The best piece of advice ever given to 54-year old Bryan Ferry came from his father, a Durham farm hand turned miner: "Don't go down the pits, lad."
Instead, he undertook a career curve very much at odds with such a distinct working class background. Much to the surprise of his parents he began to take a deep interest in art, steeping himself in its meanings, codes and ethics.
For his pains, Ferry, along with David Bowie, became the most influential pop star of his generation. He captured pop and art in a time bubble, called the unit Roxy Music and wrote one of the best lyrics ever about infidelity in a pop song (Dance Away - "you're dressed to kill and guess who's dying"). Then he burst the bubble by going solo.
Yet the image of Bryan Ferry as a perfect and pristine pop star still remains. Despite the lack of high profile hit singles over the past five years, Ferry's credibility also remains intact. His most recent album, As Time Goes By, hardly dented the charts, but that might have been due more to the nature of the record (covers of 1930s/1940s hardy annuals) than anything else. Notoriously fussy about the recording process (if there's one thing we can depend on him for, it is his obsession to detail), Ferry is also the least prolific of pop artists, which means that if we see another album from him before he reaches 60 we'll be blessed.
His excuses for his dearth of material include managerial problems and a general sense of disorganisation. There's another reason, however, why we are seeing less and less of him these years - he dislikes the interview process, only agreeing to engage in them because he feels he owes it to the work. "You feel that if you didn't do interviews," he told this writer some time back, "the work would just disappear. You spend years working on albums, and it's good for me to get some sense of approval. I liked the process much less in the early 1970s - partly because I was touring so much and because I wanted to save my voice for the shows."
The need to succeed artistically, as opposed to selling millions of records, is the fundamental rationale behind Ferry's work. His academic background as an artist (he studied Fine Art at Newcastle University under the tutelage of Richard Hamilton) enabled him to bring a strong, virtually strident visual sensibility to pop music. After a short tenure as a schoolteacher, he formed Roxy Music in 1971.
The basic tenets of Pop Art - the appropriation and manipulation of popular culture images - were foremost in his unfeasibly comely head. Coupling these with a love of 1950s rock 'n' roll, Velvet Underground and electronica, Roxy Music was the first British rock group who looked as much to the future as to the past. Even today, their early material sounds otherworldly, current and relevant. Inevitably, it wasn't to last.
Personal conflict with the group's ideas man, Brian Eno - short-lived yet much written about - resulted in a dilution of creativity. The passing of time has healed these petty considerations, with Ferry now admitting that Eno encouraged the zanier side of his talents.
Although Roxy Music finally split in 1982 (following a temporary hiatus in the late 1970s), Ferry had been nurturing a solo career as far back as 1973. His debut album of that year, These Foolish Things, was a huge success for him, and effectively started the by-now widespread trend of cover version projects by rock stars. The stylish album cover also launched Ferry as rock music's Mr Handsome Bastard - a film noir lounge lizard figure with a voice made in honeyed heaven, resplendent in white dinner jacket and silky cummerbund. He came across like a time-warped iconic rock version of Humphrey Bogart and Bing Crosby - the ultimate post modern crooner. It was, and remains, a defining image albeit one that has dogged the singer ever since.
In reality, it's been all change for quite some time. Ferry's marriage to society heiress Lucy Helmore in 1982 and his fatherly responsibilities (he has four sons, all down for Eton, naturally) might not have allowed him the necessary time to devote his energies to writing more bleak and bitterly romantic songs, but it has chipped away at the perceived image of him as one of rock music's more eligible bachelors. Back in the 1970s, Ferry's rarefied tastes in beautiful models (one of whom was Jerry Hall) and all aspects of the good life were rarely out of the gossip columns.
It was, he admits, a flamboyant mixture of the high and low life, a period when he met the most unlikely people and had the most brilliant of times. These days, Ferry is more content and stable, relating marriage and domesticity as possibly unconscious desires to pace himself.
"Your world changes," he once said. "You've got to feel more self-confident and assured. You have to, otherwise you'll blow away. I like having the anchor of my family, but not necessarily the responsibilities. As you grow older, you find much more of your parents in yourself. I laugh at the antics of my children - exactly like my dad. Except I don't have a pipe." Perish the thought.
Bryan Ferry plays the Olympia Theatre on Saturday April 29th and Sunday April 30th
