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As the frontman for Roxy Music and a solo artist, Bryan Ferry has written classic songs about love (“Love Is the Drug”), created classic album covers (“Country Life”) featuring gorgeous women (several of whom he’s dated) and spent four decades as a style icon. So it’s little surprise that when The Post meets him at the Mandarin Oriental to discuss his new album “The Jazz Age” — a collection of his songs redone as 1920s-style instrumentals — he puts on the jacket of his bespoke Anderson & Sheppard suit just for our conversation. Over the course of an hour, Ferry, 67, shared his accumulated wisdom and a few of his favorite things.
* Blue songs: “Songs have to have a strong emotional core. If it’s good, you should be crying when you’re writing it. The best songs I wrote, I remember feeling very,
‘Ahhh!’ There are songs which are more lively or uptempo and not sad, but they are few and far between. I like songs which are a blue color.”
* Style: “I first encountered stylish dress through jazz. The first record I ever bought was by the Charlie Parker Quintet, and all those bebop players were pretty cool dressers — Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis. When I started going to concerts, they all dressed up to go onstage. So I found it there, and in the movies. The Rat Pack, Sinatra and his mates, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, Jack Kennedy. It’s also very hard to beat Cary Grant in ‘North by Northwest.’ ”
* Gorgeous women: “For our first album cover, I said, ‘I think we should have a beautiful woman on the cover.’ That was the basis for most of the great advertising images from America. There was always a woman at a fridge or Hoovering, very glamorous, pouring Coca-Cola, or [smoking] cigarettes. I was very much into Americana, and I wanted to get [our covers] to look like a scene from a movie or a picture from advertising. It was more interesting than four guys standing moodily in a back street, which was the norm.”
* The 1920s: “It was an incredibly exciting period, and the beginning of so many things: transatlantic air flight, radio broadcasting, T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land,’ and ‘The Great Gatsby,’ one of the first books I ever read for pleasure. I just loved the romanticism of it. It was a really hedonistic period and a time of high style.”
* Cover songs: “I wanted to have a varied career, which is why after the second album I’d written, I started doing occasional covers of other songs as a way of broadening my repertoire. One of the reasons was that I didn’t want to run out of ideas. People sometimes overwrite, and the quality goes down. That’s the thing about having a long career as a songwriter — it’s tough to keep finding something new to say.”
* Dedication: “My parents set a very good example, because they were together all their lives. My dad courted my mother for 10 years before she accepted him — or maybe before he got up the courage to propose. Then they married and were together until they died. They were very unselfish with each other, very devoted.”
* Decorum: “I was playing in LA once and we were staying at the Hyatt House, which was the rock ’n’ roll hotel. There was an incredible noise going on upstairs. I went up and it was a party that Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham was having. These guys always had big speaker cabinets in their suite and a million women. It was incredible to see that kind of thing. It was a different world, really. Trashing hotel rooms didn’t seem like a cool thing to do.”