The Story
Following his career from the days when John Foxx was the enigmatic frontman for Ultravox, to the wild and heady Marquee days during the Ha! Ha! Ha! period, to the hint of recognition when Ultravox played to a capacity filled Lyceum in the Systems of Romance era, despite total rejection from the music press! Then through and beyond the inevitable split, when John decided to go it alone. His first solo album was the alienating Metamatic which didn't please everybody, but was nevertheless considered by some an 'electronic classic' and sold better than any Ultravox album had prior to him leaving them.
The Studio
After that album, John's main concern was to build or design his own studio and this objective took up a lot of time. He eventually settled for the east central London location and as soon as it was equipped and the paint was dry!, John named the studio The Garden, and set about recording the album of the same name. Photographing The Garden album, and Church book involved many different trips around the countryside including Scotney Castle in Kent, Bath Cathedral, various churches, abbeys and stately homes in other locations, all a part of John's genuine love of walking, architecture and the English countryside. Songs that stand out from The Garden are Europe After The Rain, Pater Noster, and The Garden of course.
Your Dress
After what seemed like ages he released Endlessly, which despite being a frim favorite with fans, failed to make any impression at all on the charts. Things went quiet again and almost a year later, he re-mixed, re-packaged, and re-released it, and with the help of an excellent value double single pack - it nosed its way into the top 50. Then came another double package including the incongruous Your Dress, which unsurprisingly, was criticised for being a Bryan Ferry take-off. Did these criticisms upset him? "No, I think its a compliment because I like Bryan Ferry's singing. Roxy Music are quite a big influence, they've got something that no other band has, I like that about them. I was deliberately going into areas of British music, like Roxy Music and The Beatles." Towards the end of 1983 saw the release of The Golden Section plus his triumphant return to live performances.
The Quiet Man
John enjoys walking around the various parks and includes Hampstead Heath among his favorite places. Occasionally he'll wander into Highgate Cemetary and wonder at the beauty of the decaying tombstones and graves, covered in moss and almost consumed by the wild green growth clamoring upwards for every last ray of sunshine the tall leafy trees leave unclaimed. Perhaps hi's destined to remain a cult figure. It's strange really but sometimes it seemed that he enjoyed that semi-famous status because to be a really hupe pop star just wouldn't suit him and would certainly would have been an unwelcome interruption into his very pleasant and private lifestyle. John has always preferred to be a respected artist, rather than an idolised superstar.
Private Life
"I just try to enjoy my own life as much as I can and I also enjoy privacy, and that's it really - I don't like being observed when I don't want to be observed, it's as simple as that. I just feel that people have a right to maintain a life of their own and the fact that my life is partly public because I volunteer part of it to be public, is alright, because It allows me to bring a certain part of myself into play that doesn't have much chance to get out normally."
Urban Foxx
"I am and always have been interested in urban foxes, because I saw a program on television about foxes that had adapted to live in the city, even though they were actually country animals and naturally of the countryside. They adapted very well to living incities and thrived here, in London. I felt a bit like that because I'm half from the countryside, the town I came from was very industrial but it's right on the countryside and I loved that countryside and I feel I need it a lot and used to spend a lot of time there when I wanted to get away and sort things our. So that's how I figured I was a bit like that fox, I'd come to London and I was surviving in the city and had adapted myself to it and been successful at surviving. At that point it was in a very underground way. Quite often I was just walking around the city, seeing what it was and being excited by it, and frightened."
Overgrown
"I've always been very attracted to overgrown places because they're mysterious, it's like the idea of nature taking over again after we've had our play. I've always wanted to see London with treees growing out of the streets and no traffic at all. I don't like cars zooming around in London, think of all that road space being turned into gardens where you could walk or cycle, I think it would be a much nicer place to live".
This Jungle
"The Pictures in the Church Book were taken in various parts of England. I decided to walk through various parts of the countryside where I knew there were overgrown buildings and gardens and ruins. During or after these walks either I or Peter Gilbert would take the photographs that appeared in the book. I have promised not to reveal the place where the church itself is, because it has hardly been disturbed for over a hundred years and as a result has become so overgrown and beautiful. Some of the photographs too, are actually two transparencies superimposed or montaged. This creates an effect of complicating the architecture and the foilage."
Walking
"Some of the other places that I visited and photographed on my walk that can be vistied are Rievaulx and Fountains Abbeys in North Yorkshire - two beautiful ruined medeival Abbeys, Fountains being my favorite. Rousham Hall in Oxfordshire - one of the earliest landscaped gardens in England, with many strange old statues and waterways. Scotney Castle, kent, a ruined house overgrown by roses, surrounded by a moat of water lillies and black swans. At its best in summer, a riot of flowers and foilage."
London
"When I first came to London I always had this vision of it - it wasn't anything dramatic - I didn't fall down on my knees and have this vision in light or anything but I suddenly began to get this picture of London, a mental picture all the time while I was walking around, of London overgrown again, like in The Quiet Man story. There were just one or two people living here, it was very silent with lots of birds, flowers and greenery and I thought it was endlessly pleasant. When I walk around London now, I just imagine certain streets, like Oxford Street or the Strand completely overgrown. Like down by the Thames, what would that look like if you could sail down it in a rowing boat, just looking at all the buildings with masses of vines alll over them and trees everywhere."
The Garden
"I got the idea for The Garden by just walking around England and I realised that I hadn't spent enough time here. I'd been all over Europe and America and over half the world and I knew a lot of it as well as I knew England or in some cases better than I knew England. Over this summer I've spent a lot of time just walking around different parts of England, and it's a wonderful place! I've been following tracks and footpaths in a very casual kind of way,m not hitch-hiking with boots and rucksack but just going off for two days at a time, for instance last week, I went up to Yorkshire to see Rieu Abbey and Fountains Abbey which are ruined medieval abbeys and they're wonderful places - they're massive gothic ruins - they look beautiful and the landscape that they're set in - the hills and the countryside, are gorgeous. I'm beginning to get a feeling of England, as it is and it's very exciting to me. I've been physically feeling it as well, I've been doing things like swimming the rivers and sleeping outside at nights because I like that feeling of the landscape and the land, the sunlight and the air and the freshness of it all because it's wonderful and it's there! All you've got to do is walk off and enjoy it. There are thousands of years of history there and that landscape has barely changed over all those years and it's grown into something that is unique in the world and it's literally on our doorstep! I don't understand why people don't go there more because it's so pleasant - it's unbelievable."
Church
"My roots aren't really rock'n'roll at all, they're church music. It's true, I was born and brought up a catholic. I wasn't a particularly good catholic I must admit but there were some things that the religion had, that I enjoyed a lot, like the stained glass windows and the churches and feelings of quietness and silence that you can only get in a big church, the sound of some of the music, I like Purcell a lot and those masses and gregorian chants. It's only recently that I've been able to disconnect them from the bad associations that I had with religion. I stopped being a part of religion a long time ago when I was still at school because I couldn't come to terms with it - honestly. I would have been dishonest if I had of continued to pretend to be part of the religion and I didn't want to be a hypocrite. But the music and all those things - I still feel are very beautiful and it's only recently that I've been able to detach those things from some of the feelings that I've had in the past."
Pater Noster
"I was very excited when I did Pater Noster because it meant that I could walk into a church again and still feel a reverence of the place and for the ingenuity and the architecture and man's ingenuity in building it and the kind of dediation that's gone into that and the real beauty that is there and the ideas that have come into the making of a church and the history of it. Like the crusades are responsible in and indirect way, for the shape of the churches now because the crusaders brought back the idea of the pointed arch, which solved a lot of the problems in churches, it meant they could become much taller and stronger structurally. As a result of that , they became more beautiful and more elegant buildings and much bigger. Whereas, in the past they had a round arch which didn't carry as much weight and if too much weight was put on them, they would crumble, so that limited the size of the churches. That's why most of those pre-pointed arch churches are fairly small and after pointed arches you'd get these massive tall churches, like Notre Dame in Paris and lots of chruches in England especially in Norfolk and around that area. So there's all that history as well, which is very interesting."
Endlessly
"....is about things that you always go back to but never quite get hold of. I made it into a person to make it less abstract. It's a feeling you get, like when you're somewhere and you think that you've been there before, it's that kind of feeling plus the fact that there are things that you want to get to, things that are intriguing that you always want to understand, or be near, that's the idea of the song - that you're always moving towards an endlessly...."
The Golden Section
"....It's a term which is applied to architecture and art. It's part of a mode of aesthetics that were around in Renaissance times, where they related human proportions to buildings, paintings or whatever. It's the area that your eye is drawn to, when you're looking at a painting for instance, your eye then begins to travel around the painting, it's where the proportions kind of indicate to where you should look. It's not the perfect geometrical center of somewhere, it's just slightly offf center usually."
Zeus B. Held
"....I met Zeus at a party Heaven 17 were holding, we just got talking and later he came to the studio (The Garden) and played some of his tapes and we started working together. It was very informal - but I like that kind of thing. Also I wanted someone to produce it with me because I wanted another angle on what I was doing, I think that's healthier, especially with what I wanted to do on that album, which was to concentrate more on singing and playing - rather than sitting behind the desk. Because you can get very schizophrenic about it when you record, I find you get too critical too early on, because as you're singing or playing something you're thinking about how it will sound in the control room, and if you're not careful, it can inhibit you. I wanted to be more spontaneous and less bothered about how it sounded on tape but more bothered about the feeling of it all, because I really believe the 'feeling' does get down on tape."
Emotional
"After a long time of trying to get rid of feeling, I've gone right back to it. Now, I don't care about anything else apart from getting it emotionally right. I don't care about imperfections, I think it's much more important to get the emotional quality of it right. I've been bored stiff over the last couple of years by almost every band doing things that were over-perfected, over-clean. I'm not criticising people for doing it, because it's a logical step - to perfect things, when you've got the means to do it - but on the other hand the more instinctive, human element tends to get lost, and that's what I've missed in a lot of records recently, and it's something I want to find for myself".
A Kind Of Wave
"I always record lots more material than I actually ever use on any album. Many songs stay at the stage of being simply sung into a cassette recorder or further on as half finished studio tapes. The ones I like best go onto albums while the others are abandoned or worked on later. The songs I can't fit onto an album, I put onto the B-sides of singles, for example This Jungle, A Kind Of Wave, Woman On A Stairway, Dance with Me etc. - and some even make it on to the next album. Writing songs is a continuous process for me, there's always at least one on my mind.
Live
"I'm a great believer in instinct really, moving on instinct. I felt it was what I wanted to do, plus I got lots of letters over the years, they seemed to build up all the time saying "Why don't you tour?" and I just thought after a time, "Why don't I" Everybody seemed to want me to, so I did and it was tremendous. I was really overwhelmed by it, because I hadn't played live for over four years. I felt very happy that everyone was so enthusiastic, it felt marvelous. We went to Japan, Europe and it was the same everywhere. It brought it all back into perspective somehow, the fact that it is a woldwide thing - and that people do value what I do. Emotionally it was a very moving feeling that I got from the whole thing. I just feel that people are so generous about it."
Credits
Special thanks go out to the sources of the above text which appear here in the Assembly section of The Garden, without whom I could not have provided this for your enjoyment. They are 'The Service', which is The Official John Foxx Information Service for the fans of John Foxx and 'In The City' John Foxx/Ultravox fanzine created and published by the venerable Peter Gilbert & Francis Drake.
