Customer Reviews

Let's Stick Together

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a hidden treasure. Great music, great musicians and great recording. The whole CD is special and deserves greater credit. The giutar playing and drumming are simply first rate, the singing aint too bad either. The only thing missing is some of the other covers he did around the same time that were released as singles B sides and never got released on LP. Music I give this 93% and recording it gets 90%.

On his third solo outing, Bryan ups the ante by mixing originals in with covers. Or more precisely, covers of his own (previously released Roxy Music) songs mixed with covers of other peoples' songs. One of his very best albums, and the first of three-in-a-row solo records that towered above the competition. Simply put, if you don't have "Let's Stick Together" "In Your Mind" & "Bride Stripped Bare" then you don't have a complete collection. If you cannot appreciate Ferry at his best, well, then, I guess your mind has been stripped bare and stuck together.

Bryan Ferry launched his solo career during the first flush of Roxy Music's fame. As some members played on his solo recordings, one must assume his dual role did not cause undue friction within the band. After the space-age art rock avant-gardity of Roxy Music, the musical direction of Bryan Ferry's first solo albums was something of a surprise, ranging from Billie Holiday's My Foolish Things (the title track of her first album) to Bob Dylan's A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, Dobie Gray's The In Crowd and the Platters' Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, all of which were extracted as singles. It was a long way from Virginia Plain and Pyjamarama.

The album Let's Stick Together came out in 1976 in time to capitalize on the success of the single it was named after. It was an extremely useful mopping-up of all the non-album tracks released to date, including Extended Play (a freshly released EP of cover versions comprising The Price Of Love, Shame Shame Shame, the extraordinarily lightweight Heart On My Sleeve and Beatles cover It's Only Love) and You Go To My Head, another Billie Holiday standard from the thirties given the Ferry makeover treatment. It also had one previously unreleased track, Casanova, an original Ferry composition that had previously appeared on Roxy Music's Country Life album in 1974.

The other four tracks are all alternative recordings of songs that appeared on the first Roxy Music albums, and were re-made as B-sides of his solo singles between 1973 and 1976. I recall Bryan Ferry remarking at the time that he didn't like a song to be represented by just one recorded version of it, that would always play identically to the time before and be set it in aspic, and therefore liked to tackle songs he had previously recorded. Chris Spedding is the guitarist, and Roxy Music alumni Eddie Jobson, John Wetton and Paul Thompson provide colour and backbone. Bryan Ferry had not quite found his own voice on the first album and these versions are more confident, if less idiosyncratic than the group versions, and of course lack Eno's unique input. 2HB, Chance Meeting and Sea Breezes are otherwise relatively faithful re-makes of the originals, Sea Breezes being particularly effective, but Re-Make Re-Model from 1975 has been re-made and re-modeled into a blue-eyed soul funk groove for the B-side of You Go To My Head, and has perhaps dated less well. Incidentally, Roxy Music's own non-album B-sides have yet to be compiled onto CD.

All in all, this makes an ideal companion piece to the albums These Foolish Things and Another Time, Another Place.

Released as a stopgap after Siren, Let's Stick Together consists of outtakes from Ferry's first two covers albums, and remakes of Roxy songs. The latter songs are not especially necessary, but they are more accessible (and Ferry's vocals are less histrionic) than the originals. The covers are uniformly excellent. This album may not be a stunner, but is very consistent and fun, and would work as a good starting place for newcomers curious about both Ferry and Roxy Music. (Ferry's pencil mustache on the cover is hilarious.)

Rather than writing about the wonderful music, since the other reviewers have done such a good job of it, I'll comment on the newly issued remasters of the Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry releases. They are spectacular! Each release sounds markedly better than any previous version, including the original vinyl pressings. You will hear things on this record that you didn't know were in the grooves. And the HDCD encoding is a special treat for those people with compatible CD players, though not required to hear the glories of one of the all-time great bands.

Bryan Ferry in the Seventies hadn't completely given way to the "wallpaper effect" that marred his later solo albums (and resulted in three very bland Roxy Music albums between 1979 and 1982) and on this collection of "ready-mades"--Ferry's own term for covers--he goes all out. The remakes of some Roxy Music songs are a mixed bag, with "Sea Breezes" being the best and "Remake/Remodel" being the worst. The title cut, though, is a steamer with some of Ferry's best rock 'n roll singing and "Casanova," the only Roxy cover here NOT from that band's first album, is given a funky beat and sent dancing in the grooves. The jaded-man-of-lost-romance schtick that has been Ferry's trademark forever hasn't yet worn out it's welcome and while Ferry doesn't hit any emoltional home runs on this album, he does make being jaded seem entertaining.

Let's Stick Together being Ferry's 1975 release and his third solo album and contains material released as singles , b-sides and an EP. Songs that I like on this release are "Let's Stick Together", "You Go to My Head" and "Sea Breezes". The cover is really nice with Ferry looking ever so suave with a nice shirt, jacket and tie. No lyrics are included but we get a list of whom plays what on the album. 4/5.

From 1971 through 1976 Roxy Music changed rock 'n' roll, recording an exciting , original body of work that countless younger - and more commercially successful - bands (Duran Duran, Simple Minds, etc) remains audacious and not the least bit dated. Roxy Music in their prime were remarkably prolific, issuing six classic albums (1972's "Roxy Music" through "Viva!") in four years, plus worthy single sides ('Pyjamarama', 'Hula Kula' etc), and more than a dozen essential outside projects. I'd include Eno's great records from the same period, which like Phil Manzanera's excellent "Diamond Head" and "801 Live", Bryan Ferry's solo discs ("These Foolish Things", Another Time Another Place", "In Your Mind" and "The Bride Stripped Bare"), Andy Mackay's uneven but entertaining "In Search Of Eddie Riff", as well as classic albums by John Cale ("Fear") and Nico ("The End..."). All these side projects feature several band members - perfoming, composing or producing - together, but outside the confines of Roxy Music, which despite Manzanera, Mackay, Paul Thompson, Eno, and Eddie Jobson's obvious originality as musicians and contributions to shaping the music, from the start it had been Ferry's vision,
and (mostly) songs, those classic album covers, down to the font in which "Roxy Music" appeared on the album covers. Ferry was a visionary, but his leadership became increasingly rigid, and the delicate balance that was this great band (greater than the sum of its parts) led to the defection of Eno first, and later Paul Thompson; Mackay and Manzanera were by 1980 at least somewhat marginalized.
It goes without saying given the band members' histories that Roxy Music could fairly be called 'art rock'; they embraced and successfully integrated an impressive range of musical, literary, cinematic, and iconic influences, and their great records were often dense, challenging, sometimes 'inaccessable', at the same time crafting glorious hit singles. RM made infectious, great 'pop' songs for teenagers. Their best work is as radical as the Velvet Underground, hitting the studio and stage with a fully formed sensibility and sound of unusual wit and sophistication. With Bryan Ferry leading the band the group was very much in control of every aspect of their presentation (image and music) from the 1972 debut. Ferry's deliberately mannered voice and phrasing subtly made his 1973 solo debut "These Foolish Things" a more subversive statment than similar 'cover' albums issued that season (Lennon's "Rock and Roll", Bowie's "Pinups"). Recall how Ferry recast Lesley Gore into surprisingly high camp and great pop, not least by not changing the gender of Johnny, the boy the narrator addresses. Ferry may have been sincere on those eight minute ruminations about God ("Psalm"), emptiness, and longing in the modern world, but that voice allowed him to function as dazzling modernist cutting everything Roxy Music made with layers of ambiguity, distance or irony. The band, each member essential to the originality of the music, were superlative, original musicians, and Roxy presented with its first records their own carefully thought-out and wildly eclectic 'sound'. Roxy Music's accomplishments between 1972 and 1976 (band and 'solo', or rather side-project) - at first (perhaps deliberately) off putting, with dissonent passages and fruity vocals - remain startling. But imagine how they seemed in the early 1970s, against the grain of post-'60s rock and roll, as we witnessted the ascent of 'Southern Rock' (lesser children of the Allman Brothers Band), plus Eagles, Jim Croce, and Loggins & Messina. By '76 however the bloom had begun to wear off....Ferry had announced his desire to break up the perfect setting for his songs and vision, and along with his bandmates focused on solo projects. After promising records like "Diamond Head" abd "801 Live" Phil Manzanera's work became confused, unfocused, thanks to unsympathetic collaborators. Mackay issued the excellent "Resolving Contradictions" after travelling through China. Jobson joined Zappa briefly, then formed the prog-rock supergroup UK. Roxy returned with "Manifesto" in 1979.
"Let's Stick Together" isn't bad, in fact I enjoy much of it. It is a patched together collection that never coheres - half decent (if never revelatory) covers, half remakes of early Roxy classics. The remakes are less challenging than the originals, listenable if pointless. Even the cover art is less striking than usual. This 1976 collection should be the set to complete a Roxy Music/Ferry collection, certainly not the one with which to start. The lack of cohesion, purpose is partly due to the fact that most tracks were recorded as singles during a three year period.If you already have the 1972 - 79 RM albums, and Ferry's other solo works, the first four Eno albums, and "801 Live" you'll enjoy this. But I doubt you'll play it very much.

Bryan Ferry's third solo album seemingly finds him trying to gain commercial acceptance. How else to explain not one but five re-modeled Roxy songs? These remakes are okay but I prefer the cover versions of other artists' songs. His upbeat delivery on "Let's Stick Together" and "Price of Love", the lovely versions of "You Go To My Head" and "Heart on My Sleeve" and the blue-eyed funk of "Shame,Shame,Shame" alone make this CD worth owning. The rest of the album is certainly not bad, just a bit superfluous if you have the Roxy Music versions.

This patchwork quilt of an album isn't necessarily the best place to check out Bryan's solo career. Despite its pedigree (this was originally an EP in the Uk. Atlantic Records in the US added some b sides and a single and ta-da! instant album.

The Roxy tracks (along with Price of Love and the title track) are the most interesting. Ferry reinvents some of them improving on the original versions. Not a bad album but not the place to start to check out Ferry's solo work.