Songfacts®:

• In 1973, Bryan Ferry did something rather audacious. He took Bob Dylan's 1963 apocalyptic folk song "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" - a stark warning about nuclear catastrophe - and turned it into a high-gloss, high-drama rock spectacle, complete with a seething vocal, ominous keyboards, and a chorus of brassy backing singers. It worked. The song reached #10 on the UK Singles Chart and made Dylan's ominous masterpiece sound like something you could dance to at a particularly decadent cocktail party.
• The track was the lead single from These Foolish Things, Ferry's debut solo album, which was essentially a one-man mission to prove that Roxy Music's velvet-suited frontman could take any song - be it a Beatles number or a Motown standard - and turn it into a swirling, cinematic production. The album, co-produced with John Porter and John Punter, was a commercial smash, peaking at #5 on the UK Albums Chart.
• John Porter had history with Ferry. The two met at Newcastle University in the 1960s when Ferry was fronting an R&B/soul band called the Gas Board. Porter played bass on Roxy Music's For Your Pleasure before joining Ferry in the studio for These Foolish Things.
  
  John Punter, meanwhile, had cut his teeth at Decca Studios before joining Air Studios, where he worked for Ferry and Roxy Music among other artists.
• The success of These Foolish Things emboldened Ferry. He followed it up with Another Time, Another Place (1974), another covers album, before proving himself as a songwriter with tracks like "Love Is The Drug," "More Than This" and "Slave To Love" - all of which cemented him as not only an effortlessly stylish presence but also a master of evocative, enigmatic pop.
  
  Reflecting on his early solo records, Ferry told Uncut magazine they were a turning point: "That set the tone of what was to follow. Those first covers albums gave me more confidence as a record-maker, which fed into what I subsequently did with Roxy Music. I started thinking more about song structure, arranging, producing. I became more particular about lyrics."
• One thing Ferry had always wanted to do, since first crooning his way through "Hard Rain" in 1973, was record an entire album of Dylan covers. He finally got around to it in 2007 with Dylanesque, which hit #5 on the UK chart and performed well across Europe.