Loose Talk

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.

Loose Talk marks the first time Ferry has created new music for another writer’s words. The album consists of eleven texts, composed by Amelia Barratt, creating fascinating micro-fictions, simultaneously fragmentary and self-contained.

The album balances refined minimalism and abstraction with an experimental and youthful energy. Ferry’s music and Barratt’s texts each hold their own codes. As those codes pulse as one, the album discovers its own language – two monologues begin a conversation that becomes a duet.

Bryan Ferry and Amelia Barratt were first connected via their separate involvements in the art world. The collaboration began with a chance meeting at an exhibition opening, where Ferry grew intrigued to learn Barratt had started working with writing and performance in parallel with her painting. Both artists share an art school background – Bryan Ferry studied painting at Newcastle University in the 1960s, Barratt at Glasgow School of Art and the Slade School of Art, where she received an MFA in 2016 – but it’s the differences between them that animate Loose Talk and create unmapped territory.

“I’m very pleased people are saying that Loose Talk sounds ‘very different’. That’s what I’ve always wanted everything I’ve done to be: different. Different to what you’ve heard or seen before. That’s the point of being an artist: trying to create a new thing, a new world – something more colourful, more beautiful, and perhaps more meaningful, which will take your breath away.” -Bryan Ferry