Gloryoski! Has it really been 15 years since the last Bryan Ferry solo compilation? “The Best Of Bryan Ferry” from that year sported not only 21 songs, but also a DVD of music videos chronicling the same period. It’s been on my want list but US dealers are scarce on the ground. I still have the first three Ferry compilations, though. Each one was salted with something special that we needed for the archives.
2023 marked a half-century since Ferry boldly lit the fuse on a solo career that has seen him active far beyond the periods where the Roxy Music juggernaut was in play. With that in mind, the Ferry Concern is bringing a more deeply curated Boxed Set Of God to the marketplace this year; making it the first such compilation to encompass his entire solo era from Island Records, Polydor, Virgin/E.G. all the way up to the current BMG era. It will be five CDs deep with each disc dedicated to a different aspect of his multifaceted career.
SUPER DELUXE CD BOX
Bryan Ferry: Retrospective Selected Recordings 1973-2023
CD1: The Best Of Bryan Ferry
- A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
- These Foolish Things
- The “In” Crowd
- Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
- Casanova
- Let’s Stick Together
- Sign Of The Times
- Slave To Love
- Don’t Stop The Dance
- Windswept
- Kiss And Tell
- As Time Goes By
- Your Painted Smile
- I Put A Spell On You
- Which Way To Turn
- Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
- Make You Feel My Love
- You Can Dance
- Love Letters
- Johnny And Mary
CD2: Compositions
- Can’t Let Go
- Tokyo Joe
- This Island Earth
- Love Me Madly Again
- Limbo
- When She Walks In The Room
- Boys And Girls
- Zamba
- Chain Reaction
- Bete Noire
- I Thought
- The Only Face
- Valentine
- Loop De Li
- Reason Or Rhyme
CD3: Interpretations
- The Price of Love
- Shame Shame Shame
- Hold On (I’m Coming)
- Just One Look
- The Girl Of My Best Friend
- What Goes On
- That’s How Strong My Love Is
- You Go To My Head
- Where Or When
- The Way You Look Tonight
- One Night
- Simple Twist Of Fate
- Positively 4th Street
- Song To The Siren
- Fooled Around and Fell In Love
CD4: The Bryan Ferry Orchestra
- Virginia Plain
- Do The Strand
- While My Heart Is Still Beating
- This Island Earth
- Bitter-Sweet
- Dance Away
- Zamba
- Reason Or Rhyme
- Avalon
- Back To Black
- Limbo
- Young & Beautiful
- Love Is The Drug
- Sign Of The Times
- Chance Meeting
CD5: Rare and Unreleased
- Feel The Need
- Mother Of Pearl
- Don’t Be Cruel
- I Don’t Want To Go On Without You
- I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know
- Crazy Love
- Whatever Gets You Through The Night
- Bob Dylan’s Dream
- He’ll Have To Go
- A Fool For Love
- Lowlands Low
- Is Your Love Strong Enough
- Sonnet 18
- She Belongs To Me
- Oh Lonesome Me
- Star
I can’t find much fault with that curation. Disc one contains the bright, shiny hits; a mixture of originals and his legendary cover versions. Disc two are original deep cuts with only “Tokyo Joe”‘ and “Limbo” having single status. Disc three is a deep dive into his penchant for cover versions. Disc four was devoted to his surprising side career in jazz orchestra revisions of his material. And disc five is filled with a selection of non-LP B-sides and loose tracks from hither and yon. Capped with a new song, “Star.”And of course it comes with a 100 page hardbound book in the luxe slipcase encompassing it all.
OTHER VERSIONS
For those who aren’t obsessed with Bryan Ferry [who surely can’t still be reading this], there’s the single disc version with just the hits, ma’am. It consists of the first disc from the full box in a nifty mediabook package. Undoubtedly sporting a brutal edit of the 100 page book in the former.
For fans of the licorice pizza, there is a 2xLP black vinyl version with all 20 songs on the CD above present and accounted for.
And because this is 2024, of course there’s a colored wax version of the same 20 songs, this time on blue and green vinyl discs.
The Official Ferry Store has every conceivable potential bundle of these four formats with many having an print signed by The Maestro to enhance your home. Discounts are applied for multiple purchases. Basically, any fans who opt for the combinations of records and or CDs in the table below in italics, will get the print. So it’s possible to get a print for as little as a $55 investment [fair!] but fans who spring for the 5xCD box at its rather higher price point go home empty handed […wha??!]. So what are those prices? Here’s what the Official Store says:
| FORMAT | £ | € | $ |
| CD | 15 | 18 | 20 |
| LP | 32 | 39 | 42 |
| LP [color] | 35 | 42 | 46 |
| CD + LP | 42 | 51 | 55 |
| CD + LP [color] | 45 | 59 | 59 |
| LP + LP [color] | 60 | 72 | 78 |
| 5xCD/book | 110 | 132 | 144 |
| 5xCD/book + LP | 130 | 135 | 168 |
| 5xCD/book + LP [color] | 135 | 160 | 174 |
The hardcover book that Ferry designed for the “Roxy Music” ultrabox was as close to being the Roxy Music coffee table book of your dreams as possible, so this is likely to be just as good for a Ferry solo tome. But note that the book makes the price point almost double when all five CDs are also in the package. This is partly a factor of the cost of printing and producing the no doubt sumptuous book, but also the licensing of 81 tracks from multiple labels.
So with that in mind, I’d strongly recommend that anyone under the age of 30 reading this to dig in and at least get the 5xCD set. You have a lot to catch up on. Bryan Ferry is an icon for a good reason. He wrote the book on coming to Pop/Rock from an intellectual, adult direction that was also deeply emotional for all of his theoretical maneuverings. Uniting the Apollonian and Dionysian like no other artist before him. And he’s the last icon we have standing. [except for Iggy Pop]
As for me, I’ll see about the surgical download option since there’s so little here I don’t already have. Though the 5xCD package is the only way to get any tracks from his 2022 “Love Letters” DL EP on the silver disc. And I’m thrilled to see the Japanese bonus CD track from “Frantic” [“I’ve Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know”] manifest on disc five. I could never track that one down. Currently iTunes has the DL BSOG for a tight $39.99 with single tracks presumably available once the whole shebang is released on October 25, 2024. On that day, this will be all over the place, but you can pre-order below if the DJ hits that button.
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Post-Punk Monk 
Woo Hoo! To be upstaged by Mr. Bryan Ferry is perfectly acceptable! I’m so there on this box set… I’m in the ‘5xCD/book’ camp. Hopefully I can get a signed edition!
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René – Alas, you’ll have to bundle records with that to get the signed print. I think that anyone dropping a hundred and fourty four bones should get the perk that those who spent $55 did. Just saying.
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Hmmm. I may just have to ‘beg’ BF management… They’ve been responsive since that Spanish demo of ‘Ilusión’ I did on Avalon’s 40th back in 2022 made some news. Just sent them my new release and PPM article, by the way!
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like the recent Bowie Rock and Roll Star set, it’s way over priced. Being a fan, I have just about all his solo albums, apart from the Orchestra, so there’s not much here to tempt me unless the CD set drops in price dramatically.
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Roy Solomon – It’s been known to happen! I got the “Immersion Edition” of “Olympia” – sealed, for a crisp $20. I have one Orchestra album and found it to be a stunner. I still need the first two.
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Yeah, I recently bought the Mamouna/Horoscope 3CD set for a quite reasonable price. I was a bit disappointed that the 3rd CD didn’t include any of the extra tracks that were on the singles released at the time.
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Roy Solomon – I still need to buy lots of things I didn’t due to this year’s big trip. Including that!
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I would rather have a compilation containing ALL singles and b-sides with all the correct single edits and mixes. A disc of all extended mixes would be good too.
Although I really like Ferry’s output I’ll be giving this a miss. Great if you don’t own much of his stuff but a missed opportunity if you have a lot already.
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AndyB – In all fairness, it’s intended to be a “legacy in a box;” not a resource for collectors! I made a 3xCD set 22 years ago that had all of the B-sides/remixes/live tracks from the singles. Now out of date. Yet we live in a world where there’s a 19 disc set of Dead Or Alive’s albums and remixes… or a 50 disc set of Al Stewart’s career! I’m not denigrating either of these fine artists; each represented in my Record Cell, but we’re talking about Bryan Ferry here.
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hi mr monk,
to be fair, depending on the artist. either it has been a multi decade wait for all the material. in the case of dead or alive to happen.
also, his untimely passing may also have some impact on that too. there’s no guarantee for any band, or package ever being released. there are bands like abc, pet shop boys, duran duran, kraftwerk, that are still waiting on definitive releases and reissues.
whatever the labels, and ultimately the bands want impacts this.
its no surprise that no progress has been made on the abc remasters, wang chung, and more that i was getting involved with, because the bands aren’t interested either.
nostalgia, budgets, and licensing are the enemies of collectors, and fans.
later
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ne gative 1
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negative1ne – Times look rough for CDs. Talking to the owner of Schoolkids Records recently, he mentioned the majors price hikes on LOs have had his customers pivoting back to CD only to have the production dry up. To better beat the herd in the direction of streaming.
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hi mr monk,
that may be true for single cd releases for bands. but i see no slowdown for boxsets with multi cds at all. there’s still plenty more out there from bands coming out. i’ve got a few boxsets to look forward to later this year.
since i’ve taken half the year off from buying music. i’m ready to catch up on a few things now. luckily there hasn’t been much that interested me this year. so i’m glad in some ways.
i haven’t seen any cancellations or cutbacks from the bands i follow either.
so its hard to say the impact on these.
later
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ne ga tive 1
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I have a fair amount of Roxy Music stuff in my scattered collection, and I certainly did grab that spectacular SDE box set of the debut RM album when it came out, which consists of 3CDs, a DVD, and a gorgeous book.
I hope you’re right about the price of such things eventually dropping, because the pricing on this Ferry set is … hmm, what’s the phrase I want … oh yeah, kind of nuts!
As someone who doesn’t really collect vinyl much anymore, the 5CD and book version was of primary interest, but no signed print. Disappointing, but I have a lot of catching up with Mr Ferry to do, so I was prepared to settle for going without his autograph until I saw the (US) price — $144!! That’s $20 per CD, plus $44 for the (I’m sure lovely) book, not including shipping!
As you’ll recall, I bought the RM SDE for $79 on your guidance when Amazon had a sale on it, so I’m hoping that lightning strikes twice in this regard — until then, my stance is … wait for it … “Don’t pay the Ferry-man!”
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I’m in the same cell as the monk, I want the book and have pretty much everything else on here aside from the literal handful of the new and curios. In this economy I just can’t pony up the money for it.
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Tim – Hence the likelihood of strategic DLs for me.
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The previously unreleased material is starting to trickle out. Yesterday I purchased an EP with Star and She Belongs To Me on it.
Star is probably as left field as you can get for a new track added to a career retrospective. I’ve been listening to it quietly so as not to disturb someone who is working from home….I didn’t notice any Ferry vox on it, maybe they’re buried in the mix. On first listen it sounds like a dubby b-side from the Boys and Girls years. The track is a development of a Nine Inch Nails sketch.
The other track is a Dylan cover and lands more squarely in the zone of what you expect a Bryan Ferry track to sound like (even if it’s a cover).
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Tim – I see that this is already out there on iTunes…yay! I still need that covers EP that came out digitally a few years ago. Gulp! I need to go into iTunes one day with about $50 to blow and clean up dozens of loose ends like this.
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Got my 5CD box/book set finally… listening while I work. I have to emphasize—though they’ve been listed in your article—I really like the collections per disc because they’re not sequenced by every ten years (72 to 82, etc.), but by the batches from Best-Of, to covers, to composer, etc. As a Virgo, I probably would have like the chronology to be sequential BUT it’s pleasurable to hear them contextually by these groupings, giving me a new appreciation to material I otherwise know well (mostly).
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René – I finally bought the OMD “Souvenir” 5xCD box which is chronological with the 40 singles in order on the first pair of discs. There’s something to be said for experiencing the music in sequence, but with the larger scope of the Ferry solo box, I will have to admire the curation, even though it may be giving short shrift to his prodigious and impressive capacity for [mostly] transformative cover versions. Given that it was the genesis of his solo career.
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