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Mojo NOVEMBER 2010 - by Jim Wirth

BRYAN FERRY: OLYMPIA

Slick but foxy music from under pop music's best-maintained fringe.

Many bewitched by past Bryan Ferrys - the glam-Valentino firecracker of Virginia Plain, the gaucho stud muffin of Let's Stick Together - gave up on him around the mid-'80s point where the Roxy Music kingpin abandoned art-pop spangle for sober tailoring and horsey girls. However, fox-averse offspring and Nazi gaffes notwithstanding the mature Ferry continues to smoulder. On Olympia, only his third album featuring self-penned material since 1987's Bête Noire, Dave Gilmour and Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood wade into the customary echo-laden production fug along with Roxy alumni Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera, helping Ferry to polish up-market diamonds like disco thumper You Can Dance and Scissor Sisters-assisted oddity Heartache By Numbers. His '80s wine-bar rehash of Tim Buckley's Song To The Siren will horrify some, but as Ferry pines, "You say you won't but girl I know you will," with indecent candour on Alphaville, his charm remains reasonably irresistible.