There are interesting characters, there are fascinating characters, and then there’s John Foxx.

Born Dennis Leigh in Chorley, Lancashire, Foxx attended art college in Preston in the 1960s, soon winning a scholarship to study at London’s Royal College of Art, where he began experimenting with tape recorders and synthesizers. His first significant band, a glam-rock outfit by the name of Tiger Lily, was beginning to feel wooden and irrelevant in the light of punk’s arrival; having declined an opportunity to join an early incarnation of The Clash, Foxx re-christened Tiger Lily Ultravox!, and the band soon secured a deal with Island Records.

During that their first two years with Island the band released three albums, beginning with a self-titled effort produced with Steve Lillywhite, Brian Eno providing additional assistance. That album, and its follow-up, Ha!-Ha!-Ha!, didn’t achieve a great deal of commercial success but provided vivid snapshops of a band eager to evolve, and bugger the consequences. This surge of activity culminated in 1978′s magnificent Systems of Romance - a more minimalist and electronic album than its predecessors, recorded in Germany with legendary producer Conny Plank. Though a key precursor to the imminent synth-pop explosion, SOR sold well beneath expectations, and Ultravox (who by this point had jettisoned the exclamation mark from their name) were dropped by Island.

After a not unsuccessful tour of the States, Foxx announced his decision to leave the band. Ultravox would go onto achieve massive commercial success with an increasingly insipid pop sound (and the recruitment of one Midge Ure), but it was Foxx, now unchained and entirely self-reliant, who flourished creatively – releasing arguably the first and certainly most perfectly realised “pure” synth-pop record of the 1980s, Metamatic. Though acclaimed the time, hindsight has shown Metamatic to be far more than simply “a good album” -  it’s among the most important and influential art-works of the 20th century, and tellingly one of only a handful of records that Aphex Twin has publicly expressed his admiration for.

After the stark, metallic Metamatic, Foxx explored more bucolic territory on its follow-up, The Garden, and he founded a studio of the same name in Shoreditch the following year. There he produced demos for Virginia Astley’ sublime arcadian oddity From Gardens Where We Feel Secure and hosted sessions for the likes of Depeche Mode, Brian Eno, The Cure, Nick Cave and Siouxsie & The Banshees. He collaborated with Anne Clark on Pressure Points, and provided music for Antonioni’s Identificazione di una Donna, but his own original solo work was beginning to lose direction and lustre – The Golden Section, a conceptual retreat into rockier, more conventionally psychedelic sounds, didn’t quite hang together, and 1985′s  In Mysterious Ways was met virtual indifference by the world at large.

At this point most musicians would start re-hashing their earlier, more popular work in a bid for commercial acceptance, but Foxx was always too complex and restless either to rest on his laurels or simply churn out more of the same. In the event of it, he was brave enough to withdraw from the world of pop completely – working as a graphic designer under his birth-name of Dennis Leigh, he spent much of the mid-80s creating covers for a number of high-profile books including Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh and Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing The Cherry. He was lured back to music by the emergence of acid house, the sounds of which he recognised as an update and extension of his own proto-techno confections. He released two records under the name Nation 12, one of them a collaboration with Tim Simenon of Bomb The Bass, and – ever alive to the possibilities of the future – wrote the music for the Bitmap Brothers computer games Speedball 2 and Godz. After taking up a teaching post at Leeds Metropolitan University, Foxx was offered the opportunity to direct the video for LFO’s Warp Records smash ‘LFO’, which he did with some aplomb, cementing the relationship between his own work and the new UK-refracted machine music of Chicago and Detroit.

Since then Foxx has kept busy in a range of media, exhibiting films, photographs and other art-works, and releasing a number of acclaimed collaborative LPs with the likes of Louis Gordan, Jah Wobble and Robin Guthrie. However, his most impressive and resonant post-1990 works are the ambient masterpieces Cathedral Oceans and Translucence + Drift Music (the latter a double-CD collaboration with Harold Budd). These albums aren’t just albums, they’re doorways into different orders of reality, and are nowhere near as well known as they should be. Throughout his career Foxx has been hugely concerned with space, and with the individual’s place in the world. In the Ballardian nightmare vision of Metamatic, that world is one of urban violence and disquiet, but on Cathedral Oceans, Translucence and Drift Music, it’s contemplative, tranquil, completely submerged.

FACT was lucky enough to be able to interview John Foxx face-to-face in London earlier this month. Also present for the conversation was Ben Edwards, AKA Benge; in fact, the conversation took place in Edwards’ Hoxton studio, where he and Foxx are working on a new album under the name John Foxx & The Maths. Some readers might remember Benge’s 2009 solo album Twenty Systems, an “archaeological” but uncommonly soulful tribute to the unique sounds of specific analogue synthesizers, which caught the attention of such luminaries as Brian Eno and Robin Rimbaud, not to mention Foxx himself.

Ben will join Foxx, former Ultravox guitarist Robin Simon and a number of other personnel for a special “analogue show” at London’s Roundhouse on Saturday 5 June, playing new songs from John Foxx & The Maths as well as classics from Metamatic and the Ultravox era, and employing all the Moogs, ARPs and drum machines that Foxx put to such future-rushing use in 1980. Staged by the Short Circuit festival, the evening will also feature DJ sets from (among others) Jori Hulkonnen and Gary Numan; earlier in the day, Mark Fisher will chair a panel discussion event featuring Foxx, visionary author Iain Sinclair and Ghost Box’s Jim Jupp (Belbury Poly) and Julian House (The Focus Group), discussing various themes associated with the fields of psychogeography and hauntology. Tickets for the events can be found here; anyone who cares seriously about electronic music, not to mention great pop, ought to be attending.

As the above overview demonstrates, Foxx has had such an illustrious, various and incident-packed career that even an intensive 3-hour interview such as this one could only scratch the surface. Rather than focussing on the oft-dissected Metamatic and his preceding years in Ultravox, we talked instead about Foxx’s deep-seated love of London, his pioneering ambient recordings, the special character of analogue synthesis, his work during the rave era and the free-spirited studio approach that he learned from Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Conny Plank.

Ben and John – you’re working on new material together. How did you first encounter each other’s work?

Ben Edwards: “We met for the first time in October, but I’ve known John’s work for years.

John Foxx: “I heard the Twenty Systems record, and that’s how I heard about the studio.

BE: “John had a best of called Glimmer that came out the same week as my Twenty Systems record – we hadn’t met at this point, this was a year and a half ago. I was quite interested in the fact that he was being reviewed in the same issues of magazines that I was, and though I don’t think anyone compared our work, it occurred to me that there were perhaps some similarities in what we were both striving for. Then John got in touch with me…

“We really started working properly together only at the end of last year. Some of the tracks we’re working on are things that John’s had knocking about for a while…”

JF: “One or two of them, yes, and the others are things that we’ve just started spontaneously.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Features, Interviews and tagged with John Foxx, Kiran Sande. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.