John Foxx Interviews
In Mysterious Interviews: Carlos Adan Interviews John Foxx
Exo Tour Photos Copyright Andrew Woodfield 1997
Carlos Adan: What sort of listener is it that you picture when you picture someone listening to your songs? Where are they? Who are they? What do you want to be in their walkman/headphones.
John Foxx: First of all I make songs for myself because that is my prime target to please. I've got to please myself because I don't feel that I am that different to most people. I expect that most people would like and understand what I do. That is what I hope. Most of the songs I write are songs that I would like to hear if other people did them, but they don't, so I've got to do it. That is the whole idea. That is why I started making music in the first place, because there were lots of things that I wanted to hear but I couldn't, so I started making them. As for what I would like to be, what I would like to be is just invisible for people. I think that is the ideal because I think that the song is the important thing and I am not really bothered by my personality intruding in that. I just want to ideally let people have some kind of emotional experience, even just a pleasant listening for five minutes or be put into a slightly different frame of mind as the result of the song because I think that is why people want to listen to music anyway. They want to slightly adjust their mood and songs are a beautiful means of doing that. All of my favorite songs do that to me and I would hope that I could do that.
Carlos Adan: What are some of your favorite songs?
John Foxx: Lots of different kinds of songs. Some Beatles things I like a lot. I like 'Yesterday' still, an awful lot and I like 'The Shadow of Your Smile' that very old kind of jazz type song and they vary a lot over a wide spectrum, I even like 'Anarchy in the UK' you know the Sex Pistols because that is a brilliant piece of recording and Kraftwerk I like a lot and Brian Eno, his very quiet things, the ones that don't have his voice, just the instrumental things. I don't like all of them but I like one or two of them very much. I could go on for hours, some hymns, religious things. I was brought up as a Catholic and I used to listen to lots of masses that were sung in Latin. I think its very exciting, aside from the religious thing which I don't often think about, I just feel that its a lot of human beings who are united in a certain way. It's a glorious sensation to listen to them. It doesn't necessarily have to be masses by Mozart or anything like that, they can be just the ones that are almost folk masses like Gregorian Chants.
Carlos Adan: I recently purchased an album called 'Hymns & Chants for the Fall of Constantinople' and a couple years earlier a couple other Gregorian Chant albums that I bought right after listening to 'The Garden', the song 'The Garden' is the highlight of the album for me. After I heard 'Pater Noster' I recorded it and I listened to it in a couple of different cathedrals and before a concert was done at Notre Dame before they actually played the organ, I listened to it in the cathedral on my walkman, of course not to loud. I see how you definitely project that atmosphere very well.
John Foxx: It's all very important to me, that feeling. Also, its done in a big space as well, you get lots of very swirling echoes that are very beautiful, you can't really get that very easily any other way, apart from actually singing in a cathedral. But if you've ever done that, I was a choir boy when I was very small and the feeling that you get from singing in a place like that, its magical really, unbelievable, beautiful. On the other side, I like rock and roll as well, I like Elvis, I like 'Heartbreak Hotel' a lot and even songs that don't mean anything at all like 'Tootie Fruity' by Little Richard. I think that is one of the best rock records ever because it is so electric, it was performed live in one take. There is an atmosphere on that record that you just can't reproduce technically.
Carlos Adan: When composing a song just in your head, do you ever do all the different phrases or chapters all in the same time slot all at once?
John Foxx: Yes, when I am actually writing the song I sing along to myself. I've done some things very quickly, other things take longer. I've done a whole song in one night, written, mixed and finished. There is a song called 'What Kind Of Girl' on In Mysterious Ways that I did over night. 'Enter The Angel' was done very quickly as well. There is 'Enter The Angel II' which is more drifting. That was done in about 10 minutes. I did all the vocals, I just had an old string part that I put up on all the monitors and sung to it in here, in the control room. We got such a good sound that it wasn't any problem to do, it just felt right and we just kept it and that was it.
Carlos Adan: Are there any other cases like as in 'Enter The Angel I & II' where just because of what you believe in the melody that you would like to see more than one version of the song, perhaps one fast, one slow?
John Foxx: Oh yes, I often do that. That is one of the problems for me, I often write a song and then I listen to the version I've done of it, I immediately think of another version, just to bring something out perhaps in the lyrics that I would like to expose more and that means changing the tempo and some of the instrumentation as well. Occasionally I've ended up with a completely different song just based on one line of another song and that is how things grow, I often find that and I write a new song. I can give an example of that and a strange one as well. 'Pater Noster' actually came out of another song called 'Europe After The Rain' and it is absolutely unlike 'Europe After The Rain'. I actually recorded it on the same piece of tape. There are 24 tracks obviously and 12 are occupied by 'Pater Noster' and the other 12 are occupied by 'Europe After The Rain' simultaneously. What happened was that I was going to use the kind of Human Host thing which is a collection of tapes and vocoders and that kind of thing. On 'Europe After The Rain' I started singing to the beat and to one of the bass notes that I locked into a device that just locks the note so it repeats all the time. I suddenly found that I was singing almost a Gregorian Chant to it, because that is the way that It felt like it should go. I said to the guy that I was working with at the time 'just keep the machine going, I'll sing this'. Again that was a very quick one, I did that one in about four hours.
Carlos Adan: So did 'Europe After The Rain' give you the idea for 'Pater Noster'?
John Foxx: Yes, it was working over the backing track for 'Europe After The Rain'.
Carols Adan: On 'Enter The Angel II' which was very chantlike, I thought that that was you isolating some tracks from the sped up version. Is it in fact something where you re-recorded everything?
John Foxx: I did two versions of 'Enter The Angel' and I threw everything away on the first one, apart from the string part which I liked, I almost wrote another song around that but I decided to keep the words the same so it ended up as another version of 'Enter The Angel' and that was the slow version of it that I wanted to do harmonies in, like choral harmonies. It was so different to the first one that I thought it was quite legitimate to use this because it doesn't feel the same at all and I thought people might enjoy an annexe to a song, its kind of another room.
Carlos Adan: Are there moments when you are ready to throw another track on just because you like the track but the song is already fairly thick and you hold off and say 'well I guess I'll use that idea for something else because I don't think that the listener can listen to something as thick as I would like to hear.
John Foxx: Oh yes, often, I often do that. I think that songs should be fairly minimal otherwise they get too confused, they lose direction. I think that some of the best songs are the simplest songs. Unless you are going for the effect of having a lot of things deliberately, than that is fine, to build up layers. Generally speaking I like the simpler things, I like elegant solutions to a problem. The simpler a thing is the more elegant it is too, the more beautiful it is. That's just the way I feel about it, I mean there are lots of people who don't feel the same, they may like very Baroque kind of complex things. It's just a matter of taste really, that's all.
Carlos Adan: With a studio filled with so many things that are just mechanical and nothing really imaginative about the devices. Do you find that your imagination is enough to get all the inspiration in an environment so potentially functional and cold.
John Foxx: Yes. It's alright for me because I use an engineer to take care of all the machines you see. All I do is I just come in with my voice and my guitar and just start working and that takes away all of the problems of dealing with machines. I don't touch them at all when I am recording a song. I may afterwards when I want to change the sound a bit, but for the performance I don't even think about machines. They're just tools anyways, they're just like another guitar. I don't think they are very important, except they are there to do a job. It is very easy for young bands to come in and be over awed by a studio because they do look like an aircraft cockpit or something like that. It's terrifying to see all the lights and it looks very complex but the function is very simple, simply to record what you do and they are your servants really. If you use them properly they become invisible again, you don't think about it.
Carlos Adan: Do you think that you have advanced a lot since the stage where the studio limited you and perhaps controlled you? Do you have enough control over the devices now so that no matter what they do, you get your message out through the studio.
John Foxx: I feel I can do that now, of course you learn as you go along, that's the exciting thing about it. But there is always a stage where a studio seems to be an inhibition and you have got to overcome that. But it is easy, all you do is you ignore it, with a good engineer you can ignore the studio because as I have said before they are just tools, just like another guitar and that is how you've got to look at it. You just use it to get the sound that you want, throw it away if it doesn't work because you can't let a piece of iron dictate how you are going to feel.
Carlos Adan: In your lyrics, you talk a lot about places that if the listener didn't think about the lyric, he might not realize what he is hearing, whereas if the listener really concentrates on your lyric John. I know that he/she can realize the situation that is being spoken of . Does it bother you that a lot of people don't invest the extra mental gymnastics to concentrate on the meaning of the words to get themselves where they could be when they listen to a song of yours.
John Foxx: Well, it's always a problem because I think that a lot of people don't listen to words at all, even when they speak to eachother. So its just the way we live, we are very visual people at this stage and we like images. What I wanted to do is make images by using words. I like to trigger off images in people's minds by saying a few words. I think that people appreciate that after a while because I take the trouble to do that and it's not always apparent. It can be rewarding when you spend a little time and listen to it and become involved in the song and then you find that it can be a vehicle for other areas of emotion or whatever. I've always liked good words in songs, words that mean something or create an atmosphere, give you a new thought, a new way of looking at something. It is really there for people to take if they want it, if they don't want it then that is fine but I like to do that, it is just my pride in what I do. I would hate to do a song with bad or indifferent words, I couldn't do that. It's like diving into a swimming pool with no water in it, it looks delicious until you hit the bottom. An attractive sounding song, if I find that the words are not very good, I am disappointed, I don't like the song after that so that is why I try to make things as good as I can.
Carlos Adan: When you talk about people, in order for the images to be fulfilled you've definitely got to be a listener. There are a lot of places that you talk about, you mentioned that for 'Enter The Angel' some of your ideas came from Italy, where DaVinci was born. You speak about an island in one of your songs, can you name islands that you've visited.
John Foxx: I don't like to be too specific in songs because if someone who is listening hasn't been to that particular place......they've always got an island for instance that they've been to themselves and that is how you think of an island. So I wouldn't name a place, because what I want is for people to remember their own island, their own experience. A way to illustrate that is if I say 'a blue room', everyone who listens to that song will have a different version of a blue room in their mind and that is the wonderful thing about words, they seem to be specific but they are not really because everyone brings their own experience to them and I find that tremendously exciting. Because I know that everyone writes the song along with me, if you know what I mean. So everything you say, everything you refer to, people bring their own version of it to the song. That is why I think songs are a bit magical and they do things that other mediums cannot do. If you show a blue room on a TV screen or a cinema it's one particular room but in a song it's a million different rooms or ten million different rooms, depending upon how many people are listening to that song and it is the same thing with every thing that you describe in a song. When you talk about a lover in a song, everyone imagines either their ideal lover or a particular lover, so again you have a million lovers or ten million lovers depending upon how many lovers the person has. That is one of the functions of songs that I am in awe of, it almost scares me when I think about that dimension to it.
Carlos Adan: There are as many different identities as there are humans then there can be just as many 'Enter The Angel' interpretations. I long for this to exist, if when nighttime came around, humans never had to sleep, there would obviously be very important number of hours that you would suddenly have on your hands. What would you do in a case like that, where you were just as efficient physically and all of your desires could be manifested.
John Foxx: There are two answers to that. First of all there are lots of things that I'd like to do that I don't have time to do like painting or reading books that I would like to read or just seeing friends that I sometimes I don't have time to see because I find there are never enough hours in a day anyways but I would be sad about that because I enjoy dreaming, I enjoy the process of dreaming, I think it is very interesting what happens in dreams. I would miss that a tremendous amount, so I suspect that I would be up to something that would provide me with a few dreams. I just think you work out so much when you dream, in a healthy way that it would be sad to lose that because I believe it is just as valuable as waking time.
Carlos Adan: If dreams are useful to you, can you name any songs where ideas have been contributed unconsciously?
John Foxx: Oh yes, all of them in fact, they usually start with an idea that I've seen, a collection of words that you put together and then the process of making a song is almost like dreaming. You kind of wait and ideas are attracted to eachother in a strange way and then you have a song or the basis of it. Writing music is very much like dreaming, it's free association, you play a note and then you have a few words that seem to go with that note and then you begin to sing and the thing just takes off, it's like dreaming when you are awake. I think that writing is like that too, just writing words, lots of the arts and cinema are like that too. I think what we see on the cinema screen is a manifestation of what we desire which is one function of dreaming so its the same thing. Lots of the mediums that we have invented for ourselves are ways to dream, ways to manifest our desires, to work out problems.
Carlos Adan: The technical part of getting your art to be expressed physically is getting more and more complicated every day. What are some of the problems that you don't particularly like that you face infallibly with getting your ideas that you have when you are drifting off or day dreaming. What are some of the problems with going from the day dream to the actual finished song.
John Foxx: That is where the craftsmanship comes in I think. You have got to be a craftsman because there a plenty of people who day dream and never actually discipline themselves enough to have a craft, to make it work. It was Salvador Dahli who said 'no masterpiece was ever made by a lazy artist'. That may not quite be true but it's generally true. What you have got to do once you have the idea or dream, you have to make it real so that you can communicate it with other people and let other people use it, listen to it or see it. That is when you have got to hold off for a while. It is an interesting process because even as I go along writing a song, the whole process attracts other ideas, that is the way that I like to do it. When I am recording for instance and I use something accidental, that will incorporate itself into the song, into the recording as well and that makes the whole process exciting, it's not dull, it's not just discipline, it's a living process. When it stops being that then I usually throw the whole thing away and start something else because I think that people can hear when something has died in the last stages. I hear lots of songs of other peoples that I know that has happened and I try to avoid that.
Carols Adan: With every album you've done, you've changed obviously, are there some changes that you would have liked to thrown in with 'In Mysterious Ways' that you held off because you didn't think either that it went with the album or that people would be ready for them?
John Foxx: I do move according to how I feel about things, that's the only way I can move because I can't do things in a contrived way. I know lots of people who sit down for instance to write a hit record or everytime they write a song. I can't do that because I don't think songs are necessarily about that, although I do like hit records, I think it's a bit contrived if you try to do that and I can't do it because I always end up with something that sounds horrible to me. The only way I can do it is by doing things that I like doing or I feel are right, I can't do it any other way.
Carlos Adan: Is there a question that you've never been asked that you would like to be asked?
John Foxx: I can't think of one, sorry about that.
Carols Adan: I try to make my questions not too specific and I really went overboard with that one. When you are writing songs, what percentage of the time are you in a place that is inspirational and how often are you in a place where even though you are in an inspirational place in your mind, you may be in common place like a subway? How often do you wander to a place that is physically inspiring.
John Foxx: It's usually......I've go to be somewhere where I feel like that because I don't get ideas in the subway unfortunately, I do a lot of walking in the countryside and I get lots of ideas when I am walking and that is the best place, the best situation for me. I think because you get into a rhythm when you walk, your mind is free to wander about as you wish and also you get to see spaces, distances and all the perspectives that you don't normally see in the city, it kind of opens you out a bit and you're free to daydream a little bit and out of that comes all kinds of associations. I find that it is very stimulating to do that, I get lots of ideas from just walking, in fact that is where most of the songs come from. As I go along, as I am in the rhythm of walking I'll work out the parts and sing along to it, probably like an absolute lunatic if anyone could see me. Also it is nice being outside because you can sing, there aren't many people around to hear.
Carlos Adan: Has there been a moment in your life when a very impressive environment caused you to come up with a song.
John Foxx: The things that do that the most are simple things like a sunset, you know the old romantic things I am still very prone to, I find it very moving actually, especially when you are on a beach or something like that. The West Coast, and the Lake District in the north of England get some very beautiful sunsets, you find you get very moved if you are standing on a hilltop looking at the sea and likewise by a lake, when the sun goes down it's very moving indeed. I get lots of ideas from that, 'Twilight's Last Gleaming'......I got the whole beginning of it and the form of it from just being there and seeing a sunset one day when I was walking. Also as I said before being in a church is quite exciting, I get lots of ideas for harmonies from being in a church.
