Check out his live recordings too, the live version of In the Air Tonight is pretty fantastic. Not too many people can belt out a song and play a drum solo at the same time.
The answer is Willy Deville.
Yeah, in a thread about top-tier English musicians, an unknown guy from New York who pretended he was from New Orleans was the person who really needed talking about, eh?
There’s nothing NOT pretentious or affected about Sting IMO.
I don’t think it’s an affectation. I think it’s an actual reflection of his personality. He thinks it’s cool to be that way and so he’s being that way.
Thanks. I’ll check it out. I’m starting from the beginning and listening to Face Value right now. I remember hearing that the original “In The Air Tonight” single had real drums underneath it the whole way through, because the head of Atlantic Records wanted them in earlier. While not terrible, it does lose a lot in terms of atmosphere and energy when that iconic drum break comes in to break up the until-then electronic drums percussion track.
Yeah, that’s why my answer is Ferry. It’s cool by association with Eno, though. Those first two records are cooler than Costello’s whole catalog even if you distilled it down to it’s coolest points.
Eno is a brilliant musician but Ferry is a brilliant performer. Also he just seems like a cooler guy, on a personal level; I would rather hang out with Ferry than Eno (or Costello, or Sting, for that matter) - Ferry just seems like a really genuine, down to earth guy, despite his bombastic stage persona. Ferry seems more approachable, Eno seems like he’d be more cerebral but also more closed-off. Costello just seems bitter.
Gotta go against the tide and vote Sting. Not just because Police-Sting was undoubtedly cool. Solo Sting was also cool - the Sting of the Englishman in New York video for instance. And only a cool dude can pull off that jersey he wears in We’ll Be Together …
I’ll admit the lute record was a negative, but not enough to offset the basic coolness there.
Costello is hip, but not cool. Watch the Oliver’s Army video and tell me with a straight face that speccy git is cool.
Ferry was cooler, but lost all coolness today for being pro-Conservative and pro-fox-hunting.
Elvis helped bring the brains musicianship and actual writing to punk rock instead of just pounding drums jangling guitars and screaming rants and ended up creating new wave …
Hit the wrong button. I meant to vote for Ferry, not Costello. I have no opinion on Costello whatsoever other than his work seems to carry respectability and integrity, and personally it never connects with the wavelength I’m on.
I think of Costello in terms of an inordinate cleverness, defying cool or uncool.
Brian Ferry is extremely cool, so got my vote. Costello is militantly uncool, as someone described him upthread an “angry nerd”. Yes, geek/hipster is cool now, but Ferry’s coolness is timeless.
Sting is a dick.
I went with Ferry over Elvis. Elvis comes from the “through enough shit at the wall and something is bound to stick” composer world. Some sublime material with a lot of mediocre stuff as well. Ferry seems much more particular. His choices of covers blows away Elvis’s choices. Hell I think I’d even justify Ferry over Elvis due to Elvis’s delving into the country genre. Almost Blue? Blecch!
Sting was in Dune, I thought Dune was cool, therefore Sting is cool.
I may not be as cool as I think I am.
Man - ZERO response to my “Jesus of Cool” observation. The guy was Johnny Cash’s son-in-law! How cool is THAT?! 
My contributions are wasted here! (sniff) 
I’m torn, they all have their attraction to me. Sting is quite rightly mocked for his latter-day earnestness but he absolutely had leading-man looks, he was very easy on the eye. Elvis is a punk through and through with killer writing chops. Ferry in his pomp was effortlessly and superficially cool though perhaps a flamboyant vessel through which Eno worked his magic.
The one thing they clearly all had in common was a “don’t give a fuck” stance. If cool was purely attitude and talent it is Costello, outright good looks it has to be Sting but there is a little bit of an “x” factor required that has me leaning towards Ferry, it might be the glittery lapels and the platform heels and of course Eno confers coolness on all he touches, heck even Bowie was cooler *after *working with him.
This actually was on my mind when I was considering Sting’s coolness (or lack thereof), because he was unquestionably cool in Dune, looking more like a bad-ass Johnny Rotten punk than the anodyne singer he became. But did he put enough coolness in the bank during his Police (and Dune) days to leave a balance today? IMO, no, it wasn’t enough.
Did Bryan Ferry bank enough as a performer to make up for his later Nazi dalliances and politics? It knocks him down a little in my view, but he had a big enough account to keep him in the positive.
But Elvis started cool and stayed cool. As others note, it’s more the nerdy hipster cool, but that’s still cool to me.
This is what Ferry actually said:
“The Nazis knew how to put themselves in the limelight and present themselves. Leni Riefenstahl’s movies and Albert Speer’s buildings and the mass parades and the flags–just amazing. Really beautiful.”
Up until the part where he says it’s amazing and beautiful, that could have been a statement from any objective historian describing the Nazis’ use of aesthetics. Now, whether giving a positive affirmation of these aesthetics is outright pro-Nazi…I think it’s debatable. If it fit with a larger pattern of making remarks sympathetic to the Nazis, that would be one thing, but…it doesn’t, right? Nevertheless, Ferry apologized for the whole thing anyway.
I wouldn’t get too hung up on it.
I am surprised that no one here has brought up Elvis Costello’s “racism” from when he drunkenly called Ray Charles “…a blind, ignorant nigger” and James Brown “…a jive-ass nigger” to Steven Stills and Bonnie Bramlett.
Not cool, by any metric, but it appears that he has been forgiven by the public, which is probably a good thing.