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| Name | John Foxx |
|---|---|
| Background | solo_singer |
| Birth name | Dennis Leigh |
| Born | September 26, 1952 |
| Origin | Chorley, Lancashire, England |
| Years active | 1973–present |
| Instrument | Vocals, keyboards, guitars, percussion |
| Genre | Glam rock, synthpop, New Wave, psychedelic rock, ambient, electronic |
| Alias | John Foxx |
| Associated acts | Tiger Lily, Ultravox, Nation 12, Louis Gordon, Harold Budd |
| Url | metamatic.com |
His first band, formed whilst at art college in Preston, was called Woolly Fish.
Prior to 1973, he was singing and playing a 12 string guitar, and occasionally supported Stack Waddy in Manchester, from where he later moved to London in order to escape what he saw as a lack of musical stimulus.
Tiger Lily released a single on 14 March 1975, the A-side of which was a cover of the Fats Waller track "Ain't Misbehavin'". It was commissioned for (but not subsequently used in) a soft porn movie of the same name. The B-side of "Ain't Misbehavin'" was the group's own song - "Monkey Jive".
Eventually, after several name-changes, including Fire of London, The Zips and even The Damned, the band transformed into Ultravox!, with an exclamation mark. The group's style fused punk, glam, electronic, reggae and new wave music. Around this time, Leigh adopted his stage name of John Foxx (while Chris St. John called himself Chris Cross and Curry changed his stage last name to his original, Currie).
Among the elements that set the band apart from their contemporaries were Foxx's lyrics and vocal delivery, and Billy Currie's violin and synthesiser playing. Once the band signed to Island Records, they released three LPs during 1977-1978. The first Ultravox! single, Dangerous Rhythm, backed with "My Sex", was released 19 January 1977. Their first album (the self-titled Ultravox!) was released shortly afterwards, produced by Steve Lillywhite and the band, with assistance from Eno. The album attracted a lot of attention, but did not sell well. It was quickly followed by their second album Ha!-Ha!-Ha!, which featured a more jagged punk sound, and included the single ROckWrok, although both also had commercial failures.
During the recording of Systems of Romance, a song of the same name was written, but the band had no time to record it. It was later included on Foxx's second solo album The Garden. [] At Systems of Romance gigs, Foxx began to perform with the band two future solo songs, "He's a Liquid" (later included on Metamatic, Foxx's first solo album) and "Walk Away" (included on The Garden album). The latter song was not performed again by Foxx until 1983.
The band came to a parting of the ways during the tour, Robin Simon deciding to stay on in New York and Foxx announcing his plan to go solo upon returning to England. Without a lead singer, the band went into hiatus, Billy Currie joining Gary Numan's touring band and contributing to his highly successful 1979 album, The Pleasure Principle. [] The burgeoning popularity of synthesiser music at this time, and Numan's oft-quoted praise for the Foxx-fronted lineup and song-output of Ultravox, helped revive interest in the band. Billy Currie rejoined the group, while John Foxx was replaced as lead vocalist by Midge Ure, of The Rich Kids, Slik and Thin Lizzy. Ultravox then built on some of the ideas explored on Systems of Romance, achieving huge worldwide success with the album Vienna in 1980, after which the band released a series of popular albums and singles. Midge Ure was active in organising, and Ultravox performed at, Live Aid in 1985, and at subsequent Live Aid events. This Ultravox lineup lasted another nine years , overshadowing Foxx's concurrent solo career.
Foxx's next LP was The Garden, released 25 September 1981. This recording was a departure from the stark electronic sound of Metamatic, bearing a greater resemblance to Foxx’s swansong with Ultravox, Systems of Romance. The Garden's starting point was in fact a song called "Systems of Romance", written by Foxx for the earlier album but not released at the time.[]
In 1982, Foxx set up his own recording studio, designed by Andy Munro, also called The Garden, housed in an artists' collective in Shoreditch, East London, in a former warehouse also occupied by sculptors, painters and film makers. He produced some demo recordings for Virginia Astley's first album From Gardens Where We Feel Secure . Artists such as Depeche Mode, British Electric Foundation, Brian Eno, Trevor Horn, The Cure, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Tina Turner, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Tuxedomoon also recorded in Foxx's studio.
In 1983, Foxx provided some music for the soundtrack to Michelangelo Antonioni's film Identification of a Woman (Identificazione di una Donna) . In September that year, his third solo LP The Golden Section was released. A development of the sound of The Garden, Foxx described this album as a "roots check" of his earliest influences such as The Beatles, psychedelia, and other pre-punk sources.
The album In Mysterious Ways was issued in October 1985. Musically it was not considered a significant advance on the sound of his two previous releases, nor was it a commercial success . Foxx later said that at the time he felt divorced from any contemporary musical influences. However, he did produce, co-write and play on Pressure Points, by Anne Clark, the same year [].
After about five years "living like a ghost in London", Foxx began to find inspiration in the underground House and Acid music scenes in Detroit and London. With Nation 12 in the early 1990s, Foxx released two 12-inch singles, "Remember" and "Electrofear". The first was a collaboration with Tim Simenon, best known for his Bomb the Bass project. The group also wrote the music for the Bitmap Brothers computer games Speedball 2 (1990) and Gods (1991). He also worked with pioneers in this field such as LFO and made the music video for their eponymous debut single. Around this time, Foxx also taught on the Graphic Arts & Design degree course at Leeds Metropolitan University.
Shifting City was a collaboration with Manchester's Louis Gordon, an updated stylistic return to Foxx's Metamatic synth pop sound which also displayed the influence of 1990s underground dance music and the 'triphop' style, along with the psychedelic Beatles-esque pop first apparent on Ultravox’s "When You Walk Through Me".
On 11 October 1997, Foxx played his first public gig since 1982 at The Astoria, London. A limited edition CD (1,000 numbered copies only) entitled Subterranean Omnidelic Exotour was available for purchase by ticket holders.
Cathedral Oceans was a solo John Foxx record, an ambient return to his Catholic youth and his love of the cathedrals of England and Europe. Its roots included traditional evensong, Gregorian Chant, Brian Eno, Harold Budd, and German band Cluster. From his own music Foxx drew on such pieces as "My Sex" from the first self-titled Ultravox! record, "Hiroshima Mon Amour" from Ha!-Ha!-Ha!, "Just For a Moment" from Systems Of Romance, and the title track from The Garden. Cathedral Oceans began as a project during the sessions for "The Garden" and has been a work in progress for 20 years before this release, described by Foxx himself as one of the proudest achievements of his career. An accompanying DVD and book of images was made commercially available for the first time during an installation in Hoxton Square, London, in January 2003.
Foxx and Gordon continued to work together, performing live on the Subterranean Omnnidelic Exotour in 1997 and 1998 and releasing a second album The Pleasures of Electricity, in September 2001. Two years later they toured again, to promote the album Crash and Burn, released in September 2003 on Foxx's own Metamatic Records. This continued the Ballardian themes of urban landscape and automobiles present in Metamatic, and was supplemented by the Drive EP. 2003 also saw the release of the second volume of Cathedral Oceans as well as another ambient record, the double CD Translucence and Drift Music with Harold Budd. In 2004, from September through October, a collection of Cathedral Oceans images was exhibited at BCB Art, Hudson, New York, and in the following year Cathedral Oceans III was released.
In April 2005 Foxx guested on Finnish DJ Jori Hulkkonen's album Dualizm, where he provided vocals for "Dislocated" which Hulkkonen had written especially for him. A month later, Foxx appeared on stage at the Brighton Pavilion with Harold Budd and Bill Nelson as part of a concert to celebrate the work of the retiring pianist, which led to the announcement in October that year that Foxx would be involved in collaborations with Jah Wobble, Robin Guthrie, Steve Jansen and Nelson. The following month an album's worth of salvaged Nation 12 material was finally issued under the title Electrofear. Despite its relatively low-key promotion and status as largely a 'work in progress', Electrofear encapsulated many of the original ideas that were more fully realised on Shifting City and, in its turn, From Trash.
In June 2006, Foxx released an instrumental solo album called Tiny Colour Movies consisting of fifteen instrumental tracks inspired by short art films he saw at a private screening. His official website described these as having the "filmic, atmospheric approach" of the Metamatic-era instrumental B-sides "Glimmer", "Film One" and "Mr No". On 18 November 2006, Foxx gave a performance of the work at the Duke of York's cinema in Brighton, where Tiny Colour Movies was premiered as part of the city's Film Festival. Edited versions of the movies were shown on a big screen for the first time with Foxx playing a mix of live and recorded accompaniment from the album. This 'film' was shown again at Fulham Palace in July 2007 and then in a slightly revised format at the ICA and as part of the 21st International Film Festival in Leeds during November that year.
Three collaborative albums with Louis Gordon were released in late 2006: Live From a Room (As Big as a City), a 'live' studio album from the 2003 tour (released in association with an interview CD entitled "The Hidden Man") in October; the studio album From Trash in November; and a further album from the same sessions a few weeks later during the accompanying mini-tour. This two-CD package, entitled Sideways, included ten original tracks plus two extended versions of songs on From Trash. The second disc contained an extensive interview with Foxx describing the making of From Trash which was available only at concerts on the 2006 tour. The album saw a more commercial UK-wide release in April 2007.
A second surround sound DVD of Cathedral Oceans was released in March 2007. This contained his artwork made into a film intended as a "slowly moving, hallucinogenic, digital stained glass window, intended to be projected as big as possible onto architecture and in public places." The work was premiered in November 2006 at the Leeds International Film Festival.
In July 2007, Foxx exhibited some of his Cathedral Oceans artwork as large format digital prints at Fulham Palace as part of the RetroFuture exhibition hosted by ArtHertz. On the opening night, Foxx performed a piano piece accompanying a reading from his unpublished novel The Quiet Man in front of an audience for the first time. In September, a remastered edition of Metamatic was released as a two-CD pack containing the original album plus most of the associated B-sides and extra tracks from the period, including two 'new' songs re-assembled from original music recorded at the time.
On 29 September 2007, a showcase of Foxx's work was held at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London where he performed another version of Tiny Colour Movies and hosted a question-and-answer session. This was followed by the first-ever live performance of the entire Metamatic album, during which Foxx and Louis Gordon were accompanied on stage by Steve D'Agostino. Later in the evening, the DVD of Cathedral Oceans was shown in one of the ICA cinema studios. In October, Foxx and Gordon toured the UK with Metamatic, culminating in a show at Cargo in London. The year ended with two shows at the Luminaire in London. A live album titled A New Kind of Man, culled from the Metamatic performances in 2007, was released on Metamatic Records on 28 April 2008.
John Foxx presented three different pieces of his solo work in the space of one week in June 2008. This began with a showing of Tiny Colour Movies at the Caixaforum in Barcelona on 14 June 2008, followed by a performance of Cathedral Oceans III inside the Great Hall at Durham Castle, England on the 18th. He then travelled to Italy and presented an extract from The Quiet Man at the 14th Festival Internazionale di Poesia in Genoa.
Foxx has more recently taken a senior lecturer position at The London College of Music and Media TVU in London, working with art, media and music students across a range of courses. These include a masters degree in Computer Arts, as well as undergraduate courses such as Digital Arts and Audio Technology. In mid-2005, he took a sabbatical to record new music, write, work on the films which make up Tiny Colour Movies and tour in Europe and the UK.
In December 2007, Foxx exhibited some of his photographic works in an exhibition called Cinemascope at the Coningsby Gallery in West London. The images were part of three collections, "Grey Suit Music", "Tiny Colour Movies" and "Cathedral Oceans".
Category:1952 births Category:English male singers Category:English songwriters Category:English rock musicians Category:People from Chorley Category:Alumni of the Royal College of Art Category:Academics of Thames Valley University Category:Living people Category:Ambient musicians Category:Synthpop Category:Ultravox members
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