Boys and Girls

Reader ScoreNo score yet, be the first to add.0.0Genre:Electronic / RockLabel:VirginRelease Date:1985By Daniel FelsenthalReviewed June 28, 2026Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible.

Today, we look back at the inimitable chanteur’s 1985 solo record, a dapper work of exquisite pop perfectionism.Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this storyWhen Roxy Music set England afire with their self-titled debut in 1972 and the maximal For Your Pleasure less than a year later, their bizarre, diffident frontman seemed less comfortable with the act than his bandmates. Bryan Ferry wore tiger stripes and devilish eyeliner, coiffing his hair a few brushes past heartthrob.

Beyond the glam, you could see glimmers of another artist who came into focus on his solo albums—which he somehow recorded while his main band released five masterpieces in three years. If Ferry of Roxy Music was outlandish, alluring, even villainous, solo Ferry was a genteel civilian alter-ego. Gone were the garish outfits; the singer played it straighter, performing covers of nostalgic songs from his youth.

He had initiated a long process of feeling more secure in his skin. The white coat and black bowtie he donned on the sleeve of his 1974 solo outing Another Time, Another Place became his signature costume for decades, a campy refraction of reality: This son of a County Durham coal miner had cracked the glass ceiling of the British class system.Awareness of class always swirled around Roxy Music and the public antics of their leader.

Even among his sybaritic peers in post-Swinging London, Ferry’s playboy reputation stood out—he was emblematic of new money, a scandalously quick ascent up the UK’s social strata. Roxy may have been the consummate “art school” band, but this hardly indicated born privilege. Government-subsidized art programs offered disadvantaged Brits an alternative education, a way to transcend the village or council estate.

By the start of Ferry’s studies at Newcastle University in the 1960s, many of these scrappy and accomplished academies had become hubs of pop art and rock‘n’roll, an environment that introduced him to a nexus of thought about postmodernism, stardom, and fashion. He knew that flamboyance befit Roxy Music—especially when Brian Eno was a member until his 1973 departure. Yet he began to realize that this wasn’t the right look for Bryan Ferry.

Reader ScoreNo score yet, be the first to add.0.0At the age of thirty-nine, Ferry redefined himself on his landmark sixth solo record, Boys and Girls—but only after he remade/remodelled his whole band.

He took a seven-year hiatus from releasing records under his own name following 1978’s The Bride Stripped Bare, a period that enabled him to shift the gravitational center of Roxy’s sound toward haunting pop, which felt both original and reverent of the traditional songcraft he admired. The group had a massive European hit with their cover of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” just two months after the Beatle was murdered—exactly the sort of omnipresent, generational anthem that Ferry tackled on his solo albums. He sang about romance with less freneticism and, on stage, swanned around like he had a Caesar’s Palace residency in his future.

Though the sessions for 1982’s Avalon were notably druggy, Ferry tried to foster a perception as a family-focused husband in search of peace, which matched the mature tone of his new tunes. The name of Roxy Music’s opus, Country Life, had seemed like a joke when it dropped in 1974; by their 1983 break-up, the same title had become a diary entry. As Margaret Thatcher defunded art departments and wreaked untold havoc on the progressive gains of the Labour Party, Ferry basked in the Sussex countryside with his wife and growing lineage, when he was not tinkering with his music at one or another international studio.

He glided toward life’s middle, posing for men’s fashion magazines and acting charming with reporters, avoiding the right-wing banter and hanky-panky (he was a newlywed, after all), but otherwise aging into the natty and cartoonish vision of refinement that characterizes his public persona to this day.Boys and Girls came out in 1985, in the heat of such a queasy, conservative historical juncture, and it brims with a slick luxury that suffused the culture. The 38-minute collection is, if not quite perfect, a work of exquisite perfectionism.

This is among the earliest mainstream pop records on which instrumental flourishes don’t seem played, as if on a cue, but placed, as if in a visual field. Each of the nine songs is like a room that you can wander, a gorgeous, ultra-designed space for daydreams. Cuts that were derided at the time for their aimlessness and repetition—“The Chosen One,” “Stone Woman”—now seem like showpieces that transform with each listen, their grooves bare scaffolding on which to hang surprising details.

On Boys and Girls, Ferry completed