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INTERVIEW: John Foxx
John Foxx, 61, was the original lead singer with the band Ultravox. He left in 1979 to start a solo career, which continues to this day. Under his real name, Dennis Leigh, he has also pursued a parallel career in lecturing and graphic design. Tomorrow (Friday, November 7) he appears at Leeds Town Hall, as part of Leeds International Film Festival. Contact 0113 224 3801 for tickets.
Much of your back catalogue has recently been reissued. What do you make of the likes of Metamatic, The Garden and The Golden Section now?
It seems as if someone else made them. So I can almost be objective now.
Metamatic - Cold, ruthless, extensively damaged - A subtext of withheld romance and optimism. Attempting to maintain some sort of dignity against the odds.
The Garden - Reclaiming the other side of the territory – Warm grand landscape stuff. Experiencing some sort of grand reconciliation after going to Italy and enjoying life to the full again, after the grey concrete and glass Metadata era London of the 1970s.
The Golden Section - The start of acknowledging and working with Psychedelia, which had been declared ungood by punk. It refers to late 1960s British Psychedelia which is far wilder and carries greater imaginative potential than anything else originated here. This was some ten years before Oasis and the others began to use it as a template. The difference was they incorporated Punk too, which was the right thing to do.
I still have a nagging feeling there is still some way to go with all this - it hasn't really been properly incorporated into the genetic stream yet. It will come. Inevitable. The 1960s have taken 45 years to even begin to be properly realised.
That's why the street still emulates that style. ( Emulate = Still undergoing assimilation). I wouldn't have dreamt of emulating Fred Astaire, who was big thirty years before my youth, yet the chosen street style for a good section of Western youth now is 1965 onward. Over forty years later. We still haven't realised all the blueprints of behaviour philosophy and potential laid down then.
Are you pleased with the revival of interest in your work?
Can't tell you. That's what an artist's life is really about.Long-term communication.
You pioneered synth pop with Ultravox but the band were under-appreciated at the time of punk and new wave. Would you have liked them to have been more commercially successful or do you see your role has always been - to some extent - to stand outside the mainstream?
I think we simply did everything too early, then moved on without consolidating any of it. If we'd taken more time to consolidate, we couldn't have covered the ground. And there really was an awful lot to cover. Mind you, we could have done with the money.
Given the chance of a replay, I'd have made even more obscure and violent material - an ambient album, an abstract electronics album, got into film making asap. Some work with the Brothers Quay and black and white films, documentary material of London, Paris, New York and Berlin at the time, plus interviews with people who were an influence, such as - Ballard, McLuhan, Burroughs, Truffaut, Warhol, Cage, Brakhage, Kneale, etc. A sort of Seven-Up documentary would be truly fascinating now. All the daftness and angst and ideas, boiling away in grainy black and white. Great thing, hindsight.
Apart from that, any sort of fame is terrifying - I'm simply not equipped.. Personal inadequacy.
It's the exploration of new territories - the studio as lab/ spacecraft - that really interest me. That's why I got into music in the first place - the studio. It must be the legacy of starting out as a painter.
I'm really some sort of reluctant outsider, I guess. Would truly like to join the party - but simply can't afford the price. You get used to it
For the best part of a decade you stayed away from music, concentrating on graphic design and lecturing (at Leeds Poly). What brought you back to the pop world in 1997?
Well, I lectured in several other places as well. I've always done that - lecturing forces you to be articulate in a way that music or painting can suppress. Through those, any articulation is much more complete and satisfying, so you never feel the need. You run a serious risk of losing any verbal dexterity - simply through disuse.
I got interested again because that awful stupid era of the mid to late Eighties music was over.
Acid and other forms of dance music were beginning to use electronics and sounds derived precisely from my era, and people were beginning to get in touch - such as Tim Simenon of Bomb the Bass, and Warp Records - some of what I judged to be the most interesting artists of the time.
At the other end of the spectrum, I'd been working with Harold Budd - someone I've always admired greatly, as well as completing Cathedral Oceans. Suddenly, the time seemed right for all these things simultaneously.
There was an underground scene again - and that's where the new things will always happen first, if your instincts are tuned well enough to be able to recognise them. So there was this definite continuity, plus new elements, plus underground – seemed like the perfect ecology for fascinating new forms of life. It's been that way ever since.
What do you make of many of your contemporaries jumping on the Eighties nostalgia bandwagon? Have you ever been remotely tempted to join them?
I'm against preservatives. Music is a living, electrical language - has to be alive and moving forward, otherwise it's dead.
You're appearing at Leeds Town Hall on November 7 as part of Leeds International Film Festival. Tell us a little about the Quiet Man show.
Yes - The Quiet Man is a novel I've been working on for the past 30 years. It's the story of a man a woman and a city. I never attempted to publish it because it still supplies me with ideas for songs and music.
(All my songs are written from the Quiet Man's point of view. I invented him because I had to - as a means of escape from attention. So he became another me, I guess. A substitute I send in when the main player gets injured).
I found an old grey suit in a charity shop. Over the years I got a series of friends to wear the suit in various locations in London. I filmed them just walking or sitting in cafes or apartments.
As I did this, The Quiet Man story began to emerge. All about London becoming overgrown, the suit itself being alive somehow, the shadow of a woman, and the way cities can alter us - and our memories.
So - what I'm presenting at the film festival is this story, with the films and a voiceover. A work in progress. I provide music using a treated grand piano in one section, then I read voiceover to a synchronised film in another.
As well as a story about cities and memory, it also acts an essay on the future of film - or one possible avenue for that future. You see, I think cinema is built on the same grammatical base as dreaming, you can see this in several ways - the compression and expansion of time (flashback, slow motion, jumps forward and backward etc) - and in many other aspects of the way film has evolved.
I think the next phase of Cinema may be what I like to identify as 'repurposing' - making new movies out of existing material, just as artists did with collage, or musicians do with sampling - or everyone does with their real life each night, when they dream.
Cinema seems to me a biological extension of dreaming - the attempt to make some meaning out of replayed fragmented experience.
There is something magical about externalising dreams in this way. No other animal can do this, or even wants to. We sit in the dark for hours watching images flickering across a screen.
In the novel, The Quiet Man walks into the screen at one point. I think we all do this when we view a film. We enter into it. Participate. Travel without moving.
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