John Foxx

John Foxx is the name that Dennis Leigh gave himself in the London rock band Ultravox!. He'd traveled from Chorley, Lancashire, on a scholarship to attend the Royal College of Art. While in London, he met some very energetic, inventive, intelligent and telepathic musicians and in 1973 formed what was to be called Tiger Lily a couple of years later. The band recorded one 45rpm, the A-side of which was a cover of the famous Fats Waller track Ain't Misbehavin', to be used in a soft porn movie of the same name.

Eventually, after several names including Fire Of London, The Zips and even The Damned, Tiger Lily became Ultravox!, a tangentially Punk/Glam/Electronic Rock band. Other appropriate labels could be Robot Rock and Art Rock. It's influences were apparent from the start, like Roxy Music, The New York Dolls, David Bowie with some Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd. As one of their earlier names, London Soundtrack, implies, they absorbed everything around them, including Disco, Reggae and Prog musics in their earliest songs, some of which made it on their first self-titled record.

There are elements that set them apart from their contemporaries, not the least of which were John Foxx's vocals and Billy Currie's violin and keyboard playing. Currie, originally from Yorkshire, brought both Classical and Improvisational backgrounds. Ritual Theatre consisted of four musicians and four dancers, included Currie, Henry Cow's Lindsay Cooper as well as a performer named Ed Francis, later of Eddi & Sunshine and Gloria Mundi. Francis persuaded Currie to move back down to London, excited about Tiger Lily, for whom he'd been appearing with, performing Pantomime as he'd done earlier with Ritual Theatre.

They were there at the beginning of punk, one of its originators, in fact, but Ultravox! was always experimenting a little too much to remain acceptable. At some point punk became a category, very defined, complete with maniphestos, uniforms and a regimented code of ethics.

The band was signed to Island Records and for that label they made three very interesting and exciting LPs, released in 1976, 1977 and 1978. The first of these was credited as produced by Ultravox!, Brian Eno and Steve Lillywhite. This is likely the first example of Eno providing a rock band a means for a thesis, coaxing them through the valleys of what is and what isn't. On the back cover of his diary, 1995, there's a long list of things Eno calls himself and one of them is a drifting clarifier, something he was first for Ultravox!. He performed this function many times after that but is best known for this role in relation to Devo, Talking Heads and finally, with real financial rewards, to U2.

Ha!-Ha!-Ha!, the second release, featured an actual synthesizer, the ARP Odessey and on the track Hiroshima Mon Amour, the TR-77 drum machine, made by Roland Corporation, was employed in what seems to be a modified bossa-nova preset by drummer Warren Cann. Foxx's first solo record a few years later was really born amid the songs and sounds found here.

Like the German band Neu!, Ultravox!'s identity was partly linked to its exclaimation point. By the third album, Systems Of Romance, dropped was the exclaimation point, for whatever reason, along with most connections to the sounds, visuals and attitudes connected to punk. Also missing was their first guitarist, Stevie Shears, replaced by Robin Simon, from a band called Neo (not to be confused with Neu!). On this release, the most streamlined of the three, the lyrics and music are at their most visual and emotional, exploring interesting psychological states with the synthesizer taking on an expanded role. In When You Walk Thru Me, the drum pattern is the same as The Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows. Psychedelia was always one thread in the tapestry of Ultravox's music and it recurs often in solo Foxx music after this.

A tour of the United States, was very successful in terms of crowd enthusiasm and ticket sales, but it had no financial help from a record label as the band had been dropped from Island's roster. Simon decided to stay on in New York and Foxx made plans to go solo upon returning to England.

In 1979, not on the best of terms with his band and choosing to follow his interest in D.I.Y., Foxx gave up the rock band construct, plotted a new career and an independent label. In the Ultravox camp, he was replaced as lead vocalist by JamesMidge Ure. This next incarnation of Ultravox built on some of the ideas explored on the final Foxx-era record Systems Of Romance to huge worldwide success with Vienna in 1980. With Currie at the helm, musically, more releases, hits, arenas and Live Aid followed. The Ure-fronted version of Ultravox lasted another six years, more or less.

When he was enjoying #1 hits in Britain, the innovative Electropop pop star Gary Numan, whether speaking on radio, television or to the print media, made it no secret that it was the Foxx-era Ultravox that was his major influence.

Signed to Virgin Records, Foxx achieved chart success with his first solo single, Underpass. It brings the listener to a territory introduced by Throbbing Gristle's Hamburger Lady and United. All three of these achieved chart success in the UK, got much attention on college radio in the U.S. and yet, as catchy as these are, they really sidestep a lot of other pop requirements. Stranger music seemed like it could hold its own, move units and sell tickets. There was a feeling in the air that, prior to it being marginalized by categorization, an ever-growing power in a stranger, more Noir-style pop could continue for sometime, which it did, swimming underground and resurfacing in younger generations.

The collective Noir pop statement of 1980 could be said to span 1977-1985, and could include, but not be limited to, Numan's The Pleasure Principle, Foxx's Metamatic, Bill Nelson's Quit Dreaming And Get On The Beam, Yukihiro Takahashi's Neuromantic, Yello's Claro Que Si, Cluster's Curiosum, Judy Nylon's Pal Judy, Haruomi Hosono's Philharmony,Cabaret Voltaire's Red Mecca, Laurie Anderson's Big Science, Cowboys International's Original Sin, Der Plan's Geri Reig, YMO's BGM, Throbbing Gristle's 20 Jazz Funk Greats, Nico& The Faction's Camera Obscura, The Plastic's Welcome Plastics, The Residents's Commercial Album, Riuchi Sakamoto's B-2 Unit, Tuxedo Moon's Half Mute, Japan's Gentlemen Take Polaroids, Yellow Magic Orchestra's Solid State Survivor, The Normal's Warm Leatherette, Lene Lovich's Stateless, Thomas Leer & Robert Rental's The Bridge, The Human League's Reproduction, Young Marble Giant's Colossal Youth and Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures.

The eighties pop music pulled firmly away from the noir direction it began in. Big, bright lights were proudly switched on, with the music made by people like Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes with The Buggles and the hit Video Killed The Radio Star and, from that same circle, Thomas Dolby Robertson with his Golden Age Of Wireless record as well as the Ure-fronted Ultravox, with its the grandiose Vienna.

The New Romantic movement was spearheaded by the fashion-conscious punk rocker Steve Strange and his Club For Heroes. Strange also had a band, Visage (which is where Billy Currie met Midge Ure). Coming out of the club scenes in London and other urban centers of the UK, in the late 1970s, the New Romantics declared Glam was not dead. Like Glam, there statement involved loud yet atmospheric music, a very visual wardrobe, bi-sexual tendencies and a drug-friendly attitude toward life. Because of their clothing, hair and music, people like Foxx, Ultravox and the members of Japan were included in the NR scene, almost by default. The very successful Soft Cell and Culture Club also began in the New Romantics era. Growing all along was what was eventually to be categorized as New Wave. As its name implies, it rose out of the wreckage of punk and included NR under its big umbrella. By the time the keyboard-heavy and NR-looking pop band Duran Duran started having hits, this all became something entirely different, got consumed, splintered or went underground and became something else.

Released on Metal Beat, Metamatic, which is the name of a painting machine (Metamatic N°17) by kinetic artist Jean Tinguely of twenty years before, is Foxx playing most of the synthesizers and "rhythm boxes," as they're listed on the jacket. The label is named after one of the songs from the album (or is it the other way around?), which was also released as a single. Despite the fact that, in interviews, he expressed enthusiasm for his label including others' releases along with his own, Metal Beat lasted from 1980 to 1985 with Foxx as its only artist, or "solo pilot" as he put it to his fans. Though musically far apart, both Foxx and Ultravox left the pop world of the eighties around the middle of that decade.

Metamatic continues some of the spirit of the Conny Plank-produced Systems of Romance. It also included at least two tracks that were performed live with Ultravox, Touch And Go and He's A Liquid. This collection of tracks sounds more akin to the likes of Kraftwerk, Gary Numan and Thomas Leer than it does his former band.

The mood is influenced by the fiction of J.G. Ballard, the still fresh-sounding, surreal and stripped-down electronic tracks conjure up moods and images of sex, violence, personal dramas and manias, love, betrayal, isolation, inclusion, cities, abandoned rooms and buildings, car bombs, fog, sunshine, trees, the elements and the skies. Sometimes uncannily like Peter Cook's popstar character in the movie Bedazzled, Foxx, with seeming detachment, talks the lyrics. He just as often shouts, sings and whispers them.

It has been said Metamatic is the first proper electropop record. It is just as likely that Gary Numan's The Pleasure Principle, also released in 1980, deserves such a classification. Kraftwerk's Trans-Europe Express, from 1977 is also, most definitely, electropop.

Like his music, Foxx's images are often concerned with Collage, or Montage technique. His melodies and lyrics, too, make use of hybridization and cannibalization of the easily recognizable joined with the unrecognizable. The power of his imagery puts Foxx in a category that also includes Throbbing Gristle and Industrial Records, Cluster (Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius together, separate or with collaborators) and others on Sky Records, Factory Records, Creation Records, David Sylvian, Can and Spoon Records, Neu!, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Jandek and Corwood Industries, The Residents and Ralph Records, Hipgnosis (which included future Throbbing Gristle member Peter Christopherson), Talking Heads, Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music as well as Brian Eno. In terms of audio and visual presented as an intentionally cohesive statement these are of the same relevance as Martin Denny and all that is Exotica, The Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol as well as The Beatles.

Metamatic's cover art comes from the same world as Bill Brandt, Jandek and Rene Magritte. Foxx appears to come from a future time or a time from forty years before. It also somehow conveys a sense of Science Fiction. It is all and none of these things. Coincidentally, Gary Numan has said that the cover of his The Pleasure Principle was a tribute to Magritte's painting Le Principe Du Plaisir, but no-one noticed.

Foxx set up his own recording studio, called The Garden, housed in an artist's collective, surrounded by sculptors, painters and film makers. The Garden is a follow-up to Systems Of Romance, has more of a band feel and even includes Robin Simon, having recently departed the band Magazine, on guitar. Simon is to be found on the remaining two Foxx records from the eighties. Anyway, it is possible that this is what Ultravox would have sounded like had it remained in its Systems Of Romance line-up. Europe After The Rain, which also happens to be the name of a painting by Max Ernst, opens this record and was another hit single. It has a vocal break in a near-yodel style and the sound gives the listener the feeling of a train ride.

The Vocoder, or voice-operated recorder, originally created in the late 1930s by Homer Dudley for Bell Laboratories was used so well by Kraftwerk on all their records but when Trans-Europe Express was released, in 1977, black people in the U.S. took notice and what they created from that re-influenced Europe and the U.K. Music with the Vocoder as an intrinsic part can be found by many U.S. artists, including Miles Davis' former keyboardist Herbie Hancock. There was a new vocabulary for people in American Soul and Funk categories, especially Roger Troutman with and without Zapp, Boston's Michael Jonzun and the Jonzun Crew, the D.I.Y. electronic Hip Hop of Detroit's Juan Atkins and New York's Electro Funk, especially Afrika Bambaataa's Planet Rock. Throughout Black Music, from the late 1970s onward one can find Vocoder Soul.

In a very different direction, there is YMO's Behind The Mask, one of the most beautiful realizations of electronic Vocoder pop. Laurie Anderson's O Superman caught the attention of many and it is almost completely Vocoder, a long meditation with strange lyrics and no beats. In tracks Walk Away, Fusion/Fision and Pater Noster, the statement is a psychedelic and ecclesiastic hybrid, somewhere between the YMO and Anderson tracks mentioned plus more rock tradition than either. Sometimes, on this record and associated singles, Foxx uses the Vocoder as a texture, part of what he called the "Human Host," which seemed to be a half robot/half human choir. Sometimes it's adding ghostly trails.

In 1983, Foxx provided the soundtrack for Michelangelo Antonioni's film Identification Of A Woman (Identificazione Di Una Donna). This was a good choice by Antonioni, who had Pink Floyd provide him a soundtrack over ten years before. The images and mood of this movie are very Foxx. A musical reference point here could be Tangerine Dream's Phaedra. That same year, The Golden Section was released. This is less organic-sounding than The Garden, the sequencers are more angular and there's more of a Beatles sound on certain tracks. Produced by Zeus B. Held, it's full of amazing sounds, uses samples and each song drives along with its own engine. Ghosts On Water has drums and percussion that sound as though performed by Jerry Moratta and uses vocal samples from the record's previous track Endlessly, where John's voice, at certain times, sounds similar to George Harrison's. The Harrison voice is especially pronounced in the version of this song released a year earlier, when Endlessly appeared as a single. The single version had a surprise Sitar, backwards cymbals, a Shehnai, a string arrangement, played backwards at the end. This is another Foxx track that features the Tomorrow Never Knows drum pattern. Sitting At The Edge Of The World would not sound out of place in Yellow Submarine, with its pulsing Mellotron, perspective-altering lyrics and shimmering melody. The Golden Section's graphics features photographs of Foxx's head, in mugshot angles.

In Mysterious Ways was released in 1985. It's a collection of love songs. Lots of vibrato-laden organ is heard throughout. Morning Glory is a long, two-chord meditation with a Van Morrison delivery. Mid-eighties drum machines are heard on a few of the tracks and This Side Of Paradise has a late-seventies Ultravox feel to it. The Foxx talk sounds almost like Bob Dylan on Stars On Fire, a minor hit. Enter The Angel has female backing vocalists and the effect is Girl Group mid-sixties. Female vocalists are also heard on the almost Country ballad, Stepping Softly. Even though there are some familiar lyrical themes and word images, the record doesn't really sound like anything else Foxx has ever done. The cover art is in the collage style he had been presenting to his public since the early Ultravox! days.

After In Mysterious Ways, Foxx gave up the pop music scene. He sold his recording studio and returned to his earlier career as a graphic designer and artist, working under his original name of Dennis Leigh. For examples, see the book covers of Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Jeanette Winterson's Sexing The Cherry. He also began experimenting in Ambient, working on a project called Cathedral Oceans.

During his sabbatical, Foxx found inspiration in the underground House and Acid music scenes in Detroit and London, releasing white label vinyl anonymously. These brought with them new possibilities, scenes surrounding pure electronic beats and music where bands, stars and even melody weren't necessary. The rhythms were updated but the methodology for composing and releasing music inspired lots of creative energy. In the very early 1990s, as Nation 12, he released two 12" singles (Remember and Electrofear) with Tim Simenon, who is best known for his Bomb The Bass project.

It wasn't until 1995 that John Foxx released another album, Shifting City, a collaboration with Manchester's Louis Gordon, which was an updated stylistic return to Metamatic plus what he learned from 1990s underground dance music, along with the psychedelic pop that's been there since at least When You Walk Through Me. Also, in 1995, the first volume of Cathedral Oceans was finally released.

Cathedral Oceans is really a return to Foxx's Catholic youth and his love of the cathedrals of England, the UK and Europe. One can find the roots of Cathedral Oceans in traditional evensong, the Ambient Series of records by Brian Eno, My Sex from the first self-titled Ultravox! record, Hiroshima Mon Amour from Ha!-Ha!-Ha! as well as Just For A Moment from Systems Of Romance. There's also the 1981 release The Garden (and its accompanying full-color book of pre-Photoshop photo montages, called Church), the soundtrack to aforementioned Identificazione Di Una Donna, the Metamatic-era Glimmer along with the In Mysterious Ways-era Enter The Angel II and B-side Lumen De Lumine.

The return of Foxx has been well received by fans, and he and Louis Gordon have continued to work together. Especially exciting is their Crash And Burn available on vinyl and CD, from 2003, on Metamatic Records.

In late 2004, from September through October, a collection of Cathedral Oceans images was exhibited at BCB Art, Hudson, New York .

Discography

With Ultravox!:

• Ultravox! (1976)
• Ha!-Ha!-Ha! (1977)
• Systems of Romance (1978)

Solo:

• Metamatic (1980)
• The Garden (1981)
• The Golden Section (1983)
• In Mysterious Ways (1985)
• Cathedral Oceans (1995)

With Louis Gordon:

• Shifting City (1995)
• The Pleasures of Electricity (2002)
• Crash and Burn (2003)

With Harold Budd:

• Translucence/Drift Music (2003)

Links

Metamatic, the official John Foxx web site.