Product Description

Wildly controversial in its day, Roxy Music frontman Bryan Ferry's first solo album now seems more eccentric than groundbreaking; more one man's oddball take on an eclectic bunch of his favourite artists' songs than an ironic manifesto of a new pop order. Rock purists, of course, were outraged. Howdare Ferry implicitly maintain the esthetic equivalence of Bob Dylan ("A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall", complete with gospel backup singers and thunderstorm effects), with teen angst queen Leslie Gore (an unabashedly camp version of her classic "It's My Party")?
Although Bryan Ferry's mannered, tremulous vocals are better suited for his own romantically bruised lounge lizard songs, he obviously connects with these tunes on a personal level. THESE FOOLISH THINGS contains many instances, most notably on the title track and Smokey Robinson's "Tracks of My Tears", where Ferry transcends his vocal limitations and comes up with his own foppish, but still valid, version of the blues.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3631 in Music
• Released on: 1999-10-11
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Original recording remastered

Customer Reviews

The original covers album
Before David Bowie, before John Lennon, Elvis Costello, Paul Weller and so on and so on tried it, Bryan Ferry cut loose from his art-school, avant-garde rock career with Roxy Music to lay down what were viewed at the time, deeply uncool cover versions of songs such as "It's My Party" and "These Foolish Things". It didn't go down too well at the time and, to be fair, it doesn't match up to some of his later, more trademark recordings. But it is an interesting collection all the same, leading off with a wonderfully kitsch cover of Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall", where Ferry outleers even himself in his vocal posturing. "The Tracks Of My Tears" is nice, as is "God Only Knows", and, to this day, his cut of "These Foolish Things" makes it into my top fifty tracks of all time. However, "Sympathy For The Devil" should have been left well alone. It is truly dreadful and nigh on unlistenable.

Taken in context, which all these 1970s albums should be, this was an interesting release. Worth a curious listen.

Baby I Don't Care
At this time (1973) Roxy Music were making some truly ground-breaking music and I never really understood why Bryan Ferry felt he had do this whole album of covers. I think it's only with Roxy Music that you get to hear the things that Ferry's remarkable voice can do. I'm not sure that tracks like 'Sympathy For The Devil' should ever be touched by anyone else, and it deosn't really work for me. Having said that, 'It's My Party' is brilliant.

For me, 'Let's Stick Together' is a superior Ferry album. Apart from the musical content, a plus point for 'These Foolish Things' is that there isn't a semi-naked, distressed looking woman in sight - just a very nice cover picture of BF.

Still cool after all these years...
I first bought this album in 1973 when it first came out and it is still being played in my house today. Every track is a winner and Ferry has chosen the covers so well from such a wide range of sources that obviously influenced him - The Beatles, Motown/Smokey Robinson, Dylan, The Beach Boys, Rolling Stones etc. - but still manages to bring a fresh interpretation to them so they don't sound dated even now. You can take one song and trace it back to it's original version and, assuming you've never heard stuff by them before, you open up whole new panaromas of music. And the front cover pic is cool epitomised - I've been wishing I looked that good ever since