Bryan Ferry considers himself a 21st-century Jay Gatsby, said Louise Gannon in the Daily Mail (U.K.). “I can remember reading [The Great Gatsby] when I was about 15 or 16, and yes, I wanted to be him,” he says. “I just loved the glamour of it.” Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tragic hero, the former Roxy Music singer comes from humble roots, having grown up in the English working-class enclave of County Durham. His father worked as a miner, and his mother took in laundry. “They had tough lives. They grew up without electricity. We had it in our house growing up. To them it was absolute luxury.” Today, Ferry has glamour to spare, with all the trappings of an aging rock star—the fashionable wardrobe, the second wife 37 years his junior, and the country estate. “It’s big but not, you know, huge,” he says. Now 67, he has even managed to retain his youthful looks. “I’ve never really changed from who I was,” he says. “I’ve just sort of developed along the same lines I’d always been on.” Perhaps that’s why a tribe in the Congo is said to revere Ferry as a kind of god. “It’s absolutely true,” he says. “They think I visit in an invisible plane.”
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