Let's Stick Together

Bryan Ferry: Let's Stick Together

Let's Stick Together, released in 1976, was actually created from a hodge-podge of:

• a couple of one-off singles (You Go To My Head & Let's Stick Together)
• 4 tracks from a 1976 EP (publicised by a music video for The Price Of Love) and released to keep Ferry in the public eye given that Roxy Music was on hold, temporarily
• 4 re-recorded Roxy Music tracks which had been released as b-sides to Ferry's SOLO singles + 1 more that hadn't

    

Curiously, after releasing:

• These Foolish Things in 1973 &
• Another Time, Another Place in 1974

...to pretty good reviews and sales (considering he wasn't touring to promote either of them), Ferry only released the single You Go To My Head in 1975, a wonderful, tasteful remake of a song made famous by (amongst others) Frank Sinatra. Ferry's version is light, bubbling, white-boy funk with highlighted strings and though I liked it, (Heck, I still love it) the public didn't...and You Go To My Head didn't even make the Top 30 in the UK.

In fact, it was almost a full year later before Ferry released another single, tied to coincide with the release of the LIVE Roxy Music album, Viva. Ferry chose Let's Stick Together, a boogie by Wilbert Harrison, which had been reworked into a hit single by American band Canned Heat during the late Sixties. For the music video, The Stylish One camped it up as a white-suited Clark Gable, added a killer horn section, whose memorable first bars monster riff still fills dance-floors around the world, instantaneously.  

Let's Stick Together was a top 5 hit in the UK but a huge # 1 smash in Australia, primarily because of the slick music video, which featured a young Jerry Hall as a voracious vamp in a tigerskin print.

Bryan Ferry: Let's Stick Together

With the success of Let's Stick Together, Ferry recorded another 4 covers:

• The Price Of Love...an old Everley Brothers flop from 1965, totally revamped with trumpet and big guitars to sound completely different from the original
• Shame, Shame, Shame...a boogie by American blues singer Jimmy Reed
• It's Only Love...by Lennon & McCartney from Help, played pretty straight  &
• Heart On My Sleeve...by quality English light-pop composers Gallagher & Lyle who's album Breakaway* had then recently been a success (yes, I had that, too) 

...and released them as an E.P., a 4-disc single, which went Top 10 in the UK. 

When bundled together with Ferry's collected b-sides from his various singles, reworkings of tracks from Roxy Music, Roxy's first album, the collection created the Let's Stick Together album. Those Roxy tracks were: 

• 2HB a better recorded version than the original...but not greatly different
• Chance Meeting ...again...a much better recorded version than the original... but not greatly different  
• Remake Remodel ...significantly reworked into a desperate funk dance-track with big horns and girlie backing vocals
• Sea Breezes ...not greatly different from the original

...And he added a new version of Casanova...funkier and faster than the original on Country Life but lacking the original's menace.

For diehard Roxy Music fans like me, the "album" has always been a let-down, simply because we'd seen the tracks appear over the years...but for those who didn't, Let's Stick Together is pretty good mid-70s fare, with:

• You Go To My Head
• Let's Stick Together
• The Price Of Love &
• Chance Meeting

...being standout tracks. 

Bryan Ferry: Let's Stick Together

Excerpts from Jerry Hall's memoir, Tall Tales: ...Bryan has a song called Let's Stick Together. I used to tell him about this pact my sister Terry and I had made. It was: 'Twins forever stick together.' We still put it at the end of our letters to each other. And with my girlfriend Karen and her sister Michelle we'd all become blood sisters. You know, we'd cut our thumbs and stuck them together. Kids do things like that. So I used to tell Bryan about this all the time and then he did this song that went: C'mon, c'mon, let's stick together, You know we made a pact [sic] not to leave one another forever [sic] It was one of my favorites. I hoot an' holler on it. And on that first tour of America, right around the time of the Atlantic Records party, he was going to do it live at the Bottom Line, which is a real small club in New York. Bryan was one of the first to do videos, you know, and I'd already gotten into several of them, including the one of this song, so I asked if I could do it in the act. I think he was a little apprehensive but he said I could. So I painted myself with gold dust - just highlights, you know, glimmering - and then I had this costume that Anthony Price had made that was a leopard-skin swimsuit with built-in huge boobs inside and cut real high at the thighs and then in the back it came down with a long tail. So I came out doing my part, hootin' an' hollerin', you know, and I swung the tail around. It was really fun. I was really carryin' on. It was the first time I'd done a real live professional performance. Of course, modeling is a kind of performing, but I'd never hooted an' hollered and I'd never had a mike near me. So I rolled my eyes and winked at people and sashayed all around the stage and really hammed it up. I had a great time doin' it.   Jerry Hall: Tall Tales   I'd invited all my friends. Andy Warhol was there and Eileen and Jerry Ford and Antonio. And afterward everyone started screaming, 'Bring back Jerry!' That made Bryan very uncomfortable. I never got in his act again!

For more info, see:

• wikipedia Let's Stick Together   

*Note to M.O.R. artists looking for a great song:  Breakaway has a wonderful and wise ballad from an older  man/woman addressed to a teenage girl with a broken heart called 15 Summers that would make an excellent album track