John Foxx Interviews

Golden Years

A record reviewers dream? Certainly the kind of haughty hack who is forever searching for ways of boistering his own intellectually standing by finding totured links between the forlorn vulgarity that is most pop music and the apple of every educated eye----Art, an album title like 'The Golden Section' is a Godsend. Because such a title is just the stuff gratuitous connections are made of. The Golden Section is the name given to an intriguing, if slightly dubious notion of art theory that specifies a particular part of an artistic work as being the key to it's meaning and beauty. The point at which oil and canvas----or whatever else the media used might be----pull together to stimulate our own Aesthetic Emotion. And discovering such a section is no haphazard exercise. It's location is in very precise accordance with mathematic equation spelt out in one text bood as CB:AC=AC:AB! All of which could be rightly deemed a total irrelevence were it not for the fact that the album that bears this title as a beautifully proportioned and classically typographed caption below a suitably hued shot of its 'author' with a Golden Section of its own (the left eye if you're interested ) is by John Foxx. For the title serves Foxx far better than as merely an exercise in Pretension As Art (nothing so snide) or even as an idication of his Art School origins. Instead, in its clinical testing of form, texture etc. to mathematically define the nature of beauty, the term holds definite parallels with and is a part-explanation of Foxx's recording career. From his earliest experimentation with music as an 'exercise in design' whilst a student at London's Royal College of Art, the founder, member and prime mover of Ultravox (before moving on to complete what now stands as three solo albums) has engagingly juggled the component forms of music in an effective, if sometime affected way. Not, he maintains, in a dry, technical way (although the over-abundant presence of 'technology' ---synths 'n' things --- in his recordings would help fuel such a view), more as a means of finding out what makes music tick. Hence the title? Reacting right on cue to such a testing question with his nonchalantly dismissive "I just lided the words", foxx needs pushing before he will admit to any of the associations I've spent the alst few hundred words constructing. "It was when I came to read the lyrics I had written for the album that I noticed I'd used the word 'golden' a lot and I was reminded of the term. It just seemed to fit. At the time I was recording I had reached a sort of Golden Section in my life if you like, where everything seemed harmonious and good."

So good in fact that "The Golden Section" was recorded at a rip roaring pace (have the backing tracks down in three days and most of the vocals the result of one take wonders during an all night session) spurring him on to take his music out of the studio and on the road for the first time in four years. Which is why, when we meet, it's in the faded splendour of Liverpool's Adelphi Hotel. Two nights of his UK slog down and loads still to go, Foxx is clearly out of practice, at first resisting lensperson Robin "Colombo" Barton's requests to search out some crashed out lobby-bound shots. Finally lured into a taxi to check out some all to familiar Blackstuff locations around the "Pools" recession-slaughtered docklands, it's not long before we're back and chatting over tea and biscuits about Foxx's long career. It all started at RCA circa 1972. Having embarked on a design course and brought his down-to-earth Northern talents to bear on a reaction against the more esoteric attractions of Abstract Impressionism, Foxx turned his attention to some theories he had developed on the 'design' of rock groups----hence Ultravox. "I had all these ideas like the Gestalt theory that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts to I just placed some ads in the music papers for some musicians to start a group. I really wasn't interested in how they played, I was much more interested in seeing what came of the different styles. I had all these ideas about making it a working unit, like crediting the group with the songwriting when in reality I did it all, and designing the sleeves under my real name of Dennis Leigh so it wouldn't look like Ultravox was just my band." But it was Foxx's band to the extent he did the buld of the work, and it is this that led to his leaving at the tail end of the 1979 American tour. "I remember before we started rehearsing for 'Systems Of Romance' I went away for six weeks to write material and I naturally assumed the others would do the same. But when I got back with ten songs expecting the rest of the band to have at least ten between them, I found nobody had written anything. That's when I thought, 'this is the end'. I decided I'd do the album and the tour but that was it. I only told them on the last night of the tour (in Los Angeles) but I'd decided even before we had started recording the album." So having left them with the name, 'because Ultravox was always intended to be a band, never just a person', was Foxx bitter at their subsequent success with musical chameleon Midge Ure at the helm? "Not at all, because it proves that my basic design was good, because that hasn't changed. They've got a very corporate identity with their image and that's also something I'd planned for Ultravox." Feeling burn out by five years in a band, for his first solo excursion, 'Metamatic', Foxx decided to get right back to basics.

Ultravox had ended up in Conny Plank's studio near Cologne which was pretty high tech for the time. You could say what sound you wanted and somebody would go away and design and build something to get it and bring it back the same day. I decided I'd had enough of that, I wanted to get back to something really primitive, and that was the idea behind 'Metamatic', another design concept but this time using just ghree synths and an eight track tape machine. There were no drum machines as usch then so it was hell trying to get everything into sync." By the time he came to record his second solo album Foxx had built himself his own studio, The Garden, from which the record gets its name. So what was the design concept here? "Well, 'Metamatic', with its very strict limitations, was meant to be a one off thing even though, unfortunately, it gave a lot of other people the same idea! With 'The Garden' I decided I wanted to get back to doing rock and roll music, but in a much wider sense. Also, at the same time, I was digging around trying to get back to what I'd always liked musically, and having been brought up as a catholic, I realized the music meant a lot to me as well. Taht was always a big area of confusion because people were saying 'he's gone religious, how silly' but it was not like that at all, I just found it really exciting music". Forced to account for the excitement that inspired his own "Pater Noster', Foxx speaks in terms of formulas---the musical nuts and bolts that he arranges and packages in his own 'design concepts'. "You can dissect any piece of music into its component parts to see what makes it work and that's why 'Systems Of Romance' was called that. People tend to think of music as being very romantic, which it can be of course, but it is also incredibly systematised in its construction. It's written systemically and is performed in a set number of styles and it is the way we perceive these formulas that has interested me in a very practical way. You see, music can perform a lot of con tricks. Look at the way Frank Sinatra was recorded; the orchestra in the background with Sinatra's voice way up close to the mic to make the girls feel as if he was signing into their ear. But it's just a wonderfully constructed illusion!" So why did Foxx choose this moment (or to be more accurate, this album) to break with a four year tradition and once more tread the nation's boards? "Because I didn't want to do it until now. 'Metamatic' was supposed to be purely electronic and just that album, and as far as I'm concerned '

The Garden' was supposed conceived as a similar sort of thing. Mind you, there was a time when I was going to tour with 'The Garden'. I worked with Jo Dworniak and Duncan Bridgeman (bassist and keyboard players in 1 Level) and they were really keen to take it on tour. I went along with them for a while before I realised I just wasn't ready for it, so I said so. Also, for this album I worked with a new policy. It was put down in a very short time because I think to labour over things can be counter-productive. For me this was a very 'hot' album in the way it was put together as opposed to the cooler ones I'd done so it just seemed natural to go on the road with it. Plus, and I know this sounds really corny but it's true, I stell get a lot of letters from fans and they always say 'when are you going to tour?' so I decided the time is right". It would certainly seem so. Tickets have sold so well for the dates currently underway that, after a trip to Japan to do some shows, John Foxx will be back to do a further twelve dates in December. But tonight it's Friday so it musb be Liverpool, a city with a strong association for this Chorley lad. So it's less of the disembodied elegance of his recorded work and a more straight ahead rock approach, using the bounteous talents of guitarist Robin Simon and keyboardist Pete Oxendale (who's played with Zappa and Cale with a brief stint with the Glitter Band to break the monotony!) that greets the comfortably-bulging Royal Court. Dworniak's 1 Level commitments have kept him off this tour but the bottom end doesn't suffer unduly even if the percussive element is left a bit sluggish. It's an expansive set that includes material from all three albums (Quiet Man and Pater Noster, going down particularly well) and it's clear that Foxx stage presence hasn't diminished since he last performed. After the show the ol' rock 'n' roll lifestyle is given a welcome airing with a heft contingent take in the State (and some of us were in one by this time!), and up-market Liverpool niterie.

Above the muffled roar of 'Confusion' and a thousand Pils bottles being crushed underfoot, I ask a tired-looking Foxx if he still enjoys the pace. The answer's in the affirmative but I can't help remembering a remark he had made earlier in the evening. "Last night we were in Manchester and we met up with a lot of record company people. Listening to them talk, I suddenly felt the urge to go up on the moors for a long moonlit walk just to clear my head." So is Foxx a man of simple tastes? "No, I do like simple things like going for walks in the countryside but some of my pleasures are very complex, like my interest in technology. But good thing is that whereas in the past such interests would clash, we're now entering a world where technology is more elegant, you can enjoy both. There are problems and we can see them----social, political, etcetera----but things will work themselves out. But that's another question, that's another interview." Indeed it is.