John Foxx

John Foxx is a mysterious figure in England's rock history. There are some details that have slipped through. He appeared on three LPs in the 1970s and four in the 1980s. He has let it be known that The Shadows were an influence as well The Swimmer, Dada and Euro Disco.

Art College And Ultravox!

Dennis Leigh began to call himself John Foxx at some point very early on right before the self-titled release of his band Ultravox!. Originally from Chorley, Lancashire, on a scholarship to attend the Royal College of Art, in Central London, he met lots of people, including Peter Blake, pop artist who designed the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles and Francis Bacon, a painter in genre all his own, a maker of brutal and surreal images. These meetings were undoubtedly influential or reaffirming because Foxx art, whether it's in melody, lyrics, singing or graphic design all evokes similar visions and emotional charges.

While at artschool, Leigh experimented with tape recorders and synthesizers, as some people do at artschool. He loved his new surroundings, in London, and met very energetic, inventive, intelligent and telepathic musicians, including bassist Chris Allen (later Chris Cross) and drummer Warren Cann, an ex-pat from Vancouver, Canada. Accompanying himself on acoustic guitar he'd played these people his song ideas and in or around 1973 or 1974 formed what was eventually to be called Tiger Lily. The band recorded one 45 rpm, the A-side of which was a commissioned cover of the famous Fats Waller track Ain't Misbehavin'. It was to be used in a soft porn movie of the same name. During this time, post-Psychedlic, post-Hippie, and post-Ziggy Stardust this time of in-between, there was Pub Rock going on at one extreme and Gary Glitter at the other. At times, Foxx has sometimes said these scenes had nice atmospheres and at other times he's remembered them as dreadful and boring, London being, initially, rather a disappointment for such high expectations. Either way, there was a desire for the something else besides these among the youths roaming around and forming bands.

Punk came into its own as people in London and New York and soon after other cities around the world turned boredom and apathy into action. During its formative years, it was important that no one imitate anyone else. In an interview with the BBC, Foxx later admitted he'd had an opportunity to join an early version of what became The Clash, as the vocalist, when they were still the pre-Joe Strummer ever-revolving band called London SS. This also included future members of PiL and The Damned.

Jon Savage, in his book England's Dreaming, says that Ultravox! is included in the history of punk rock only because of Foxx's enthusiasm for it. Despite Savage giving them only about 1 sentence in his lengthy book, Ultravox! were there at the beginning of punk, one of its originators, in fact. The problem was that they were always experimenting a little too much to remain acceptable because, at some point, punk, which started out full of rage but also full of freedom, became a category, very defined, complete with maniphestos, uniforms and a regimented code of ethics. Leigh had seen this before. It became as alienating and cartoon-like for some as the worlds it initially promised to leave behind.

Eventually, after several names including Fire Of London, The Zips and even The Damned, Tiger Lily became Ultravox!, a tangentially Punk/Glam/Electronic Rock band. Other appropriate labels could be Robot Rock and Art Rock. Its influences were apparent from the start, like Roxy Music, The New York Dolls, David Bowie, Mott The Hoople, some Velvet Underground and some Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd. As one of their earlier names, London Soundtrack, implies, they absorbed everything around them, including Disco, Reggae and Prog musics in their earliest songs, some of which made it on their first self-titled record. With just the slightest traces of the androgynous early 70s and the punk take on fetish and like Prince in the early eighties, they appeared on stage and in photographs wearing dog collars, mascara, plastic macs and high-heeled boots. The overall effect was slightly unsettling, a little bit in the past, the present and the future.

There are elements that set them apart from their contemporaries, not the least of which were Foxx's lyrics and vocal delivery and Billy Currie's violin and keyboard playing.

Currie, originally from Yorkshire, brought with him both Classical and Improvisational backgrounds. Ritual Theatre consisted of four musicians and four dancers, included Currie, Henry Cow's Lindsay Cooper as well as a performer named Ed Francis, later of Eddi & Sunshine and Gloria Mundi. After R.T.'s demise, Francis persuaded Currie to move back down to London, so enthused he was about Tiger Lily, for whom he'd been appearing with, performing Pantomime as he'd done earlier with Ritual Theatre.

In the scheme of things, the Foxx-era of this band was short-lived. Signed to Island Records, they made three very interesting and exciting LPs, released in 1976, 1977 and 1978. The first of these was credited as produced by Ultravox!, Brian Eno and Steve Lillywhite. This is likely the first example of Eno providing a rock band a means for a thesis, coaxing them through the valleys of what is and what isn't. On the back cover of his diary, 1995, there's a long list of things Eno calls himself and one of them is a drifting clarifier, something he was first for Ultravox!. He performed this function many times after that but is best known for this role in relation to Devo, Talking Heads and finally, with real financial rewards, to U2.

The album owes a lot to the visions of American writers, like William S. Burroughs and Phillip K. Dick but this was definitely music made by and for English kids. Sat'day Night In The City Of The Dead is the only time you'll find Foxx on harmonica between his near-Rap lyrics, ambushing the listener, which give one the sense of city nightlife while on speed. For all the comparisons to Roxy Music the band got, it's only Dangerous Rhythm where the singer comes close to sounding anything like Bryan Ferry. I Want To Be A Machine is very long, the title of which comes from a famous quote by Andy Warhol, has many musical breaks highlighting the playing and performance of all the individual players. Wide Boys makes use of a distorted voice, almost as if recorded through a telephone, not unlike John Lennon in the track released as The Beatles in Tomorrow Never Knows. Lonely Hunter is a song that seems to be about Dennis as John, the fox, roaming, ghost-like but free, around the city (and other places). This theme never stops with Foxx all the way into the next century.

Ha!-Ha!-Ha!, the second release, is even more confident than the first and is more extreme in all directions. Fear In The Western World, more punk rock and political than anything on the first record and While I'm Still Alive may be as close as Ultravox! ever got to the Sex Pistols with the vocal phrasing slightly like John Lydon's. An actual synthesizer, the ARP Odessey makes loud noises and haunting melodies. The Frozen Ones, a rock song from the point of view humans preserved by Cryogenics, begins with Currie and Foxx alone until the band revs up and explodes. Artificial Life, starts out like Roxy Music's Every Dream Home A Heartache. It examines suburban teenage life and tribes, which become epitomized by a girl named Mary who'd ran through Warhol, Divine Light, Scientology and "her own sex" prior to giving it all up. Hiroshima Mon Amour includes the TR-77 drum machine, made by Roland Corporation, employed in what seems to be a modified bossa-nova preset by drummer Warren Cann, foreshadows music John was to make later. Foxx's first solo record was really born amid the songs and sounds found here.

Like the German so-called Krautrock band Neu!, Ultravox!'s identity was partly linked to its exclaimation point. By the third album, Systems Of Romance, dropped was the exclaimation point, for whatever reason, along with most connections to the sounds, visuals and attitudes connected to punk. Also missing was their first guitarist, the loud and versatile Stevie Shears, replaced by Robin Simon, from a band called Neo (not to be confused with Neu!). On this release, the most streamlined of the three, the lyrics and music are at their most visual and emotional, exploring interesting psychological states with the synthesizer taking on an expanded role. Dennis bought a suit at an Oxfam shop at some point and it became a source for a lot of song ideas. While in this suit, John Foxx found a secret life a new means toward anonymity. He began writing a kind of dream diary, called The Quiet Man. This became a source lyrical and melodic ideas. Songs like The Quiet Men and Someone Else's Clothes are examples. In When You Walk Thru Me, the drum pattern is the same as The Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows. Psychedelia was always one thread in the tapestry of Ultravox's music and it recurs often in solo Foxx music after this. Some Of Them is a burst of psyche punk that sounds like the Ha!-Ha!-Ha! and has a near prog break that includes lyrics mentioning evergreens. Dislocation is another example of how innovative this band was -- very minimal, strange and transcendent it is -- leaping into a future that never really manifested. The lyrics, continuing the Lonely Hunter theme, mention Eau de Cologne. How could this end? The band were at their peak, the tensions and interactions of these people was overwhelming

A tour of the United States, was very successful in terms of crowd enthusiasm and ticket sales, but it had no financial help from a record label as the band had been dropped from Island's roster. Simon decided to stay on in New York and Foxx made plans to go solo upon returning to England.

In 1979, possibly not on the best of terms with his band and possibly excited by the possibilities of leaving the gang and choosing to go D.I.Y., Foxx gave up the rock band construct, plotted a new career and an independent label. He'd thought of possibly forming another band, completely free of electric guitars in an unabashedly new direction or even changing his name again. In the end, Foxx and Ultravox decided to co-exist. In the Ultravox camp, Foxx was replaced as lead vocalist by JamesMidge Ure, of The Rich Kids, Slik and Thin Lizzy, who was often photographed sporting a mustache. This next incarnation of Ultravox built on some of the ideas explored on the final Foxx-era record Systems Of Romance to huge worldwide success with Vienna in 1980. With Currie at the helm, musically, more releases, hits, arenas and Live Aid followed. The Ure-fronted version of Ultravox lasted another six years, more or less.

When he was having hits in Britain, the Electropop star Gary Numan made it no secret that it was the Foxx-era Ultravox that was his major influence.

Solo

It has been said Metamatic is the first proper Electropop record. It is just as likely that Gary Numan's The Pleasure Principle, also released in 1980, deserves such a classification. Kraftwerk's Trans-Europe Express, from 1977 is also, most definitely, Electropop. However, Electropop will be forever equally tied to The Buggles and their The Age Of Plastic.

It would be fair to say that Foxx has a statement in at least three major developments in 1980s UK Pop Culture. There is an Electropop record, a New Romantic record and a New Wave record.

Signed to Virgin Records, Foxx achieved chart success with his first solo single, Underpass. It brings the listener to a territory introduced by Throbbing Gristle's Hamburger Lady and United. All three of these achieved chart success in the UK, got much attention on college radio in the U.S. and yet, as catchy as these are, they really sidestep a lot of other pop requirements. Stranger music seemed like it could hold its own, move units and sell tickets. There was a feeling in the air that, prior to it being marginalized by categorization, an ever-growing power in a stranger, more Noir-style pop could continue for sometime, which it did, swimming underground and resurfacing in younger generations.

The collective Noir pop statement of 1980 could be said to span 1977-1985, and could include, but not be limited to, Numan's The Pleasure Principle, Foxx's Metamatic, Bill Nelson's Quit Dreaming And Get On The Beam, Yukihiro Takahashi's Neuromantic, Devo's Duty Now For The Future, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Yello's Claro Que Si, Cluster's Curiosum, Judy Nylon's Pal Judy, Haruomi Hosono's Philharmony,Cabaret Voltaire's Red Mecca, Laurie Anderson's Big Science, Cowboys International's Original Sin, Der Plan's Geri Reig, YMO's BGM,Solid State Survivor and Technodelic, Throbbing Gristle's 20 Jazz Funk Greats, Nico& The Faction's Camera Obscura, The Plastic's Welcome Plastics, The Residents's Commercial Album, Riuchi Sakamoto's B-2 Unit, Siouxsie & The Banshees's Kaleidoscope, PiL's The Flowers Of Romance, Tuxedo Moon's Half Mute, Japan's Gentlemen Take Polaroids,Talking Heads' Fear Of Music, The Normal's Warm Leatherette, Lene Lovich's Stateless, Thomas Leer & Robert Rental's The Bridge, The Human League's Reproduction, Snakefinger's Greener Postures, Young Marble Giant's Colossal Youth and Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures.

Quite early on, the eighties' pop music pulled firmly away from the noir direction it began in. Big, bright lights were proudly switched on, with the music made by people like Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes with The Buggles and the hit Video Killed The Radio Star. The promotional video for this song was also the first ever broadcast on MTV. For this reason it's an Electropop anthem for the age of music videos. Additionally, it is supposedly Ultravox's Warren Cann who played drums on Radio Star. Also from that same circle of people that came out of Bruce Wooley & The Camera Club, was Thomas Dolby Robertson with his Golden Age Of Wireless record. The Ure-fronted Ultravox was particularly grandiose and anthemic with Vienna.

Anyway, in 1959, a beautifully strange and noisy painting machine called Metamatic N°17, made by kinetic artist Jean Tinguely, was exhibited at the first Paris Biennial. Released on Metal Beat, Metamatic, appeared in record shops on January 17, 1980. It's Foxx playing most of the synthesizers and "rhythm boxes," as they're listed on the jacket. The label is named after one of the songs from the album (or is it the other way around?), which was also released as a single. Despite the fact that, in interviews, he expressed enthusiasm for his label including others' releases along with his own, Metal Beat lasted from 1980 to 1985 with Foxx as its only artist, or "solo pilot" as he put it to his fans. Though musically far apart, both Foxx and Ultravox left the pop world of the eighties around the middle of that decade.

Metamatic continues some of the spirit of the Conny Plank-produced Systems of Romance. It also includes at least two tracks that were performed live with Ultravox, Touch And Go and He's A Liquid. This collection of tracks sounds more akin to the likes of Kraftwerk, Gary Numan and Thomas Leer than it does his former band.

The mood is stark, influenced by the fiction of the English writer J.G. Ballard, surreal and stripped-down electronic statements which conjure up moods and images of sex, violence, personal dramas and manias, love, betrayal, isolation, inclusion, cities, abandoned rooms and buildings, car bombs, fog, sunshine, trees, the elements and the skies. There is a hint of Star Trek, sixties version, overall. Sometimes uncannily like Peter Cook's popstar character in the movie Bedazzled, Foxx, with seeming detachment, talks the lyrics. He just as often shouts, sings and whispers them. The talking style also packs emotion and began on the first Ultravox! record in the track My Sex. Mick Jagger used this style in the Rolling Stones Shattered. David Kilgour, of the New Zealand band The Clean, sounds very Foxx-talk in his Here Come The Cars. There is also Flash And The Pan's Walking In The Rain.

Like his music, Foxx's images are often rendered using the Collage, or Montage technique. Foxx images are in a category that also includes Throbbing Gristle and Industrial Records, Cluster (Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius together, separate or with collaborators) and others on Sky Records, Factory Records, Creation Records, David Sylvian, Can and Spoon Records, Neu!, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Jandek and Corwood Industries, The Residents and Ralph Records, Hipgnosis (which included future Throbbing Gristle member Peter Christopherson), Talking Heads, Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music as well as Brian Eno. In terms of audio and visual presented as an intentionally cohesive statement these are of the same relevance as Martin Denny and all that is Exotica, The Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol as well as The Beatles.

Metamatic looks a little like a Bill Brandt photograph, Jandek cover or a Rene Magritte painting. Foxx appears to come from a future time or a time from forty years before. There is a sense of Science Fiction here. It is all and none of these things. Coincidentally, Gary Numan has said that the cover of his The Pleasure Principle was a tribute to Magritte's painting Le Principe Du Plaisir, but no-one noticed.

Embraced by the New Romantics was Foxx's next release, The Garden. The New Romantic movement was spearheaded by fashion-conscious DJ, the former punk rocker turned entrepreneur named Steve Strange and his Club For Heroes. Strange also had a band, Visage, which is where Billy Currie met Midge Ure. Coming out of the club scenes in London and other urban centers of the UK, in the late 1970s, the New Romantics declared neither Glam nor Disco were dead. Like the Psychedelic, Glam and Disco scenes, the New Romantic's eighties statement involved tons of attitude, loud and atmospheric music, a very visual wardrobe, bi-sexual tendencies and a drug-friendly attitude toward life. Because of their clothing, hair and music, people like Foxx, Ultravox and the members of Japan were included in the NR scene, by default. The very successful Soft Cell and Culture Club also began in the NR era.

Foxx set up his own recording studio, called The Garden, housed in an artist's collective, surrounded by sculptors, painters and film makers. The Garden is a follow-up to Systems Of Romance, has more of a band feel and even includes Robin Simon, having recently departed the band Magazine, on guitar. Simon is to be found on the remaining two Foxx records from the eighties. Anyway, it is possible that this is what Ultravox would have sounded like had it remained in its Systems Of Romance line-up. Europe After The Rain, which also happens to be the name of a painting by Max Ernst, opens this record and was another hit single. It has a vocal break in a near-yodel style, interwoven in a train ride.

The Vocoder, or voice-operated recorder, originally created in the late 1930s by Homer Dudley for Bell Laboratories was used so well by Kraftwerk on all their records but when Trans-Europe Express was released, in 1977, black people in the U.S. took notice and what they created from that re-influenced Europe and the U.K. Music with the Vocoder as an intrinsic part can be found by many U.S. artists, including Miles Davis' former keyboardist Herbie Hancock. There was a new vocabulary for people in American Soul and Funk categories, especially Roger Troutman with and without Zapp, Boston's Michael Jonzun and the Jonzun Crew, the D.I.Y. electronic Hip Hop of Detroit's Juan Atkins and New York's Electro Funk, especially Afrika Bambaataa's Planet Rock. Throughout Black Music, from the late 1970s onward one can find Vocoder Soul.

In a very different direction, there is YMO's Behind The Mask, one of the most beautiful realizations of electronic Vocoder pop. Laurie Anderson's O Superman caught the attention of many and it is almost completely Vocoder, a long meditation with strange lyrics and no beats. In tracks Walk Away, Fusion/Fision and Pater Noster, the statement is a psychedelic and ecclesiastic hybrid, somewhere between the YMO and Anderson tracks mentioned plus more rock tradition than either. Sometimes, on this record and associated singles, Foxx uses the Vocoder as a texture, part of what he called the "Human Host," which seemed to be a half robot/half human choir. Sometimes it's adding ghostly trails.

In 1983, Foxx provided the soundtrack for Michelangelo Antonioni's film Identification Of A Woman (Identificazione Di Una Donna). This was a good choice by Antonioni, who had Pink Floyd provide him a soundtrack over ten years before. The images and mood of this movie are very Foxx. A musical reference point here could be Tangerine Dream's Phaedra.

Also, in that same year, The Golden Section was released. It could be said that this is a New Wave record. Foxx released a group of songs that crystalized everything from Ain't Misbehavin' to Pater Noster. On board were the vocoder, the sampler, The Beatles as well as Foxx's baggage, including the ghosts, like the earlier Ultravox period, but there was also falsetto vocals and lyrical images that seem LSD-inspired.

In the early 1980s, growing all along was what was eventually to be categorized as New Wave. This name was inspired by the New Wave of French cinema in the 1960s, the most recent of the various New Wave movements in history. As its name implies, New Wave rose out of the wreckage of punk and disco and included NR under its big umbrella. Some people took shelter in other streams of Punk and Glam, like Goth and, when some of these people went on holiday and found lots of sex, sun, illicit drugs and dance in Ibiza and Goa, Rave was what happened.

Right away, The Golden Section is less organic-sounding than The Garden, the sequencers are more angular, yet not as stark as they were in Metamatic. Things are much more polished here, sound-wise, for better or for worse. John decided to work with a producer this time. He'd met the eccentric sound scientist Zeus B. Held at a party given by Heaven 17, a band for whom he'd had much enthusiasm. The result is a New Wave record full of amazing sounds, using samples and each song drives along with its own, nuclear-powered engine.

Ghosts On Water has drums and percussion that sound as though performed by Jerry Moratta and uses vocal samples from the embers of song before, Endlessly, where John's voice, at certain times, sounds similar to George Harrison's. The Harrison voice is especially pronounced in the version of this song released a year earlier, when Endlessly appeared as a single. The single version had a surprise Sitar, backwards cymbals, a Shehnai, a string arrangement, played backwards at the end. This is another Foxx track that features the Tomorrow Never Knows drum pattern. Sitting At The Edge Of The World would not sound out of place in Yellow Submarine, with its pulsing Mellotron, perspective-altering lyrics and shimmering melody. Running Across Thin Ice With Tigers showcases John's vocals, a true high point, with stunning Beatlesque harmonies, a tiger's roar, recalls the painting by Salvador Dalí, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bumblebee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening.

Belonging to no eighties category, In Mysterious Ways was released in 1985. It's a collection of love songs with lyrics speaking of discovery and rediscovery. There is lots of vibrato-laden organ heard throughout. Morning Glory is a long, two-chord meditation with a Van Morrison delivery. Mid-eighties drum machines are heard on a few of the tracks and This Side Of Paradise has a late-seventies Ultravox feel to it. The Foxx talk sounds almost like Bob Dylan on Stars On Fire, a minor hit. Enter The Angel has female backing vocalists and the effect is Girl Group mid-sixties. Female vocalists are also heard on the almost Country ballad, Stepping Softly. Even though there are some familiar lyrical themes and word images, the record doesn't really sound like anything else Foxx has ever done. The cover art is in the collage style he had been presenting to his public since the early Ultravox! days.

Foxx produced, co-wrote and played on Pressure Points, by Anne Clark, which appeared in 1985.

After In Mysterious Ways, Foxx gave up a public career in pop music. He sold his recording studio and returned to his earlier career as a graphic designer and artist, working under his original name of Dennis Leigh. For examples, see the book covers of Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Jeanette Winterson's Sexing The Cherry. He also began experimenting in Ambient, working on a project called Cathedral Oceans.

During his sabbatical from the public eye, Foxx found inspiration in the underground House and Acid music scenes in Detroit and London, said to have been releasing white label vinyl anonymously. He also worked with pioneers in this field, the slightly above ground LFO and made their first music video.

These scenes brought pure electronic beats and music where bands, stars and even melody weren't always necessary. The pulsing rhythms were updated but the vocabulary was familiar, Foxx writes in the sleeve notes for his Assemblage best-of release of the mid-nineties for Virgin. Obviously, this way of composing and releasing music inspired lots of creative energy for many people.

In the very early 1990s, as Nation 12, Foxx released two snazzy 12" singles, (Remember and Electrofear). The first was a collaboration with Tim Simenon, who is best known for his Bomb The Bass project. These became real sought-after items for the fans, especially those outside the UK and Europe, some of whom read about Nation 12 in Q, in a Where Are They Now? column.

In 1995 John Foxx released another album, Shifting City, a collaboration with Manchester's Louis Gordon, which seemed an updated stylistic return to Metamatic plus what he learned from 1990s underground dance music, along with the psychedelic pop that's been there since at least When You Walk Through Me. Also, in 1995, the first volume of Cathedral Oceans was finally released.

Cathedral Oceans is really a return to Foxx's Catholic youth and his love of the cathedrals of England, the UK and Europe. One can find the roots of Cathedral Oceans in traditional evensong, Gregorian Chant, the Ambient Series of records by Brian Eno, Harold Budd, Roedelius, My Sex from the first self-titled Ultravox! record, Hiroshima Mon Amour from Ha!-Ha!-Ha! as well as Just For A Moment from Systems Of Romance. There's also the 1981 release The Garden (and its accompanying full-color book of pre-Photoshop photo montages, called Church), the soundtrack to aforementioned Identificazione Di Una Donna, the Metamatic-era Glimmer along with Morning Glory from In Mysterious Ways and the In Mysterious Ways-era Enter The Angel II and B-side Lumen De Lumine.

In the 1990s and (especially) after the turn of the century, the kind of hybridization and montage that Foxx thrived in became very much the order of the day in popular culture. Like much younger generations of people making new forms of electronic pop, such as Aphex Twin, Ladytron or Goldfrapp, Foxx ransacked his and others' pasts, and buoyed undoubtedly by exciting experimentors and barrier breakers, such as Bjork, digital, analogue, low and high Art, traditional and popular, sacred and profane all compliment and enhance one another...and without shame.

In 2000, Foxx (Leigh) designed the CD cover for Porcupine Tree called Lightbulb Sun.

The return of Foxx was well received by fans, and he and Louis Gordon continued to work together, almost as a single unit, one mind, performing live and releasing material, like The Pleasures Of Electricity. Invisible Women revisits Underpass as though disrupting and reconfiguring that old film or dream.

Another Foxx/Gordon collab that's particularly inspiring is their Crash And Burn available on vinyl and CD, from 2003, on Metamatic Records. "We are living in terminally splintered times / We are witnessing particularly vicious cimes," the title track's lyrics reveal, deadpan, sligthly Metamatic-ish. One can't help notice that this is 2003, not that long after 9/11, a year in which the U.S.A., a republic whose military was engaged in adventures abroad, in Afghanistan and Iraq (yet again), whilst bringing along the UK as a quieter adult partner, has its genearl public lost in endless new definitions. This is a multifaceted song. Immediately, the song touches upon perceptions of self as much as it does the politics of the collective, the military-industrial, interpersonal relationships, history repeating itself, remaking the land that is the geographic location of the Garden of Eden. Elsewhere, there are lyrics about getting lost in the cinema, the joys of sex, the joys of walking in the city, the joys of being alone and being in groups. A startled eye is the image on the cover. Inside, there are blurred images of people; close-ups of different parts of peoples' bodies, particularly women; an overpass; slightly opened blinds. Sex Video is sheer perfection, a pulsing existential mind/body fizzle and celebration.

In the middle of 2004, there was buzz that Foxx was to soon be collaborating with Karl Bartos, formerly of Kraftwerk, and with Adult.. There was also talk of Cathedral Oceans III, a CD and aDVD.

Foxx expressed interest to several about working further with film and video, especially "disrupted" imagery, in much the same way that sound has been similarly disrupted since the nineteen-eighties with scratching, loops and sampling.

In late 2004, from September through October, a collection of Cathedral Oceans images was exhibited at BCB Art, Hudson, New York .

Discography

With Ultravox!:

• Ultravox! (1976)
• Ha!-Ha!-Ha! (1977)
• Systems of Romance (1978)

Solo:

• Metamatic (1980)
• The Garden (1981)
• The Golden Section (1983)
• In Mysterious Ways (1985)
• Cathedral Oceans (1995)

With Louis Gordon:

• Shifting City (1995)
• The Pleasures of Electricity (2002)
• Crash and Burn (2003)

With Harold Budd:

• Translucence/Drift Music (2003)

External link

• The Garden, the first site dedicated to John Foxx on the web.

• Metamatic, the official John Foxx site.

• Rockwrok, the Far East John Foxx/Ultravox site