WHEN Roxy Music exploded on the scene in 1972, they made the sound of the future. Curious, then, that singer Bryan Ferry should have a penchant for looking back during his parallel solo career in the Great American Songbook tradition.

On Avonmore, Ferry harks back again, this time to Roxy-era Avalon, from the title and cover portrait, to tracks Loop De Li, One Night Stand and A Special Kind Of Guy. As might be expected, this is a brocade smoking jacket of a record, Ferry’s first cocktail of new songs in almost four years. It is star-studded too, with a who’s who of luminaries including Nile Rodgers, Johnny Marr and Mark Knopfler.

The result is an album that smooches like a lounge lizard while addressing, with Cowardian-stiff upper lip, Ferry’s divorce from Amanda Sheppard, who is 38 years his junior. “I am forsaken and forlorn as I face up to the shadows on the wall,” he intones with barely a whiff of emotion.

What wasn’t expected is the way Avonmore ends on a deeper, darker tone as Ferry’s polished veneer finally cracks into a maelstrom of emotions. His tremulous cover of Stephen Sondheim’s Send In The Clowns, which similarly concerns marriage to a much younger woman, is truly heart breaking, while Robert Palmer’s Johnny and Mary, is metamorphosed into a slow-motion elegy to love and loss. There is a palpable sense of personal torment as Ferry croaks: “He needs all the world to confirm, That he ain’t lonely.”