John Foxx: Interview

John Foxx’s work with Ultravox in the late 1970s and then as a solo musician prefigured so many of the developments in  electronic pop in the years that followed. As he explains in this wide-ranging interview, Foxx always saw Ultravox as an art project, and synthesizers seemed to offer new possibilities to transform his ideas into sonic imagery - “to manifest an image of a new kind of scuzzy science fiction”, as he puts it.

He also talks eloquently about his teenage tape-recorder experiments, the exploratory youth culture of 1960s art schools, the mind-expanding joys of working with Brian Eno and Conny Plank, the inventiveness of dub reggae and the vitality of Chicago house and Detroit techno - as well as how he styled his keynote Metamatic album as if it was intended to be played on “a mysterious neon jukebox in a future European motorway café”.

Michael Bracewell wrote in his book ‘Re-Make/Re-Model’ that art schools in the 1960s nurtured the development of a very English pop culture sensibility that then fed into the pop music of the 1970s. What’s your opinion?

Bracewell is absolutely right about this. The reason Britain had a pop culture and sensibility like no other nation at that time is almost entirely to do with its art school system.

It was mercifully independent of the stodgy mainstream culture of the times. Once inside, an entire generation was free to meet, mate, swap ideas and party. In fact, the entire art school existence became a party - the perfect ecology for an unfettered performance of style.

Art students were instinctive style magpies - clothes from jumble sales and flea markets, French-cut trousers and shoes from Anello and Davide and hitching trips to Paris (which in the 1960s was still much less expensive than London), Shetland jumpers, repurposed Madison Avenue and Daks suits. The fashion students would alter and remake our clothes and hairstyles.

Imported American blues records were prized, as was anything by Satie and Debussy. There were various experimental records around too - Pierre Schaeffer, John Cage, and a little later, Terry Riley.

Books such as [Aubrey] Beardsley’s ‘Venus’ and ‘Under the Hill’, ‘Jordi, Lisa and David’ [by Theodore Isaac Rubin], ‘Flowers for Algernon’ [by Daniel Keyes], [Situationist writer] Guy Debord, ‘The Naked Lunch’ [by William Burroughs], Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Arcades Project’, ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ [by D.H. Lawrence], and much early experimental sci-fi were passed around.

As well as alcohol, a few drugs were experimentally imbibed, and the brave astronauts duly reported back to their peers.

So you had a complete, immersive culture. When that generation left art school and went back into the world, all this permeated the art, graphics, fashion, clothes and music of the sixties, seventies and eighties.

I read that you did some early tape experiments while you were at art school. Can you describe what you did and what it sounded like?

All pretty rough - I’d begun to play with tapes by simply recording bands on [1960s TV pop show] ‘Ready Steady Go’ on an old ‘Elizabethan’ tape recorder, then got interested in recording atmospheric monologues with breathing and movement sounds, then street sounds. I’d enjoyed ‘Krapps Last Tape’ by [playwright Samuel] Beckett and they were that sort of thing - mysterious monologues.

I also used some recorded drones - traffic sounds from a bridge over the M6 and recordings of Hoovers -  to sing to. Then I realised you could slow things down or speed them up, play sounds backwards and cut the tapes and Sellotape them together.

I also bought a portable Japanese tape recorder. I’d walk around and whisper into it. Sometimes recorded conversations in pubs and cafes. Then the first cassette recorders appeared, great for portability, but frustrating not being able to get to the tape to cut it up.

I’d actually seen my first synth - made by a nicely eccentric friend, Tony Basset  - when we were still at school in the 1960s. Tony made this first Theremin by converting a transistor radio. That first one could really screech and scream and it fascinated me that the aerial was the control - it sensed your proximity and reacted.

I found the first actual synth at the Royal College of Art around 1973, 1974 as I was auditioning the band [Tiger Lily, Foxx’s pre-Ultravox! band], and did a few sessions just playing with it. I seem to remember it was a Minimoog. But I had no means of recording anything then, and realised I also needed a multitrack if I was going to do anything useful.

Incidentally, the spirit of all these initial experiments actually fed into the making of ‘My Sex’ on the first [Ultravox!] album [in 1977]. I’d initially wanted to use a heartbeat instead of a drum - that’s why the beat is like that, it’s imitating a heartbeat.

The initial idea had been to wire myself - and my girlfriend at the time - with contact microphones and sensors. I wanted to trigger synth sounds from the sensors and record our heartbeats accelerating and perhaps synchronising as we had sex. Then we’d use this to make the track.

Of course, there were too many technical (and other!) problems, so it didn’t happen. We also tried simply recording a heartbeat, but it was too unclear, so [‘Ultravox!’ album producer] Brian [Eno] made that drum loop instead.

‘My Sex’ was actually the first synth ballad. When we played back the final mix, I realised we were in a territory no one else had got to. Also ‘I Want to Be a Machine’ on the same album was released before Kraftwerk’s ‘The Man Machine’.

Did you initially see Ultravox as an art project?

Absolutely. The idea sprang from a discussion at the Royal College about ‘design for the real world’. This was in 1973. Professor Richard Guyatt mentioned this in a talk. I took it as making art real - not something on a wall in a gallery, but an active part of the real world. 

He also mentioned an attitude to art and design - that it’s not a detached activity, you design with your deepest instincts and all your heart and experience, as well as intellectually, etc. You were distilling your whole life into art.

This really got me thinking. It gave me a way forward and everything suddenly began to look very promising.

I loved music, even though my playing was basic, it enabled me to write songs - I wrote them all the time. It was my only real skill apart from drawing, and I wanted to incorporate it into my life properly.

So, shortly after that initial talk, I spoke to Guyatt and mentioned I’d like to design a rock band. Initially to see what his reaction might be. He thought for a minute, looked at me, then said “Good idea, go ahead.” So that was it. My Art School Project. I started auditioning immediately.

I’d already realised there were dozens of musicians floating around London, all ‘looking for the right band’. They needed a definite identity and context around themselves. That was what I set out to design.

I wrote a lot of songs of the sort this imaginary band might perform, and took them to Island Records. They gave me a deal in return for my publishing rights. There was so much money around in music then, that I reckoned we could exist very well, even in the margins - still be able to survive financially while experimenting with recording. We might even sell some records. 

I thought I’d do one album then get on with the real job - the Art. I treated the record label as another kind of art school, but with more real and democratic outcomes. Rather than make one unique painting, you could make thousands of equally beautiful records. That really appealed to me.

I soon realised that I was most interested in being in the recording studio - all the performing was a bore. The actual performance is a buzz, but you spend 22 hours in hotels and transport in order to play the couple of hours onstage. That ratio certainly didn’t appeal to me.

What was it about the synthesiser that suggested it could be a step forward for pop music in the mid-late 1970s?

I realised that the availability of affordable guitars and amplifiers had enabled the sixties to happen, and these instruments (plus recording studios and imported blues records), had shaped the music.

It seemed to me that this was happening again now, with synthesisers and drum machines. (Recording studios had also developed exponentially and the imported records were now coming over from Germany). It seemed inevitable that a new kind of recorded music would emerge.

These new instruments were capable of doing great things. They could make noises that were different and more varied than a distorted guitar, wonderful as that was. I was certain they would change the nature of music from then on.

The instruments also needed a new language of sound (and style ) to be devised for them. This was the fun and the challenge.

I felt it was vital to look as different as possible to previous generations of bands. It was also essential to replace all the functions of bass, drums, guitars, chords etc. with synth sounds.

Synths could easily perform all the same functions, but they operated in different ways. (You can, for instance, tune synth drums to take the bass function as well as the percussion, or have a song with no chords, because the synths were mostly monophonic.)

Having fun understanding and working the limitations and advantages would create the sound. All this would give future music a completely new identity. 

I felt it was vital that the synths should also sound like themselves, instead of imitating other instruments. This was the greatest pitfall in my view. I felt they’d often been misused until then.

When a new technology is introduced, there’s seems to be what I came to call a ‘Formica period’, where we try to use it to imitate a previous form. For instance, Formica was made to imitate wood before we realised its best use is as a gloriously uniform surface.

In a similar way, synths were made to imitate orchestral and other instruments before it became clear they could make unique, new sounds we’d never heard before.

Prog rock keyboard players like Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson used synthesisers in a very extravagant way, emphasising their musical virtuosity. Did you approach synths more as easy-to-operate noisemakers?

Initially yes, a means of making the most violent and disruptive sounds - much more extreme than guitars. You only needed one finger to play them - so they were actually more punk than punk.

At that time, we had no interest in virtuosity, even though Billy [Currie, Ultravox’s keyboard player] was actually a very skilled player. Virtuosity still doesn’t interest me at all, but through using and recording synths and drum machines, I gradually came to understand how radical these instruments actually were and how fascinating the sounds they make could be.

You were operating in the early days in parallel to punk, were you seeking to use the same kind of energy while avoiding the self-limiting cliché that punk became?

Exactly - we were competing with dozens of loud and wild guitar bands then, so our initial mission was to damage the audience with the most brutal and extreme noise possible. We won the noise wars hands down because no-one at the time sounded as loud and harsh. (But getting all this down on record was completely another matter. -  as we discovered later.)

After ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ [on the 1977 Ultravox! album ‘Ha!-Ha!-Ha!], though, I began to write more lyrical songs. I realised I could write something that had a different poise but was just as powerful - without the cliched or more obvious brutality and anger.

It was possible to subsume all that energy and angst into a cool, detached sort of sonic beauty that was far more effective than the usual quick punk burnout, because you could sustain it much longer. This also engaged a different and much wider set of emotional responses.

That’s when I began to write what became [third Ultravox album] ‘Systems of Romance’ [in 1978], then [first John Foxx solo album] ‘Metamatic’ [in 1980], which was really the proper culmination of all that. It’s actually a sort of synthpunk dub.

There were a lot of imperfections in that early music, was that part of its charm?

Oh yes, I always detested the idea of chasing some concept of perfection (another thing I learnt at Art School - I’d seen too many neurotic painters erasing work and endlessly starting again - then ending up with nothing). It’s a self defeating chase. You have to learn to accept and value the raw gesture. Only when you do that can you engage with real beauty. Otherwise you’re on some self-flagellating, permanently slippery slope.

There is great joy in imperfection. That’s real beauty, the real goal. For me, the best singers are non-singers, the best players leave shapes in your head made by their human imperfections which is really the evidence of their unique humanity. That, for me, is art and real beauty.

By contrast, the perfection trail leads to where academic painting arrived in the 1900s. Tedious, dull, earnest, sterile. Painful to do - and painful to look at.

All the music I love is distorted, loose, raw and beautiful. Very early John Lee Hooker is a good example, Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Smokestack Lightning’ or Little Walter, too.

By the time I sat down to make ‘Metamatic’, I’d realised that I was devising a British equivalent of the blues. Equally, I also understood the necessity to be completely ruthless and discard any and all American blues references, because I’m not American.

My own real experience is a wilderness of factory towns, ruined countryside, isolation, concrete, motorways, factories, housing estates, cinemas - and the mystical strangeness emerging at times out of all this.

It was addressing our situation at that moment – Magic Brutalist music, tailored by Burton’s. I set out to make it strictly minimal - eight tracks on tape and no more. Three instruments and a couple of effects boxes and that was it.

Europe was also an important aspect of it all. I’d been hitch-hiking there since I was 16 years old and felt a great affinity with Germany, France, Spain and Italy. I’d been reading about Pierre Schaeffer, Walter Benjamin and Paris Arcades, the lives of Picasso, Satie, Dali, Van Gough and the Surrealists, Situationists and Futurists.

I wanted to make a kind of music that would be British, but looking over to Europe, rather than to America. It had to sound like a kind of music that would have happened if America had never existed. I’m not at all anti-American, the problem is we all love that dazzling, energetic culture so much that we’d let it eclipse our own.

I felt a great need to clear the decks and recover some of that, just to see what we might really sound like. I also imagined a mysterious neon jukebox in a future European motorway café - what would it play?

When Ultravox! recorded the first album with Eno as producer, did you choose him because of his ideas about the studio being an instrument? Or because of his Roxy work? Or both?

Working with Brian was a matter of fortunate proximity. He’d just left Roxy and wanted to become a producer. We were both signed to Island Records and he was often around there. We all liked Roxy of course, and I liked Brian’s ideas. I thought it might be interesting to see what would happen.

(By the way, Bowie first got in touch with Brian just as we were finishing the record. I remember feeling rather pleased I’d got there before him. We were also very happy for Brian, because it was clear that he was now on his way. Before that call from Bowie, things had been a little uncertain).

‘Another Green World’ had been released the year before and it contained several new forms of life - ‘Sky Saw’ and ‘Becalmed’ and some of the other instrumental pieces were miniature masterpieces of sonics. By miniature I don’t mean insignificant, just the opposite -  they were small, raw jewels and they implied a new future. I saw it as something distinct from mainstream popular music -  a new sort of hybrid jazz. We both liked elements of Weather Report  - some intros and textures - and the titles - ‘Mr Gone’, plus some of the synth work of Joe Zawinul.

I think what Brian had managed to do was carry on the spirit of Miles Davis from the point of ‘Kind of Blue’. I had a theory that the potential of Jazz had been destroyed because it had been recorded. In being subjected to that, it had ceased to be a living thing - instead, it become a set of trophies in The Museum of Recorded Things.

Quite understandably, no-one had quite realised that Jazz was actually an ongoing conversation. In order to stay alive and to evolve, it had to remain an unselfconscious, excited, engaged - but cool - interplay. You can’t have a conversation of this kind in a museum.

Now, consciously or not, Brian had got around all that by moving things on to the next stage and incorporating the recording studio and its possibilities, drum machines, synthesisers, tape editing, etc, into this new form of life - and the fact was the studio was potentially another musical instrument, but Brian also used it like an easy-going nightclub, where you could try things out, work through it all. The music was alive again. That was the implication of ‘Another Green World’ for me.

Roxy, of course, were the ultimate art school band. They really had it all - glamour, fun, surrealism, futurist nostalgia - and hit records, all on their own terms. Real, living Pop Art - and actually much more alive than Pop Art art painting on a gallery wall.

How important were Eno’s ideas in the way that your music went on to develop?

Brian is both a perceptive artist and an alert opportunist. The fact that he could survive, then thrive, in that environment of record companies and their pressure to make and sell hit records, was an inspiration.

It helped offset that occasional feeling of hopelessness when coming up against the harder-nosed aspects of record companies. You felt there were other avenues, that were more human, humane and simply interesting and engaging. Brian is a great example of all that.

I also concurred with the idea of the studio being another instrument. Before him, it was strictly hands-off for musicians - you couldn’t even touch the equipment and the engineers were very territorial. Brian helped break that all down.

Shortly after this, Billy [Currie] and I went into a Bob Marley session at Basing Street Studios and witnessed the fantastic Lee Perry doing similar things with the studio there. It was the next phase of evolution for recording.

We were already intrigued by synthesisers, and just on the point of being able to afford them. Brian had some interesting ones - EMS and Moog - and it was good to try them out in the studio. He was also using an early Roland drum machine, as he had on ‘Another Green World’ and I wanted to get into that, too. We actually used one many times on that first album, but just as a click track that was discarded in the final mix.

As I was listening back in the control room to those tracks, I began to realise the drum machine had a sort of new identity, a new feel and sound. So I bought one, a [Roland] TR-77 and used it to write ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’. That was the end of all the preoccupation with noise and feedback and the beginning of the next phase.

When you chose to record [Ultravox’s third album ‘Systems of Romance’] with [German producer] Conny Plank, were you trying to search for a sound no one else had in Britain?

Yes, among a few other things. Even at the outset when I’d formed the band, I realised the most valuable thing you can have is an identity that made you distinct from everyone else.

That was one of the reasons I’d incorporated synthesisers and drum machines at a time when punk had declared all this ungood. We enjoyed moving against the prevailing fashion, because that’s all it was - a very conformist, conservative convention.

Conny was really the human crossroads at that time - the place where everything intersected - experimental, classical, electronic, rock, technology, recording, innovative ideas, art, avant pop, film music, underground and emergent culture - he understood and loved all of it. I think there was no one else alive at that time who could offer all that. 

In retrospect, the 1970s in Britain were a very troubled, turbulent time – industrial disputes, power cuts, states of emergency, violence in Northern Ireland, bomb attacks on the mainland, the rise of the National Front. How much do you think the dystopias of new wave electronic music were consciously or unconsciously rooted in the instability of society at the time?

All that chaotic urban life certainly inhabited the music - you couldn’t avoid it. Everything from the rubbish piled in Leicester Square to three hours electricity per day and the probability of nuclear annihilation within a few minutes, was our life at that time.

I was living in a squat in Islington and London felt like a wartime city. I was reading lots of science fiction, because it was really the only literature that dealt with the present (Ballard and Burroughs and Philip K Dick were actually dealing with the present moment - but in a thin disguise). It had ideas, too, about where all this might just lead.

The look and imagery of the band then were based on all that. I could see that the near future would be chaotic and the unpredictability and the grunge would be all pervasive. I was trying to manifest an image of a new kind of scuzzy science fiction. Abandoned cities, damaged half-electronic people -  which is what we are actually becoming.

You’ve cited dub reggae as something that gave you ideas for your early work, and Cabaret Voltaire have cited dub as an influence too. But it’s not often mentioned as an important influence on electronic music in general, why do you think that is?

I’m not sure why its so overlooked, because the greatest sonic evolutionary elements into modern dance music were disco and dub - but dub was far more sonically interesting, inventive and capable of evolution. It was dub that really saved the day when disco took over. It was at least equal to Kraftwerk and European electronics as a seminal force.

It was also completely studio-generated. The basic principle was you clicked the on/off buttons on the control desk to mute everything you didn’t want - leaving just a drum and a bass exposed or a voice or an echo. In this way, single sounds then had all the space -  and the effect through a sound system was dramatic. All dance music after that uses exactly the same techniques.

The very concept of the value of sub-bass was also initiated by those early dub sound systems - the way that worked on the body in a club environment. You simply have to move to it. It’s a force of nature.

I remember the first time I heard this, in Manchester in the late 1960s. A place called the Ponda Rosa - a Jamaican café we used. There was often a sound system upstairs. It rattled your black beans and pepper sauce. The entire building moved with the bass.

Dub is also hugely inventive - the way you can strip down to one sound, then feature another is a delight. That delight is how it’s valued by the audience. All that was later raided by electronic dance music, but its origin is in dub.

When electronic music became big-time pop in the mid-1980s, did you feel that you were part of a movement whose time had come, or did you feel that the music was losing its experimental spirit?

Both, really. It was gratifying to get some recognition, but it also seemed to be over. When it reached mainstream, it became a bit boy band.

At first, all this made me groan, because I’d naively thought I’d devised a great piece of territory for myself, so now I could spend the next few years exploring it -  then suddenly everyone and his dog had a synth band.

It happened almost overnight. One minute it was all punk, the next it was all synth. I’d spent a lot of energy and time developing this, and pushing against the prevailing scenes. Then I looked around and thought, “Now, how am I going to differentiate myself from this lot?”

I’d been properly kidnapped by new technology - all you needed was a synth, a tape recorder and a drum machine, and you were free to experiment and invent again, free of record companies demands for pop singles. There seemed to be so much to do. The new instruments demanded a new language, new techniques. 

But when what you’re doing coincides with a  fashion, everything suddenly changes. The pace becomes frantic and what you’ve made becomes public property. It’s as if you find lots of people suddenly living in your house. Then you find you can’t get in yourself.

I’ve always believed, though, that ideas are anyone’s property once they’re out - it’s all really a giant conversation, so it’s great to get a word or two in there.

Then, of course, the benefits arrive - you have money, you have a life, a studio, a reputation. So long as you don’t get too carried away chasing hits, you can find a level that suits you, and carry on working.

I did that until the mid-eighties, then I suddenly realised I didn’t enjoy the music that was being made then, or the music I was making myself, so I sold the studio and got on with the art. It was deeply gratifying to discover another equally interesting life was available, and totally independent of music.

When you started recording again around 1990, you did some work with Tim Simenon [of Bomb the Bass] and also made a video for LFO. What do you see as the main connections between what the music you were making a decade earlier and the house/techno movement?

It was essentially the same, but looked at through the lens of Detroit and Chicago underground dance music.

The instruments being used were the same as mine. I first heard acid tracks coming into London on cassettes around 1988. It all seemed urgent, organic and very home-made. I began to feel right at home again.

Sound systems had got much better, so now you could begin to hear what those old analogue synths actually sounded like - and they sounded really good, actually far better than digital gear.

Mainstream musicians had thrown analogue gear out in favour of digital synths and samplers, before they’d had time to properly explore that older equipment. Also samplers, being able to sound like any instrument, can be messy - a limited palette tends to give better results.

The guys in Detroit and Chicago got hold of these discarded analogue synths and drum machines - mainly Roland gear - 909 and 808 drum machines, 101s and TB-303s, sequencers and synths, rescued them from pawn shops and used them in a new, beautifully basic way - just a couple of naked sounds.

This becomes truly explosive when magnified by a good sound system. Simplicity is power. Minimal becomes maximal. Dub principles from another world.

So a new underground emerged. I always felt that things died whenever there was nothing on the streets. That’s not healthy.

Friends like [musician] James Pinker and a few others from that Vauxhall scene at the time were saying “come on over to the clubs” - The Fridge in Brixton for instance - “Have a listen - get out there man, it’s all alive again!”

Then the calls started. Tim Simenon of Bomb The Bass got in touch to do some recording, LFO wanted a video. The Bitmap Brothers wanted soundtracks for their computer games, people were angling to hire all my machines.

It was all moving again, after the dead mid-eighties. The indies were king because the major labels hadn’t a clue. I remember meetings with Martin Heath from Rhythm King, where major labels were eagerly handing him tens of thousands for his input to labels they were trying to start up.

In the end, the majors died a death - couldn’t cope with the effects of the internet. They became distributors and portfolio holders.

The real winners and originators are still Mute, Factory, Rough Trade, Fiction, Warp and a few other small, agile independents. That’s where the music really is.

Interview by Matthew Collin (via email) for ‘Dream Machines’, November 2, 2021.

Photo: John Foxx/Facebook.