Bryan Ferry & Amelia Barratt - Loose Talk (2025)

Loose Talk signals the beginning of a new creative chapter for Bryan Ferry, blurring the lines between music, poetry and art. Fifty-three years since Roxy Music's iconic debut album arrived like a bolt-from-the-blue, his latest project is just as startlingly unexpected. The sounds and shapes, and the spoken words they are set to, are unlike any previous Bryan Ferry album. At the same time, the mood that Loose Talk captures is rooted in Ferry's past half-century of work.

The album is a collaboration with visual artist and writer Amelia Barratt after they met at a gallery opening. She provides texts and narration, in a cool, unemotional RP voice, with the instrumental backings based on unreleased demo recordings from throughout Ferry’s career, with the earliest examples dating from the early 70s. These demos were then refined and reworked in the studio, with some fresh contributions from musicians including Roxy drummer Paul Thompson.

There are certainly points where Ferry’s contributions fade into the realm of the characterless – Demolition or Florist could be the work of anyone – but Loose Talk is liberally studded with genuinely haunting moments, frequently when the old demos yield a snatch of vocal, as on Landscape or Cowboy Hat. Ferry’s melodies are beautiful, the fact that these vocals are either wordless place-filler or rendered incomprehensible by the lo-fi sound gives them a strange quality, like memories you struggle to recall in detail.

The album at times brings to mind the work of fellow Londoners Dry Cleaning, with Amelia's English accent and similar flat, spoken vocal deliver of her obscure poems over Ferry's lo-fi backing tracks creating a surreal, chamber pop alternative to Dry Cleaning's post-punk drive.

There’s a particular pleasure to be had in trying to work out what era the original recordings hail from. Presumably the recordings of piano and electric piano on Big Things and Landscape, wreathed in tape hiss, are from the 1970s. Was Stand Near Me’s strange blend of funk bass and noodling, occasionally atonal synth once intended to be brushed up for 1979’s Manifesto? Were the eerie ambient electronics on Pictures on a Wall a staging post en route to Avalon’s instrumentals India and Tara?

In a sense, Barratt’s texts are vague, too. There’s plenty of visual detail in her writing, but what’s actually going on is usually unclear. If the sunny vignette of Holiday or the depiction of a tailor at work in Cowboy Hat seem straightforward enough, more often it feels as though something has happened out of shot, and it sounds like bad news: the narrator of Florist ends up in tears; the relief solitude provides on the title track feels unsettlingly overwhelming. The sense of imprecise dread or menace that infects a lot of her writing gives Loose Talk a noticeably different emotional – as well as musical – cast to anything Ferry has attempted before.

If the end results aren’t quite as holistic as the “duet” both parties have claimed it as, it still works. Barratt’s texts are striking enough that the listener doesn’t long for an instrumental version; Ferry’s approach is intriguing and impressively original. It’s a diversion, but one that transforms his past into something fresh. (Guardian)