Creativity Quote by Bryan Ferry

Bryan Ferry’s complaint isn’t really about geography; it’s about fluency. “Nicer audience” in New York, L.A., Chicago, Boston reads like a polite nod to the cities that helped build his kind of career: places with critics, tastemakers, radio ecosystems, and a shared vocabulary for art-pop theatrics. Ferry’s music has always traded on a cultivated sensibility - glamour as a form of intelligence - and he’s admitting that this pact works best where the audience has been trained to meet it halfway.

“Secondary markets” is the revealing euphemism. It reduces whole regions to a touring spreadsheet, but it also exposes a performer’s quiet dependence on cultural infrastructure. The subtext is anxiety: if the crowd “doesn’t have a clue,” the show risks turning from communion into customer service. Ferry isn’t saying they’re stupid; he’s saying the codes aren’t shared. The songs, the pose, the irony, the sleek detachment - these can read as sophisticated or simply baffling, depending on whether you’ve grown up around the institutions that teach people what to do with them.

There’s a class edge here, too: a faint aristocratic recoil disguised as professional pragmatism. Yet it also captures a real touring-era truth. Big cities function as cultural compression chambers; smaller stops can feel like data deserts. Ferry’s line lands because it’s both snobbish and honest about how “audience” is made, not found.