Ferry Drives Home a Standard Shift

“You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss. . . .” Bryan Ferry sings on “As Time Goes By,” his new album of ‘30s pop standards.

At 54, Ferry has been puckering up for a long time now--first as the flamboyant front man for the ‘70s art-rock pacesetters Roxy Music, later in solo interpretations of some ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s songs, and then in his post-Roxy career.

But Ferry has never done more than flirt with the golden age classics until now. What brought on this plunge into Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Kern and Fields? Was it the arrival of a long-awaited artistic maturity? The need for a timely hommage to this century’s pinnacle of song craft?

“Well, I wanted to get a record out before the end of the century,” Ferry said.

The singer and songwriter, who has a studio in London, laughs at his reference to the notoriously slow pace of his recorded output. The new album and his current tour, which comes to the Sun Theatre in Anaheim tonight and the Wiltern Theatre on Thursday, mark his first surfacing in five years.

“It’s not for want of hard work,” he quickly adds. “I love being in the studio. I’ve been working on lots of songs of my own . . . with a diverse number of people--Brian Eno, Dave Stewart, Johnny Greenwood from Radiohead, Marcus Miller. . . . [But] I didn’t think I was gonna get the record out in time, so I switched to this.

“It was a joy to make, I tell you. It was so nice to get away from the normal process of record-making, which for me is working with a lot of studio technology and layering things. To do an acoustic album, which I’ve never done before, it had a really good spirit about it.”

The live show is designed to showcase the ‘30s material, with a nine-piece band plus a string quartet. Most of the musicians from “As Time Goes By,” including pianist-arranger Colin Good, are on board, and Ferry says they’ve adapted well to his solo material and some rarely performed Roxy Music selections.

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A set of songs that includes “Easy Living,” “You Do Something to Me,” “Falling in Love Again” and “The Way You Look Tonight” appears to be right up the alley of a singer who has cultivated the image of debonair romantic. But the main surprise in the period-sounding album is the absence of the postmodern attitude that has accompanied that image.

“Normally I try to reinvent a song a bit, change the melody a bit and do all sorts of things,” Ferry says. “With this project I wanted to be a lot more subtle. I guess I was treating the songs with great reverence and respect. . . . It’s irony-free, I’d say. They’re just wonderful songs, and I wanted to do them fairly straight.”

That respect was implanted in the coal miner’s son during childhood, when he’d go to Newcastle City Hall to see such artists as Ella Fitzgerald, the Modern Jazz Quartet and Gerry Mulligan. His entree into the great pre-rock songwriters came with his discovery of Billie Holiday in his late teens.

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Ferry kept these passions distinct from his rock side after he formed Roxy Music in 1970 in London, though his romanticism did increasingly surface in the group’s music over its decade of recording.

Though Roxy Music was critically acclaimed for its experimental daring and conceptual sophistication, it remained mainly a cult item in the U.S., where it never had a Top 20 single or album.

But the band--which also included Brian Eno, who went on to a stellar career as a musician and producer--had a major impact on its peers, setting the tone for much of the new wave style that emerged in the ‘80s and prefiguring the lush atmospherics of ambient and dance music.

That legacy will get a new airing with the reissue of the 10-album Roxy Music catalog on Virgin Records, scheduled for Feb 1.

“Yeah, they sound really good, those,” says Ferry, whose solo albums will be re-released four weeks later. “I’m really pleased with what’s happened to that. Especially the early albums sound really good. I’m very proud of the body of work, I suppose, when I look back at it. . . .

“I was playing [1975’s] ‘Out of the Blue’ to some of my kids in the car and they said, ‘Hey, that’s really good, you should put that out.’ And I said, ‘Well, it actually has been out, before you were born.’ ”

What was that about “as time goes by”?

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Bryan Ferry, tonight at the Sun Theatre, 2200 E. Katella Ave., Anaheim, 8. $50. (714) 712-2700. Also Thursday at the Wiltern Theatre, 3790 Wilshire Blvd., 8 p.m. $42.50 to $72.50. (213) 380-5005.