As rock's King of Cool, Bryan Ferry, talks for the first time about his life, Ruth Campbell discovers how growing up in a North-East pit village and his art student days helped shape his music and his style.

STANDING atop a steep, windswept hill, the imposing Penshaw Monument near Houghton le Spring seems an unlikely inspiration for the camp, stylish glamour of a ground-breaking Seventies rock band. But to one young aspirational miner's son, living in the then small pit village of Washington down below, this Greek-style temple, built as a memorial to the first Earl of Durham, made a thrilling, almost theatrical visual statement.

"It seemed to me like a symbol - representing art, and another life, away from the coalfields and the hard North-Eastern environment; it seemed to represent something that was much finer," says Bryan Ferry, who went on to create the internationally renowned rock band, Roxy Music.

Ferry, a style and pop art icon in his own right, has been talking for the first time about how the North-East landscape and culture shaped his artistic vision. Today, he may be known as Rock's King of Cool, yet in his book, Re-make/Remodel the young Ferry emerges as someone ill at ease and uncomfortable in his surroundings. He remembers Washington as a dangerous, physical place, with rival gangs fighting each other.

Ferry, a jazz fan from the age of ten, would certainly have cut quite a curious figure in the streets of 1950s Newcastle, especially when he travelled on his own by bus to concerts.

"I would be dressed in a white trench coat - at the age of twelve. I would probably have seen the adverts for Strand cigarettes; I was very interested in style," he says.

He saw all the jazz greats on stage. It was a tantalising glimpse of a magical, star-studded world, one that the young Ferry determined to inhabit. To many, this miner's son with aristocratic leanings must have appeared, at times, irritatingly pretentious. When The Northern Echo reported on the opening of his student art exhibition, headlined Angry Young Artist's Chance, Ferry used the opportunity to criticise the "narrow minded" North-East picture buying public.

'It is sad that there's no market for the less conventional type of painting in the North-East. The people with money do not want abstract paintings, but tend to prefer the pretty landscape," he said. Then he was a confident, but callow youth. But even now, at 62, Ferry's superior air can still grate.

Talking today about the smartly dressed assistants in Jacksons outfitters where he had a Saturday job as a teenager, he says: "At the time I thought, god, these guys are really something, really posh; but looking back I suppose they were poor little salesmen in a tailor's shop in Newcastle."

Still, he has the grace to admit he has always been "a bit stuck up". "I think I have probably always been interested in elites. I left school wanting to go to university. I suppose that you'd meet a better class of person," he says.

Life was far from glamorous for Bryan and his sisters Ann and Enid growing up in 1950s Washington. Until the family was able to afford a television in 1955 - "when Newcastle were in the Cup" - the young Ferry relied on cinema and music for entertainment and recalls the thrill of buying his first records at Windows, a family music shop which is still thriving.

Working in nearby Jacksons introduced him to the art of smart tailoring. "I was always fascinated by men's clothes. I suddenly knew about three-button, single-breasted suits with side vents, or which buttons you were supposed to fasten."

Newcastle, Ferry recalls, was "a very cool town, a leading Mod town". While in the sixth form of Washington Grammar School, he went to places like the New Orleans Jazz Club and the Club A-Go-Go and played in a band, the Banshees.

When he started studying Fine Art at Newcastle, in the university's art department, led by the influential Richard Hamilton, he rubbed shoulders with the burgeoning stars of British and American Pop Art.

On moving to London in 1969, he spent his first night on David Hockney's floor in Notting Hill. Through his art school connections, he met fellow Roxy band members Brian Eno, who studied at Winchester School of Art, and Andy Mackay, who studied music at Reading. Like Eno and Mackay, Ferry was torn between making a career for himself in the arts and his love of music. Hitching to London to see Otis Redding play in 1967 was a major turning point. "It was a great moment for me, a Road to Damascus situation.

"Music is a very strong drug, that's what I wanted to do." he says. But he wanted his band to combine design, fashion and music, to make paintings with sounds. He wanted Roxy, simply, to be a work of art.

The band's debut album, Roxy Music, released in 1972 was acclaimed by New Musical Express as one of the greatest first albums ever released.

From emerald green glitter eyeshadow to leopard skin prints, fans aspired to their glamour. Style commentator Peter York said Ferry "should hang in the Tate with David Bowie".

Author Michael Bracewell's scholarly book also gives a unique insight to British art, fashion, music and culture from the austerity years of the Fifties, through to the glam rock period of the early Seventies. He was fascinated by Roxy's beginnings. "Roxy Music is more or less unique as a very successful, chart-topping, trend-defining rock group, the basis of which lay in esoteric ideas.

I wonder how he persuaded Ferry, who rarely speaks to the Press, to talk so openly. "I wrote and explained I would approach the book in the same way I would approach a book about the Pre-Raphaelites. That quite amused him," says Bracewell.

For, most of all, Ferry is an artist. The little boy who used to dream of a finer life when he looked up to the Penshaw Monument escaped to a new world of his own creation. "I quite liked hiding behind the name of Roxy Music, because Roxy Music is a glamorisation. And I didn't think my own name was terribly glamorous. I suppose, all those years ago I changed my name to Roxy Music."

Re-make/ re-model (Faber and Faber, £20)