Return of a smooth operator

Bryan Ferry tackles both Bob Dylan and Burberry in style

THERE'S not a lot that connects Bryan Ferry to Bob Dylan. Where Dylan's voice is whiny and rough-edged, Ferry's is a smooth and sexy croon.

Dylan's dress sense, if it can be called that, is dishevelled, ill-fitting and mismatched. Ferry, on the other hand, is the sort of man whose definition of casual dressing would be a three-piece suit, but without the tie.

Style of a sophisticated kind - what fashion designer Collette Dinnigan calls a "very English way of dressing" - has long been Ferry's trademark.

That's why it was such a surprise when, earlier this year, Ferry released an album of Dylan covers called Dylanesque, especially as there's nothing particularly Dylanesque about it. Every couple of years, it seems, someone releases a cover of Knockin' on Heaven's Door, but in Ferry's hands it sounds entirely new and not in the least hackneyed. On Dylanesque, it and other Dylan classics are delivered in Ferry's distinctive, sophisticated croon.

The album was apparently recorded during a one-week break while Ferry was on tour and is all the better for it: there's a loose, almost off-the-cuff feel to Ferry's renditions. It's almost as though Ferry walked into the recording studio one day and said, "I feel like putting down some Dylan tracks", and the band just went along with him. Ferry's great talent is his ability to take a well-known melody and effortlessly twist it on its head into something new.

Ferry will showcase some of his Dylan covers along with classics from his Roxy Music years on a national tour starting in Perth tomorrow.

There has always been something spontaneous and unplanned in Ferry's music. Roxy Music's self-titled debut album sounds like a student band cobbled together one night, but one that, through sheer luck, managed to have all the right ingredients of musical talent, innovation and dress sense.

Roxy Music put their stamp on rock by making it sleek and glamorous. Ferry always seemed to know that he looked his best in a suit and tie.

He was studying ceramics at art school when he advertised on a notice board for musicians interested in starting a band, and from the beginning he was as interested in the aesthetics of rock as in the music.

Roxy Music's highly developed visual presentation was no accident. In Michael Bracewell's recent book on Roxy Music's early years, Re-Make/Re-Model, Ferry describes the band as one in which art, fashion and music combined to create "above all, a state of mind".

Ferry's style credentials were enhanced by his famous relationships with beautiful women, including model Jerry Hall. His first wife, Lucy Helmore, a model 14 years his junior, posed for the cover of Roxy Music's last album, Avalon.

Helmore had posed for Robert Mapplethorpe and has been cited as a muse to designers Christian Lacroix, Manolo Blahnik and Philip Treacy. She has also worked with Dinnigan, styling her first fashion show in Paris in 1998.

Through her work with Helmore, Dinnigan met Ferry a couple of times and describes him as "just oh so stylish".

"Lucy is also very stylish and is something of a style icon really, and I think she played a huge part in putting his look together," Dinnigan says.

"But then he's just got this coolness about him and a very innate sense of style. He's not garish at all, which is nice, but his style is not without its eccentricities."

Ferry was chosen by the very British fashion label Burberry to model the brand's clothes, with two of his sons by his side, in a recent advertising campaign. He's the perfect choice for a brand such as Burberry, which, after more than 150 years in business, is enjoying something of a renaissance, led in large part by the fact that the buff male metrosexual look of the past few years is well and truly over.

In its place is a return to alpha-male style of the three-piece suit variety. It's almost as though Burberry is saying to a new generation of men: this is how it's done. The only thing missing from the photograph with Ferry and his adult sons is that signature cigarette dangling from his fingers. He's the only man who can make smoking look cool.

Bryan Ferry is touring with Joan Armatrading, beginning in Perth tomorrow.

David Meagher is the editor of Wish magazine.