“For the last ten years I have had a dismal output of work,” Ferry would confess to the Times in 1993. “It’s because I got very self-conscious about bringing out a new album, conscious of what I was trying to beat and determined to write my masterpiece… the first problem was that the technology got more and more sophisticated so my opportunities expanded and the possibilities became endless.” The new album was originally to be called Horoscope, and initially Ferry was upbeat about the prospects of releasing it quite quickly after the relative failure of Bete Noire. But by 1992, he found himself without either a manager or a producer. And, with no one there to call a halt to Ferry’s increasingly grandiose designs, the recording sessions went on and on, and on.
…the situation only stabilized when he hooked up again with his original manager, David Enthoven, who had come out of a ten-year retirement.
Rumours had it that Ferry had financed the recording of the Horoscope album to the tune of 800,000 pounds. At one point it was costing him 2,000 pounds per day to record the tracks, all financed solely from his own pocket. Listening to the tracks intended for Horoscope, Ferry and Enthoven, along with the record company, decided that, even after all the years of work, there were still not ready. Some reports claim that Virgin Records simply rejected the album out of hand, though this is rigorously denied by Ferry himself: “They seemed to like it, from what I remember. Warner Brothers in America didn’t like it as much.
