Bryan Ferry gets all tangled up in Dylan

By Steve James

NEW YORK (Reuters) - When singer Bryan Ferry was a university student, he didn't really care much for Bob Dylan, preferring the sounds of American soul and Motown.

What a difference more than four decades can make.

The debonair Englishman, who fronted Roxy Music in the 1970s, then built a solo career on '30s ballads and a string of slyly seductive numbers playing on his suave persona, has just recorded a whole album of Dylan songs.

"I heard Dylan when he first came out, and I remember seeing people wandering around with his album under their arms," Ferry recalled of his years at England's Newcastle University.

"But at that time I wasn't into ... folk music. Oh, acoustic guitars? It was not my thing.

"I was very much into Otis Redding, soul music, Stax, Motown. And guitars had to be electric for me, to be exciting," he told Reuters in a recent interview.

Asked what he thought when Dylan dropped the acoustic image and went all electric with the 1965 album "Highway 61 Revisited," Ferry laughed. "That's when I got into him."

"When the guy shouted 'Judas' at him? I would have been the one cheering," he said of the seminal moment in rock history when one fan made his displeasure known during Dylan's 1966 show in Manchester, England.

From then on, Ferry was hooked on the enigmatic American singer and after Roxy Music, his first solo single was a reinterpretation of Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall."

"So from the offset of my solo career, there's a relationship with his work," he said. "Also it was a big hit so it was like a lucky charm for me."

On the new album, titled, what else? "Dylanesque," Ferry tackles songs that might have hard-core Dylan fans wincing in anticipation. Because his work is idiosyncratic and so closely associated with the singer-songwriter, many consider Dylan almost sacrosanct -- with the Jimi Hendrix version of "All Along the Watchtower" a notable exception.

The new Ferry disc includes a couple of songs, "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and "Positively 4th Street," that most artists would not dare cover.

Confronted by the suggestion that some listeners might be prepared to hate his record, the 61-year-old Ferry was gracious.

"That's reasonable," he said, explaining that he was attracted to the lyrics. "I'm a singer, so words are important to me.

"As opposed to the songs I've done from the 1930s -- another area I've sort of plundered, or been inspired by -- those (Dylan) songs are quite complex."