Recently I became extremely lazy in the morning. After the fresh fruit juice mix (lemon, oranges & grapefruit) and the corn flakes with muesli and banana I usually move over from the kitchen table to the sofa in the living room and have my black tea there. In the meantime Catherine pollutes the kitchen with hundreds of toxic substances she blows into the air. Where was I? Oh yes the sofa. When lying on the sofa this morning I started listening to my mp3 player. It was in shuffle mode. I love it to be surprised by some great music I haven't heard for a long time and that is what happened this morning. The first track started with these few saxophone tones, then there was some tom drumming, then the electric bass joined in with a fat sound and finally the keyboards came on with a quick chord progression and lots of reverb. It was all kind of hanging there, a jazzy setting. And then the voice, androgynous, with an unclear pronunciation, first I thought Brian Eno, then David Byrne. Finally it dawned on me that it was Bryan Ferry. Somehow this song in which Ferry sings with an incredible sadness in his voice to an equally sad saxophone line does not seem to fit on 1982's Avalon, the last album and biggest chart-topper of Roxy Music. A synthpop masterpiece where the old pop experimentalists Roxy Music showed the new romantics how to make heavy emotional tuneful music and be successful at the same time. What actually sets this song apart from the others on the album except the last track, the wonderful yearning saxophone dominated Tara was that it was composed by Andy Mackay, Roxy Music's saxophone player. And that both these compositions point towards Talk Talk. There is already this feeling of time and space, a certain slowness in them. And Ferry's heartbreaking singing on While My Heart Is Still Beating definitely foreshadows Mark Hollis' plaintive chant where the words are even less distinguishable. Additionally I very much like the title in which the heart is beating and not bleeding which would have been such an obvious choice.

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