Bryan Ferry - Dylanesque Live: The London Sessions

Better than the album

“didn’t take much rehearsal, and then the next day we just banged through the album and it was filmed”, Ferry says. Mostly sitting throughout, and with little audience to speak of (essentially the camera crew), this is something of an understatement of its informality. Compared to his dapper BBC Sessions turn recently, this dishevelled suitwearing Ferry isn’t the face of M&S we know today, nor the impressively sharp man we knew before. In fact, he looks slightly awkward and shy.

What is impressive, however, is that this live run-through-plussome- more of his Dylan covers album is much more interesting than the album itself. Away from the anodyne studio production, the songs seems engaged with and sometimes even possessed of an edge wholly missing from Dylanesque the record; and that’s saying something, considering that it’s recorded in a near-empty hall.

Intercut with Ferry talking to the camera between songs, he comes off now as a kind uncle, rather than a ballsy, art-rocking leader. Change is good, but not when it’s for the blander. The bonus video for his 1973 cover of A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall leaves you too aware of what he didn’t bring to the material this time around.

Eagle Vision | EREDV 633

Reviewed by Jason Draper
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