A major star in England, where he is presently the darling of London pop society, Bryan Ferry has so far accumulated only a cult following in the States as lead singer for Roxy Music and as a result of his formidable solo album, These Foolish Things, released here less than six months ago. Like its predecessor, Another Time, Another Place offers a collection of "oldies," ranging from "You Are My Sunshine" and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" to the latter-day standards "It Ain't Me Babe" and "Help Me Make It through the Night."

Approaching Bryan Ferry's work is not easy. His public image is that of a high camp matinee idol, insouciant and supercilious. The quality of his voice is so affected (he sings from the top of his throat with an overly inflected British accent) and his phrasing so stilted that my first impulse was to dismiss him as a bad joke. After many listening hours I've grown to accept Ferry's re-creation of American pop music history as at least an inspired effort in scholarship, though it doesn't move me emotionally.

As in the last album, producer Ferry dresses up his material Seventies style with crashing studio machinery and radically reinterprets it in a way that both defines a personal mythology and accentuates psychological and social aspects of songs not apparent in earlier, familiar versions. "You Are My Sunshine" Ferry translates from a happy sing-along into an assertion of slavish devotion. "The 'In' Crowd" becomes a sinister droog anthem reeking of tyrannical snobbery. "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" Ferry treats as a glamorous, sexy torch song, in which pain is expressed with debonair tongue-in-cheek. Joe South's "Walk a Mile in My Shoes" he spews out, a bitter, sneering challenge. "It Ain't Me Babe" is a pompous march, complete with brass choir, the tirade of a Napoleonic narcissist. And his rendition of "Help Me Make It through the Night" is a chronicle of acute anxiety assuaged only by lust. These are the most outstanding exercises in "creative nostalgia" on an album that contains only one miss, a version of Sam Cooke's "Wonderful World" that trashes both the song and its black adolescent narrator. Though others may find some special meaning here also, Ferry seems to me to be too much the pop sophisticate to be able to sing simple, American teen classics (the big miss on the last album was "It's My Party").

An analogy to art history might well apply to Ferry as prototype of mid- to late-Seventies rock star. While the Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Who, etc., represented the "high renaissance" of rock in the mid-to late-Sixties, Ferry, Elton John, Bowie and others are busily ushering in rock "mannerism," wherein the elements of style that informed the 1964-70 era are polished to a high surface gloss and refined into sound artifacts whose humanism is distorted or opaque, whose eroticism is narcissistic, whose iconography is refracted into a multiplicity of aesthetic and moral contradictions. Ferry's work is self-conscious in just these ways. It both fascinates and repels, and there is no denying its significance. (RS 177)

STEPHEN HOLDEN