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What really comes through, though, is the strength of Ferry’s tunes. There are some obscure album tracks here — ‘This Island Earth’ from The Bride Stripped Bare, the Eno co-write ‘I Thought’ from 2002’s Frantic, ‘Reason or Rhyme’ from the recent Olympia — but each one has a killer melody that has only been enhanced by its jazzification. In short, Ferry and his co-producer Rhett Davies have done everything right, and then let the musicians get on with it. The result is joyous. It lifts your soul and makes you grin stupidly. It’s as daft an idea for an album as you can imagine, and that’s why it works.
Joy, of course, is not a quality you often associate with modern pop music. The thundering hip-hop that pours out of car windows in my north London street doesn’t tell me that the driver is having a thoroughly splendid day and wants to share his good cheer with the general populace. I don’t hear joy in most chart pop: I hear commercial calculation laced with blind terror. And the predominant emotion behind so much rock music, as it has been for a quarter of a century, is gloom. Poor old Chris Martin, suffering all these years as lead singer of Coldplay, has effortlessly transferred his misery to us, his loyal listeners. (He is fantastically rich, successful and married to Gwyneth Paltrow, a clearly insuperable burden.) In the same way that a film about Batman must now be dark and intense and full of shadows, and feature not a single THWACK! or KER-POW!, so listening to every new Radiohead album has become a trial of strength, something to be endured rather then enjoyed, in the hope that it might be good for you. Did Thom Yorke ingest a vast amount of cod liver oil as a child? If so, now he is getting his own back.
Only last week, Radio 2 published the results of a poll to determine its listeners’ favourite albums of all time. It wasn’t the most rigorously conducted piece of research: there were only 100 albums to choose from, and each artist was only allowed one, so if you wanted to vote for The Police, it was Synchronicity or nothing. Number one on the list, nonetheless, was Coldplay’s A Rush Of Blood To The Head. By deeply unremarkable coincidence I had played that album for the first time in ages the week before. It’s not bad at all, although ten years of everyone else sounding a bit like Coldplay make it sound staler than it used to. But best album ever by anyone, anywhere? That’s nearly as depressing as some of the songs.
No, enough of the unending musical winter; what we need is music for spring. If Ferry’s jazzisms aren’t for you, maybe some mid-period Stevie Wonder, or Neil Hannon’s cricketing side-project The Duckworth Lewis Method (a new album is imminent), or ‘Short People’ by Randy Newman, which always cheers me up. ‘They got little baby legs/ That stand so low/ You got to pick ’em up/ Just to say hello…’
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