Foxx above the knob-twiddling pack

by BRETT WOODWARD

TO paraphrase Hermann Goering - founder of the Gestapo and all 'round Nazi nutsack - when I hear names like Yazoo, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and The Buggles, that's when I reach for my revolver.

j foxx

An image from Cathedral Oceans project.

TO paraphrase Hermann Goering - founder of the Gestapo and all 'round Nazi nutsack - when I hear names like Yazoo, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and The Buggles, that's when I reach for my revolver.

Electronic music sub-genres like Synth-Pop and the New Romantics strike fear into the heart of most red-blooded music fans. The mind reels at the thought of foppish gents in heavy make-up and kilts; hair-dressing catastrophes that belonged only on Nose-Candy Barbie; and the kind of one-hit acts that still draw royalty cheques based on continuing sales of 80s party CD compilations. Yeah, I'm looking at you Kajagoogoo.

What a legacy these plug-in ponces left behind: the Thompson Twins, Bronski Beat, Erasure and, those sucklers at the devil's pizzle, Thomas Dolby and Howard Jones!

In the distasteful swirl of assembly line, Top 40 Chart chunder, it's easy to forget that there were some serious musicians working the field. Artists who had more in mind than eye-liner and a fringe that would make them look enigmatic and German.

John Foxx is about to tour Australia with a couple of very different shows and I know what you're thinking: "Foxx, the original Ultravox bloke, right? Plugged in a synthesizer while the rest of England was poking a safety pin through their schnozz."

Get comfy electro-boppers because there's so much more to this tale than a Foxx. Climb up on uncle's knee and lend an ear to a story that begins in a magical, mystical, musical time called the 70s. An age when fellas with lightning bolts painted across their faces goosed their record sales by dropping broad hints that they fancied other chaps. When David Bowie wore leotards and cod-pieces, Marc Bolan wore mascara and Lou Reed cross-dressed on his album covers. When bisexuality just meant that the Quaaludes and Cognac made you think a freckle was a fanny and that Freddy was Franny

Adrift in this androgynous milieu, a young English musician by the name of Dennis Leigh took the moniker John Foxx. In the grand tradition of the time - and possibly in the thrall of Roxy Music's own drag-wearing, knob-twiddling, keyboard-boffin, Brian Eno - the Lancashire lad began exploring the musical possibilities of tape machines and synthesizers while studying at the Royal College of Art.

Tiger Lily, a band Foxx formed in 1973, cut a version of Fats Waller's Ain't Misbehavin. Not exactly a cosmic dandy, star-groove, jeepster jam of the times but the first tentative steps toward a glam sound. Tiger Lily gigged around London until the first flushes of punk in 1976. As the story goes, Foxx was offered a job as vocalist for one of Joe Strummer's pre-Clash outfits, London SS. Instead he updated Tiger Lily's sound and cast about for a suitable new name before arriving at Ultravox!

Now, you're off again aren't you? You've been distracted, recalling the image of Midge Ure, strapped into a dark suit, wandering deserted streets in an ancient music video, caterwauling about 'Vienna'. But you see there's Ultravox and Ultravox! - and that exclamation mark makes all the difference.

This was the point at which Dennis Leigh truly became John Foxx of Ultravox! Their intellectual amalgam of electronic music, Foxx's distinctive vocals and a chilly lyrical outlook came together in the early 1977 single Dangerous Rhythm. The flipside of the seven-inch was the track My Sex which had its own echoes in Australia, providing the name for our most notorious, leather-trouser-favouring, new-wave, synth-pop band, formed just a year later.

In addition to Foxx, Ultravox! comprised Billy Currie playing violin and keys; Chris Cross on bass; Warren Cann on drums; together with guitarist Stevie Shears. Billy Currie stuck out 11 albums with Ultravox and even served time with Gary 'Tubeway Army' Numan's band and Visage. You'd have thought he'd have retired with lung-rot from hairspray abuse after that kind of run but no, Currie released a further eight solo albums, the latest of which was just last year. Chris Cross is, of course, not THAT Chris Cross, he of Sailing, Ride Like the Wind and Arthur's Theme. Ultravox! Chris Cross turned to psychotherapy and counselling after his music career, possibly as a reaction to being in a band with Midge Ure for a decade.

Brian Eno - the aforementioned glitter and feather-boa aficionado - got Ultravox! a deal with Island Records and lent Steve Lillywhite a hand to produce their 1977 self-titled debut. Ultravox! pumped out a couple more LPs over the next two years, Ha! Ha! Ha! (1977) and Systems of Romance (1978) as well as a concert EP, Retro Live(1978).

Krautrocker, and Eno collaborator, Conny Plank was brought in for Systems of Romance. His production softened the band's sound, aiming to build on the sales of the critically lauded but commercially ignored Ha! Ha! Ha!. Systems of Romance is historically regarded as ushering in the sound we came to know and loathe as New Romantic. But imitators took only the surface aspects of this pioneering synth-document and chose to serve up sizzle instead of steak.

Hoped-for chart success didn't follow and an early 1979 tour of the US, though well received, failed to hold the band together. They had already lost guitarist Stevie Shears, then the exclamation mark from their name, and finally vocalist Foxx. Rich Kid Midge Ure stepped up, next album Vienna was huge and the rest is history we'd all prefer to forget.

John Foxx began afresh as a solo artist with Virgin Records, and the landmark Metamatic album in 1980. Unencumbered by a band, Foxx was free to explore the frigid, monochrome, concrete, fever-dreamscapes that took inspiration more from the likes of author JG Ballard than the bubblegum bleepery that would culminate in a Flock Of Seagulls.

Fox had this to say on the subject of Ballard, urban malaise, tower blocks and late 20th Century psychological disintegration - pour yourself a stiff drink and maybe cuddle a puppy first: "I was in retreat from bands, mightily convinced that electronics were the future, and reading too much JG Ballard. I lived alone in Finsbury Park, spent my spare time walking the disused train lines, cycled to the studio every day and wobbled back at dawn, imagining I was the Marcel Duchamp of Electropop. Metamatic was the result. It was minimal, primitive technopunk.

"I was reading (Ballard's) Crash and High Rise. These were all making a sort of continuous landscape I recognised which intersected perfectly with living in London in the mid to late 70s. Grey, grainy, exhausted, yet a constant tantalising feeling of some kind of event or entity always about to manifest itself. You get edges of the same kind of involvement with the place as I understand hostages can develop for their captors.

"I think some of this may have been an attraction to the new modes of physical and intellectual violence on offer. Many other writers have since begun to colonise what JG Ballard established, and elaborated that grammar to deal with new technological events, but it's still essentially the same stance.

"Ballard was the first radical and relevant novelist of this technological age in Britain. You had William Burroughs and Philip K Dick in America but they were connected to the Beat movement, using drugs as a lens, reflecting an American landscape. I always enjoyed Ballard's Englishness, living in a middle-class suburb writing about a new landscape we'd only just come to live in.

"I think what Ballard maps out so well is that moment of surrender to the terrible. A total, inevitable, final embrace. After Hiroshima we really had no choice. It was impossible to pretend that the world would ever be the same again. We all sleep there every night now. Ballard blueprinted all that like no one else I've ever read."

Don't get me started on JG Ballard - seriously, DON'T. I once spent three days in a university library in 1985 combing through microfiche (hey, remember them?!) transcripts of Ballard's book reviews and interviews from the 70s because reading every novel he ever wrote just wasn't enough.

The intersection of Ballard's thoughts and themes and the electronic music I love from the last 30 years is the nub of this article. Rather than describe it clumsily - with a lot of incoherent digressions about Cabaret Voltaire, Clock DVA and Throbbing Gristle - I urge you to read Ballard's books. If you only recognise his name from the credits in David Cronenberg's Crash or Spielberg's Empire Of The Sun (a couple of unsuccessful attempts at adapting his writing) please don't let that put you off.

A lot more about the Foxx/Ballard nexus can be found at balladian.com. Have a gander at the rest of the site if this teaser pulls the trigger on your Fun Gun.

Let me double back to the Foxx show with a momentary digression and a back-handed compliment. Having shelled out dosh earned working in a factory; enduring cold, wet feet for eight-hour shifts; with only the smell of burning milk for consolation; I feel justified in firing back at Gary Numan for duping me into buying his Replicas album when it came out.

I think there's the distinct possibility that I was still light-headed from the Bowie Berlin trilogy of Low, Heroes and Lodger. I fell for Numan's Aryan alien cyborg from the future dress-up party. Truth is, I should have been mail-ordering Chrome albums like Half Machine Lip Moves and Red Exposure or at least conscious of the fact that Numan built his entire schtick out of notes he cribbed listening to John Foxx. Without the benefit of the sound of Foxx singles like Underpass or Burning Car, Numan would have beamed back up to Mothership Obscurity before gifting us with 18 more albums!

Foxx's The Garden followed toward the end of 1981. The album included the track Systems of Romance and, like the Ultravox! album of the same name, the sound detoured into lush, more accessible electronics. The coldly attractive bleakness of Metamatic was replaced by a warmer outlook which came to define Foxx's sound for the remainder of this particular era of solo recordings.

The following year Foxx built his own studio, named after The Garden album. Those who routinely peruse the small print on CD booklets will see the studio credited on albums by synth fetishists like Depeche Mode, Trevor Horn and British Electric Foundation. The Garden also hosted sessions by old pal Eno, Goth staples like The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees, along with acts as diverse as Tuxedomoon, Tina Turner and Nick Cave.

Foxx moved into film scores in 1983, working on a soundtrack for Antonioni's 'Madre Mio! I'm 70 and I still can't work out what the hell is going on in these-a female minds' movie, Identification Of A Woman. The same year Foxx released his third solo disc, The Golden Section, and two years later Mysterious Ways (1985).

Foxx chucked it in for a spell after that. He sold up The Garden, went back to his birth name and pursued an alternative career begun back in his Art School days as a graphic artist. He designed book covers for Salman Rushdie and Anthony Burgess among others.

Foxx only occasionally dabbled in music for the rest of the 80s. He took a shine to emergent House and Acid music; is rumoured to have released dance tracks under long-forgotten pseudonyms; and worked with LFO, even directing a video for them. Cathedral Oceans was his foray into a cappella ambient music - more on that in due course.

The 12-inch singles Remember and Electrofear welcomed the 90s with Foxx operating under the name Nation 12. An entire album, also titled Electrofear, of Nation 12 material turned up more than a decade later in 2005. He supposedly created some music for a couple of computer games and then dropped off the map altogether until 1997.

Shifting City combined the seemingly complementary musical stylings of Metamatic-era synth shenanigans and psychedelia with Foxx's more recent fondness for dance-oriented electronic music including Triphop. The album was released in 1997 simultaneously with Cathedral Oceans, described as, "an ambient return to Foxx's Catholic youth and his love of the cathedrals of England and Europe. Its roots included traditional evensong, Gregorian Chant, Brian Eno, Harold Budd and German band Cluster." Take the churchy part out of that combo and I'm along for the ride.

Foxx teamed up with Mancunian Louis Gordon for Shifting City; the 1997-98 Subterranean Omnnidelic Exotour; The Pleasures of Electricity album late in 2001; and Crash and Burn (2003). Their close collaboration - both live and in the studio - continues to this day.

The latter work, and the accompanying Drive EP, returned to Foxx's dark Ballardian obsession of Metamatic. In 2003, his own Metamatic Records released a follow-up Cathedral Oceans album together with Translucence and Drift Music, another ambient outing, this time with pianist Harold Budd - y'know the Jerry Lee Lewis on Oxycontin dude. A third instalment of Cathedral Oceans turned up in 2004.

Foxx's passion for the visual arts manifested itself in a number of career sidebars. The ongoing Cathedral Oceans project spawned a DVD version as well as multiple installations and photo exhibitions in London and New York. It should come as no surprise that Foxx eventually found himself a senior lecturer at The London College of Music and Media.

Foxx has kept up an increasingly busy schedule in the past decade including re-releases of his own back catalogue, touring and collaborating with other artists, along with an avalanche of new works. Tiny Colour Movies appeared mid-2006. The album was comprised of 15 instrumentals inspired by experimental shorts and film fragments.

At an intimate screening held for his wife's birthday a few years ago, Foxx stumbled across a sampling of the collection of film ephemera accumulated by Baltimore archivist Arnold Weizcs-Bryant. He explains:

"I was transfixed by the beauty and strangeness of the movies. They were like flickering transmissions from another world. Here you see old sunlight from other times and other lives. Juxtapositions of underwater automobiles, the highways of Los Angeles, movies made from smoke and light, discarded surveillance footage from New York hotel rooms in 1964... Max Forbert's assemblage movies, made from film fragments he saved when he swept the cutting-room floors of Hollywood.

"As I began to record some new music a few weeks later, I realised I was still carrying the after-image of that Baltimore evening. So I decided to give into it, to see what would happen if I made a small collection of musical pieces using the memory of those Tiny Colour Movies."

A few months later Foxx performed Tiny Colour Movies - playing along to the films in question - at the Brighton Film Festival. A warm reception from both critics and audiences saw the event repeated at Fulham Palace in July 2007 and then at the Leeds Film Festival toward the end of last year. Now it's Australia's turn.

John Foxx arrives shortly for a four-city tour that will see him delve into his vast back catalogue as well as presenting the Tiny Colour Movies show. Dates follow, and the intrigued should mouse on over to Foxx's official sites for more information on anything else mentioned above - well worth it for the photos alone.

OK, if it'll shut you up, I have, on occasion, hummed along to the Human League's Love Action.

metamatic

officialcathedraloceans.com

John Foxx tour dates

Sunday 4 May: The Tivoli, Brisbane. Includes a performance of Tiny Colour Movies

Tuesday 6 May: Fowlers Live, Adelaide. + DJ Trip

Thursday 8 May: Corner Hotel, Melbourne. + DJ Trip + Foxx On Fire

Friday 9 May: ACMI, Federation Square, Melbourne. Performance of Tiny Colour Movies

Saturday 10 May: The Metro Theatre, Sydney. Includes a performance of Tiny Colour Movies

More information about Brett's cartoons, books & writing at brett's site

2 May 2008

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