Bill Murray’s karaoke singsong to More Than This, delivered straight to a smitten Scarlett Johansson in the defining frames of Lost in Translation.

Like Grace Jones, Ferry does not make records in accordance with the musical times. This distinction elevates them both above the strictures of the pop-music model. Ferry is in rarefied company here. Morrissey works in the same way, as do Sade and Kate Bush. You wouldn’t expect a new collection of songs by prestige artists like these—who basically operate in playing fields of one—to have a particularly hard commercial impact, though Sade’s multimillion pound iTunes receipts appear to buck the rule. When sales are not the priority, an intimacy between listener and audience magically for the fans of all these acts tend to feel a sense of ownership over them, allowing the artists to hover somewhere above the notions of what is hot or not at a particular point in musical history. They are not avant-garde in the traditional sense of the word, making awkward or disorienting noise. They are singular.

Rather than with his British peers, of whom there are few, Ferry feels a latent kinship with the American R&B fraternity. “You see a beautiful girl like Rihanna or Beyoncé,” he says, “and they seem to have a similar engagement with their videos to what I had with my record sleeves. There always has to be an element of glamour. Yes. It’s about being fabulous. There are so few of us that are determined to hang on to the things that I believe in and respond to. I feel vindicated by them.”

He recently duetted at a charity function with the singer Alicia Keys, joining her for the second verse of a radically revamped Love Is the Drug. “She is a talent,” he responds, when asked what the deciding factor is in saying yes to a request like that. “She did something wonderful with the piano on it. It was quite a black audience, I believe. I suppose you would think of us as two different kettles of fish, but I understand where those artists come from.”

On both of my visits here, I have felt a dynamic similar to that of taking one of his records out of its sleeve. It feels just as you hoped it might. Both times he has been sporting a Prada tie; this one is knitted, in mustard and black. There is a delightful smell to the place, as if chemicals have never touched the furniture, and everywhere you look, a new visual stimulus pops out. There are three separate front doors, each one black gloss with brass fittings. He first moved into the basement, now his recording studio, almost 40 years ago and has accrued more of the property as time and finances have permitted. For the interview he sits in front of shelves full of fashion magazines, all lovingly catalogued. I spot a row of untouched copies of Michael Bracewell’s definitive book, Re-Make/Re-Model: Becoming Roxy Music, to his immediate right.

The soundtrack to his life, he says, consists of dusty old jazz records: “Coleman Hawkins or Charlie Parker,” which in a concession to modernity he listens to mostly on CD. “It adds texture to a room,” he says. Outside of the studio in which he creates it, he doesn’t allow his own music in the house. “In fact, if somebody put it on I wouldn’t go in the room.”

He doesn’t watch much TV. He has never seen an episode of The Wire or Lost or Man Men. “Actually I have seen one of Man Men. I thought it was rather slow, but I loved the clothes and the big girl with the red hair. Somehow I didn’t get involved.” He will allow himself the odd indulgence in one of the CSI cop show franchises. “CSI is a bit snappier. A bit more wham, bam. It’s all done in laboratories in the dark with very glamorous equipment everywhere. It’s a total fantasy, which I quite like.”

Ferry says that his male friendship patterns have remained steady over the years. “I don’t have any of what you might call ‘macho’ friends.” It hardly comes as a surprise. “One or two of my closest friends are in the banking world, but that’s unusual for me. That might be because they are more interested in collecting decorative things. That’s usually a factor in all my friendships. An aesthetic awareness. I don’t have men that I go to rugby with. My friendships aren’t like that at all. Though I do have one or two that I can discuss football with, but more as a social phenomenon than a technical game, ha ha.”

He mentions two individuals: a Swedish-American, New York-based art dealer who had been a house guest the previous weekend and the retired Oxford University don Dr. Jeremy Catto. “Your best friends are the ones who make you smile just by hearing their names.” He develops the point by mentioning designer Anthony Price and breaking into one of those smiles. He says that the first person he played Olympia to after completing it was the Guardian sports journalist Richard Williams, who will contribute sleeve notes. As then-editor of Melody Maker, Williams was also the first person he played the first Roxy Music demos to. It’s a circularity he finds pleasing. Age is no barrier to friendship with Ferry. “The best parties always have a spread of the generations,” he says, by way of a social etiquette flourish.

He sees no reason why schoolboys should not be taught how to shave properly, just as they are taught mathematics and geography. “Why does that not happen? Why do they not teach boys how to sharpen a cut-throat razor?” At this moment you cannot help but think of Ferry as a father. “I really do like shaving brushes, doing it properly.” He begins rambling, in his charming, slightly pathos-addled way, forgetting the anecdote just as he does on chat shows: “Do you have a beard all the time? Do you have one of those things to adjust the length? I like the feeling of wet shaving and I did have a kind of beard in the late ’70s. There are a few pictures of me around with one, but people didn’t actually think that it was me. It was strange. I always start shaving here, come to think of it.” He points to the immediate right of his lips.

“My first two motions are there and there.” He brushes an imaginary razor along the underside of his lip.

“And then I can’t think what I do afterwards. It would be an interesting study to film someone shaving every day, to see how the routine happens and how similar it is. Do we do exactly the same thing every day?”

He seems reassured, not numbed, by this possibility.

“I always get a little scared around here,” he continues, the imaginary razor by now reaching his throat. “Scared that I might cut myself. Funny, isn’t it? You always use a little bit of tissue if you do nick yourself. And then of course you feel slightly ridiculous when you walk out with it.” At this thought, the immaculate Ferry bristles. “That is a feeling unique to all men. We all know what that little disappointment, that failure, feels like.”