Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button!
A quick (and sadly location-specific) recommendation to kick off this week: the exhibition Faith Ringgold: American People, which runs until June 5, 2022 at the New Museum on The Bowery in NYC. Born in Harlem in 1930—and still with us at the age of 91—Ringgold is a trailblazing Black artist: painter, writer, activist, mixed media sculptor, storyteller, and performance artist. I found this sweeping, mutli-floor survey of much of her life’s work to be a frequently overwhelming emotional experience. Check it out if you can.
If you can’t—and even if you can—here’s a good 2020 profile of Ringgold in the New York Times, and a link to view The Ancestors Came (2017), a beautiful six minute short by the extremely talented London-based filmmaker Cecile Emeke that explores Ringgold’s creativity and resolve in a poetic way.
Last week I copped tickets to see Roxy Music play a 50th anniversary gig at Madison Square Garden in September. I’ve never seen them live before, and I’m looking forward to it, not least because I’ve always been fascinated by singer Bryan Ferry’s uniquely louche performance style: suave, oddly reserved, and hulking; part-knight, part-butler, part-bouncer.
One song I don’t expect to hear for obvious reasons is Ferry’s astounding and still-surprising 2014 cover version of 1980’s “Johnny and Mary” by (sadly late) fellow smoothie Robert Palmer. You know Palmer’s terrific original: over a rudimentary, insistent electronic pulse, Palmer, in the role of wry observer, spins a tale of a dysfunctional married couple. “Johnny’s always running around … Mary counts the walls.” Bleak and brittle, it’s like a miniature Mike Leigh portrait, with the added bonus of an irresistible, snaky guitar riff woven throughout.
(Sidenote: Like me, you might have first heard “Johnny and Mary”—or at least jaunty Gallic versions of “Johnny and Mary”—on British TV in the 1990s, when it was used on Renault’s ubiquitous, ludicrous “Nicole! Papa!” car ads. The actual song was first used in French Renault ads in the 1980s.)
The Ferry-sung version appeared on 2014’s “It’s Album Time”, the debut LP by Norwegian producer and DJ Todd Terje. It’s a great album full of mostly upbeat, witty, at times Streets of Rage 2-esque electronica, and perfect for the treadmill… until track 7, when the tempo suddenly slows: a brief synth surge clears a new slate, a finger starts to click with the downbeat, a warm bass sound begins to throb. A deep breath, then the exhalation: “Johnny’s always running around, trying to find certainty…”
The first time I heard it, I had no idea it was Ferry singing. He delivers the whole thing in an exhausted, conspiratorial whisper. For a man known for an often histrionic delivery—a man who can quite literally sound like a foghorn—the effect is startling. It turns the song completely on its head.
This time, it’s not a young man—Palmer was 31 in 1980—distantly narrating an experience he can’t imagine himself succumbing to. It’s a weathered, seasoned romantic veteran—Ferry was 69 in 2014; failed marriages behind him, star-crossed celebrity affairs, grown-up kids—who’s seen it all. He’s sighing in sympathy. Or is it even closer to home? Palmer categorically wasn’t Johnny. Ferry, a third-person confessor gazing sadly into the rear-view mirror, just might be.
Unlike the Renault-attracting, running-around rapidity of Palmer’s version, Terje’s interpretation takes its time. It’s almost twice as long, and eventually blossoms into a shimmering, slow motion soundscape redolent of Vangelis’ soundtrack for Chariots of Fire. But here it’s not Eric Liddell bursting past the finish line. It’s Ferry slowly rising to his feet, fastening his dinner jacket, lighting a cigarette, and walking offscreen through the Mayfair night as the camera rises up, up, and the screen fades to black. Time to go home.
Good cover versions don’t always have to do something completely different to be successful, but truly memorable ones need a sprinkle of genuine inspiration; something far beyond mimetic competence. This one’s radical, and one of the all-time greats. It never hedges its bets. It always knows what to think.
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