The magic of Bryan Ferry

The accepted line about Bryan Ferry is that his is one of the greatest reinventions in English pop culture: Peter York said, in 1976, that his life was ‘the best possible example of the ultimate art-directed existence’. But watching him at the Albert Hall, I couldn’t help thinking of my father. That’s not to diminish the show — which was a lush and all-enveloping pleasure, like getting into bed in a very good hotel — but I couldn’t help wondering if there was actually something very specific about Ferry that tends to get ignored: his generation.

He’s 74 now, though from a distance you might put him in his mid-fifties, especially in his beautifully cut suit. And he is a product of postwar Britain, specifically of the Butler Education Act of 1944, which opened up grammar school and university to the likes of him (and my father). That alone enabled the son of a farm labourer from County Durham to transform himself, and it’s often struck me how the working-class children of the postwar years felt no shame about their upward mobility — my dad never did — while today you can’t move for the prosperous and well-educated claiming to be horny-handed children of toil.

Ferry didn’t stop at getting a job in management and a Rover 2000, like my dad. Instead he became a piece of living art, using pop music as a means to portray himself as a minor aristocrat. But the music he played at the Albert Hall was not smug or self-satisfied; beneath the richness of the 11-piece band, often joined by Ferry on electric piano, there always lurked a feeling of isolation. Songs that were ostensibly about heartbreak — ‘Dance Away’, ‘The Thrill of It All’ — sounded as if they were coming from a narrator outside the room, looking in at the nobs in black tie.