The Most Foolish Thing of All
By Nick Sweeney
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In 1973, when I wasn’t wondering how David Bowie had managed to bring the entire cosmos down to earth for our critical examination, I was pondering how to become as stylish as his glam rival, Roxy Music’s singer Bryan Ferry. I never worked it out, though found out quickly that I could wear the clothes and sing the songs and still be exactly where I was the next day: living a mundane working-class existence in a grim corner of South London. Such is escapism. You manage for a while, then its elastic snaps you back to square one.
I was already a long-term Roxy Music fan. Never having heard of them, I’d blundered into one of their rare low-key gigs before their hit, “Virginia Plain,” catapulted them to festivals, television, and worldwide success. It was at an unglamorous college in London’s Waterloo, where a friend was attending a day-release class. He was hanging around the bar in the hope of running into a girl on his course. The good news was that he did. The bad news was that she looked coldly on his cringing endeavour to get her to go out with him and dismissed it in the space of the longest minute of his life, with me keeping not quite enough distance. Luckily, there was a band on. We admired the busy bequiffed crooner and his baritone that changed effortlessly into a tenor, bending his knees, showing his teeth and his palms, running from the mic to the piano at the side of the stage to bash out solos that verged on an odd but almost pleasing kind of jazz. We got so close to the stage that the weird keyboard player, stepping back to reach out for a plug or a lead or whatever – he was all leads and plugs and glitter and feathers and all hair and, somehow, all bald – stood on my friend’s hand. Ouch. We were amazed by them and at the same time forgot about them almost at once.
When I chanced on them miming to the first of their many hits, “Virginia Plain,” on weekly pop TV show Top of the Pops – in a performance now inevitably dubbed iconic – I missed my friend not being there to nudge and say, “Hey, that’s that band.” I bought that single and the first album and became somewhat obsessed by them.
I wasn’t enthusiastic about the imminent release of either Bowie’s or Ferry’s covers albums, respectively Pin Ups and These Foolish Things. I was unexcited by a bunch of forgotten sixties tunes, even done by Bowie and what was left of his Spiders band. Not entirely convinced that Bowie had already moved on, I wanted more spiky-haired Ziggy Stardust and more lightning-flashed Aladdin Sane. From Bryan Ferry, I really didn’t want another clutch of dusty old tunes, wanted more of that suave European sophistication delivered alongside some engaging noise manipulation verging on the avant-garde. I didn’t at all like what I had heard about These Foolish Things. What was more, creative maverick (and heavy-booted hand-crusher) Brian Eno had left the band, and Stranded, the first Roxy Music album without him, had yet to come out. I thought things were a bit up in the air with Roxy. Was I going to have to revert to Slade? The Sweet? The even-then desperate Gary Glitter? Surely not.
Gosh, the things a 16-year-old will dwell on… All this wasteful angst vanished when I passed a record shop near work. Drawn in by the window display for These Foolish Things, I ordered a copy.
The day it was released, I left the office at lunchtime and walked a mile over Southwark Bridge to get it. The display that had grabbed my fan’s attention, heart, and cash was a giant version of the album cover photo, a three-times-life-size cut-out of the head-and-shoulders cover shot of Mr. Ferry. I asked the guy in the store if I could have it when he was finished with it. He said I could have it there and then. No… Great. It made my day. Or so I thought.
My problems began once I was outside, with my album in its awkward bag. I’d possibly never thought about it up till then, but there has never been a great bag design for albums. The bags probably couldn’t be any other shape, but they have an awkward swing to them, especially if you need to walk at anything but a sedate, careful pace. The need to design a better bag may well have been addressed with the resurgence of vinyl, though I haven’t noticed any change.
It probably goes without saying, but the bags are even more awkward if you are also carrying an enormous 2-D bust of Bryan Ferry. The thing was too big to put under an arm. It was tiring to carry it in one hand by the top. One thing I could do was punch my fist through the record bag to enlarge the handle opening, carry that round my wrist and hold the giant Bryan in my two hands and arms. It was quite difficult to see my way ahead. I had to keep poking my head out either side of Bryan’s as I walked. Crossing the Thames back to the office while carrying a large laminated cardboard thing was like being a walking kite, and I was buffeted by alarmingly strong winds.
Then there were the weird looks, both side-eyed and blatant. Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry were decidedly not household names, so there were a lot of who-the-hell-is-that-giant-bloke looks.
This continued at the office, people stopping by my desk and going, “Hey, who’s that?” “Who? Bryan who?” “What kind of music?” I soon got sick of explaining… which didn’t mean I was allowed to stop.
Getting home on the 45-minute rush-hour bus journey was also excruciating, though I was a little more prepared for it. The same questions came at me, mostly good-natured, but that didn’t stop them being less annoying. At least I got an idea that would stop the questions and took advantage of people getting on and off to rearrange Big Bryan so that he looked out. The passers-by outside could wonder about him.
My ten-minute walk home revived the looks and questions, except that this was with people I sort of knew from my area. But then I was home and it was done, so what was there to worry about?
Giant Bryan took pride of place in my room for a few years, though the questions I got were not so much who’s that as how-come-you’ve-got-a-giant-Bryan-Ferry-thing. I seem to remember the big fellow collecting dust in a neglected corner of someplace I lived in once I’d left my mum’s flat, so it lasted at least one house move. If it survived as far as the extensive cull of my possessions I carried out before moving abroad in 1990, it certainly got chucked then.
I never got to like These Foolish Things. I thought the songs and recordings were lame, despite the wealth of talent present. The ones I knew weren’t improved, I thought, even by Bryan Ferry’s like-it-or-loathe-it voice. While I liked the opening of the title song, I lost interest in it once it got going as full-on white-man reggae.
I still like the album cover, though. It’s that head-and-shoulders shot of a legend-in-the-making and it’s effective and simple. The credit to Anthony Price for ‘clothes’ always makes me laugh: Bryan is wearing a plain black teeshirt. If I hadn’t schlepped my totem over bridges and on buses and up and down streets to the ridicule of everybody who saw me that day, that credit might have remained the most foolish thing of all.
Author’s Note: I was brought up in a time and place (1960s London) in which what we now call pop culture was very much a part of my early existence and formative years. As such, some moments in my perceptions of it sparkle in the back of my mind when I have long forgotten much more important things. “The Most Foolish Thing of All” is one of them.