A Kind Of Wave.....

John Foxx - France TV Interview

Q. Why did you decide to leave Ultravox and why after Systems Of Romance?

A. Well yes, the reason I stayed so long in fact after we made the third album (Systems Of Romance), was because I was committed to doing the tours that were connected with the album and when that was finished so was I and I left then. I think mainly becuase I was just tired of that way of life, it's not the way I want to live particularly.

Q. Do you mean the rock routine, or being in a band?

A. Well both, it's very much like being married to four people. Being married to one person is too much I think, so being married to four is four times more difficult.

Q. Where do you get a lot of your ideas from?

A. I got ideas from people like Kraftwerk, Roxy Music, and perhaps David Bowie as well and made something that I thought was appropriate for the time out of that and all that the new bands are doing is just doing exactly the same with what I did. It's a continuing process and it goes on forever I hope. I am just very flattered in fact that people picked pieces of what I did and incorporated in their new music.

Q. What do you think of the sort of obsessions that you had at one point with the technologic machine age and industrialism?

A. I thought it was useful in its time because it was new, because no one had ever explored those areas before. I think even Kraftwerk did it in a kind of superficial way. I'm not saying that I did it in a very deep way, but I did it in a slightly different way, an English way. No, I'm reacting against that almost because I want to find a way to be human and humanize the music again.

Q. I tried to ignore things like rock music and certain ways of singing and behaving that I didn't want before that time and made a new stance out of it really. I mean the music is pathetic really, as a response to whats happening now. All it did was it gave some initial clue to one or two ways of bahaving in the face of big change, the big change thats happening now but reality outstripped it very quickly I think.

A. A charicacture of that was probably Gary Numan who at the same time stole all of your ideas from Ultravox.

Q. Well he didn't steal them, he was welcome to them as far as I was concerned. I don't think anyone can steal ideas. I think as soon as you put them out they are everyone's property, I really believe that. It's as simple as that. At least he had the grace to admit where a lot of his ideas came from. He was very generous in that respect.

Q. Another song from Metamatic is He's A Liquid. What is that song about?

A. That was a lot of ideas that ame together at once. One of them was a Japanese film called the H-Man. I didn't see the film, I just saw a still from it. It's a 1950's horror film. I just saw a suit in a chair with no one inside the suit and there was some liquid coming from the sleeve of the suit, as if either the person who had occupied the suit a few minutes ago had changed into a liquid or the liquid had absorbed him. I was also reading at the same time an article about people who are married for a long time start to look like each other, start to resememble each other as if they've somehow changed their faces slightly.

Q. Do you really feel that being in a rock band is a way of losing control of life and reality.

A. Oh yes, very strongly. It's totally artificial. It's got nothing to do with anything else. It's incestuous and ridiculous as well really. I think some rock bands are very silly constructions. They're good fun for a while, for a year or two, to be in them is good fun, but after that it's rediculous, you turn into a clown. I think rock music finished before Elvis grew fat.

Q. What is the song Miles Away about?

A. In English there's an expression 'miles away' when you are absent minded. You know when you're looking out of a window or you're not quite present, you know you're with someone but your mind is on something else, and that is quite often my state of mind I think, so I decided to write a song about it.

Q. You give a great importance to video because you've done lots of videos for your songs. Are you going to do more, like video LP's.

A. I hope so, I really want to do that. I think it's like synthesizers were a few years ago, it's a new form and it's a new instrument almost. I'd like to use it more than I do. There is so much to do with it yet. I think it's just begun to be explored really. I remember thinking that the only visual equivalent, this is a long time ago before rock videos started, that the only visual equivalent to a rock song was a TV advertisement because the cutting was very fast. You had to get the maximum amount of information into 30 seconds, and a song is very similar to that because it's form is dictated by the amount of time its got to take and how its got to affect the listener. The whole mode of commercial songs is being effected by airtime for instance which is two and one half minutes. It's one of the strongest creative forces in music has been that limitation I believe, at least in polular music anyway.