Ferry Stops Singing Long Enough for Some Self-Promotion

There are basically two kinds of tours in the rock world: the concert tour--in which an act hits the road for a series of live performances--and the promotional tour, which leaves the band behind and has the star chat it up with an assortment of reporters and radio personalities. Recently, singer Bryan Ferry was in Washington on one of the latter and considered the differences between a promotional tour and the concert variety.

“Well, it’s equally obsessive,” he said. “You’re talking about yourself all the time--you have to--and it can be a bit testing if you really don’t enjoy that. I had sort of mastered it in Europe, and it’s much more grueling there. They have so much more press, you see. You sometimes do about eight newspapers and magazines in a day; 11 is the record so far. At the end of that, you don’t know what you’re saying.”

A concert tour, by contrast, “can be very physically exhausting, just like running 5 miles or something. The last long tour I did was five years ago. I did the Live Aid show at Wembley (Stadium in London) two years ago, and just before Christmas I did ‘Saturday Night Live’ and the Jimmy Maelen show.”

Now Ferry is in the midst of his first American concert tour since Roxy Music, the genre-busting band he founded 18 years ago, broke up in 1983. Why did he wait so long before taking a band on the road again?

There were a couple of reasons, not the least of which being the sheer physical exhaustion he endured at the end of his final tour with Roxy Music. “I had a lot of illness on that tour, a lot of sore throats . . . problems with my back,” he said. “In every city I’d have a different doctor. And it just became this awful kind of burden, that tour. I thought, ‘I’m not sure I’d like to do this again.’ ”

Further, he said, “I’m married and have two children. They’re at a very crucial age; after even five days or two weeks of being on the road, my 2-year-old son sounds different. Then they just start talking in a much more kind of assured way. ‘Is that him, or is that the older one?’ You just like to be around a lot.”

Mostly, though, Ferry has stayed at home because he thought that at this point in his career, his time would be best spent “in the studio, doing new work all the time.” Apart from his work with Roxy Music, Ferry has been remarkably productive, releasing seven solo albums over the years. His latest, “Bete Noire,” produced the Top 40 hit “Kiss and Tell.”

“I like to be the artist,” he said. “In the studio, that’s what I do.”

Being an artist was what Ferry started out doing. Before forming Roxy Music, he had been a lecturer in art at the University of Newcastle in England, where he had studied with conceptual artist Richard Hamilton, and for many years, music was a secondary pursuit. Even today, though singing and songwriting are his livelihood, Ferry remains something of a non-musician.

“I still don’t read music,” he said. “I’ve never bothered to get into that. I always liked the feel of being an inspired amateur, anyway. I think it means I come in with a slightly unusual standpoint. It just makes it a little bit more idiosyncratic and unusual, coming in at that angle.

“It can be very irritating to musicians. Sometimes they don’t quite know what I’m getting at.”

How so? In part because Ferry starts off with a visual conception of each new tune. “I always see it as being like pictures, each song,” he said. “And it’s like, ‘Well, let’s start with red,’ or this texture or something. One thing leads to another, and the piece takes on a life of its own.”

Of course, that requires a certain amount of explaining along the way because a musician tends to think in terms of specific notes and chords. “And I’ll say, ‘Make it more pink,’ ” Ferry said, laughing.

That said, though, the singer confessed that one of his favorite things about working as a solo artist in the studio is the freedom to bring in a variety of sidemen. “I love mixing around musicians,” he said. “That’s something you can’t do on a group album so easily.”

Again, his background in painting provides an analogy. Pulling performances out of other musicians and then assembling the parts into a whole, he said, is like working with “found objects,” the way artist Robert Rauschenberg would paste a bit of newspaper or a block of wood onto a painting.

“To me, it’s part and parcel, the same thing. It’s slightly more fun doing it when all the people are there, real living presences rather than pieces of newsprint that you stick on canvases. You’re trying to get their souls involved, right on the . . . “

He paused, then laughed. “I want to say vinyl . . . but I suppose now, it’s whatever compact discs are made of.”