![\"Bryan](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Bryan-Ferry-1973-Roxy-Music-Far-Out-Magazine-f-1140x855.jpg\")
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(Credits: Far Out \/ AVRO)<\/p>\n
Mon 23 February 2026 8:30, UK <\/p>\n
Because of their art school backgrounds and high-brow, retro-kitschy presentation, Roxy Music<\/a> were often presumed to be making some sort of commentary on the sounds and styles of pop music\u2019s past, rather than declaring their fandom for it. <\/p>\n Frontman Bryan Ferry, in particular, was so over-the-top in the romantic crooning<\/a> that he surely had to be going for satire. Or was he?<\/p>\n \u201cI do wonder whether Bryan, at the time, was really aware of what he was doing,\u201d Ferry\u2019s former Roxy bandmate Andy Mackay told the Guardian in 1997. \u201cThe band he was in before, the Gas Board, was basically a soul band; and it\u2019s very interesting that as soon as he got the chance to launch his solo career off the back of Roxy with [the 1973 album] These Foolish Things, he immediately did covers of all the songs by singers who he admired, which were soul songs. I think he thought he was singing one thing, but because he was English, it came out differently.\u201d<\/p>\n Ferry recorded These Foolish Things right in the middle of Roxy Music\u2019s ascent, when he was still the band\u2019s lead singer, but also within the same summer that Brian Eno opted to leave the band after too many creative clashes with the frontman. This makes the record pretty telling of where that divide existed, as Ferry really was an honest-to-gosh crooner by heart, and was just as happy interpreting his favourite pop songs of the \u201860s as he was pushing boundaries with new electro-glam rock material.<\/p>\n These Foolish Things includes covers of not-so-obscure hits by the Beach Boys (\u2018Don\u2019t Worry Baby\u2019), Smokey Robinson (\u2018The Tracks of My Tears\u2019), the Four Tops (\u2018Loving You is Sweeter Than Ever\u2019) and the Rolling Stones (\u2018Sympathy for the Devil), and while the album was an early showcase for a 28-year-old Ferry as a viable pop star, it also established a format he would revisit repeatedly later in life on other thematic covers records like 1999\u2019s As Time Goes By and 2007\u2019s Dylanesque.<\/p>\n That latter project was, unsurprisingly, a collection of Ferry\u2019s interpretation of 11 Bob Dylan tunes, but it was far from his first foray into the Robert Zimmerman songbook. Way back in \u201873, the first track on These Foolish Things was a rousing, bouncy, soulful take on \u2018A Hard Rain\u2019s a-Gonna Fall<\/a>\u2019, a rendition that Ferry claimed, nearly 50 years later, was still the cover he was \u201cmost proud of\u201d from across his career. It was also the first cover he ever recorded.<\/p>\n