Fashion move for Roxy Music’s jealous guy

He is the epitome of savvy style and refined luxury – now Bryan Ferry wants to follow his pop-star peers and create his own branded clothing.

“It’s something I would really like to do. I should have done it years ago,” the Roxy Music frontman told us before accepting the BMI Icon award at the performing rights organisation’s Park Lane awards.

“I did collaborate with [designer] Antony Price, who created a range for Topman. If P. Diddy can do it, why can’t I?” asks Ferry, 63, whose stage clobber inspired last year’s Burberry collection.

Ferry is keen to regain his place in the fashion firmament after his role as Marks & Spencer’s “spokesmodel” ended over the furore over some unwise comments in which he expressed admiration for the architecture of the Third Reich.

Continuing on the fashion theme, Ferry adds that he isn’t thrilled by the iTunes era: “I liked vinyl albums with cover art. It’s like direct selling now, like marketing cardigans.”

However, even wealthy rockers need a sideline during the crunch. “We couldn’t afford to tour the US with my Dylanesque album. We would have lost too much money.”

Greer invokes Boston Tea Party

Germaine Greer is promising direct action against proposals to take UK voting rights away from resident Commonwealth citizens.

“Government is threatening to withdraw voting rights for foreign nationals living in UK,” she tells Clive James on Times Online. “Haven’t they heard of the Boston Tea Party? F*** ’em. I’m going to refuse to pay income tax if they go through with this.”

Greer also believes that ministers “don’t know their arse from their elbow” after they abolished Commonwealth scholarships (like the one that brought her to these shores).

And don’t forget Sylvia Plath, who fell into the trap of turning her life into art. “I worry for Tracey Emin. It’s the same sort of thing. Why does Sylvia Plath end it and write about ending it before she does? Is it because the work is ended?”

Hear Germaine Greer in full flight

The British Ambassador in Manila has been hauled in for a dressing-down after the Philippine Government failed to see the funny side of a Harry Enfield sketch in which a man urges his neighbour to “mount” a Filipina maid. The sketch, in Harry and Paul on BBC One, in which the maid was forced to mate with a “pet northerner”, was “insensitive and racist,” a congresswoman said. The Embassy said that any views expressed and situations portrayed by the BBC “are completely independent” of the Government. Why aren’t northerners up in arms too?

The Face: Danny Cipriani

With a deal to become adidas’s “brand ambassador” sealed yesterday, is it too much to ask for Danny Cipriani, English rugby’s sex symbol, to fulfil his promise on the pitch?

The fly-half jersey is set to pass from Jonny Wilkinson to the gifted new star, 20, but Twickenham’s blazers still twitch over his dalliance with the actress Kelly Brook.

More tabloid revelations – that he dated a stunner, later revealed to be a transsexual, followed by a nightclub episode and his subsequent removal from the England squad – suggested a lack of rigour. Yet Cipriani, whose mother drove a black cab to fund his school fees, possesses the rare ability to change a game.

Injury permitting he will carry English hopes this autumn. The Wasps man has been stung too often to fail.

Postscript

We wish Peter Mandelson, the new Business Secretary, well after the removal of his kidney stone. However, less well-disposed Labour colleagues have been heard around Westminster quoting Evelyn Waugh’s remark on hearing that doctors had removed a benign tumour from Randolph Churchill (Sir Winston’s less admired son): “It was a typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.”

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