His lyrics are hopeless, his covers are catastrophic, yet I still love Bryan Ferry

There were two new albums I wanted for Christmas — the Bryan Ferry and the Pink Floyd — and to my delight I got both. Others may prefer the unknown and the experimental as presents, but at this time of year I favour the pop music equivalent of a decent scarf or a new pair of slippers. The Pink Floyd we shall leave until later, on the reasonable grounds that I haven’t listened to it yet. But the new Ferry album, Avonmore (BMG), is splendid, as warm and elegant as a cashmere scarf, as perfectly snug as the fluffiest slippers. For those of us who have followed Ferry moderately slavishly for several decades, it ticks all the boxes. And what are those boxes, precisely?

It’s the same but different. We would be foolish to expect anything drastically new from one of rock’s elder statesmen, and we are not fools. Avonmore sounds a lot like his last album of original material, Olympia, and a little like all his and Roxy Music’s albums since Flesh + Blood in 1980. (What it doesn’t sound like is any of the younger, sparkier albums before that, for which critical consensus will never forgive him.) There are the same discreet rhythms, the same elegant washes of keyboard, miles over there somewhere, and because Ferry can afford the best, we have the great Marcus Miller on bass, giving the songs some very un-English groove and bite. Beyond that, there are so many guitars and guitarists you can’t even begin to make them all out. On one track, nine are listed, including Johnny Marr, Nile Rodgers and Chris Spedding. No doubt Ferry thought, well, we’ve got seven, we may as well get another two, although I note that one, David Williams, actually died in 2009. But this isn’t a guitar album, in any sense.