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 “Recognition is important, simply as a human need. We do these things to communicate and it feels good if people recognise and respond to what you do. At the same time, I'm very conscious that my personality has always got in the way of being in any way high profile. I prefer to be a sort of ghost. I’ve got no choice really; though it is very pleasing when people still take the trouble to respond, even despite this.”
Pioneering synth legend John Foxx remains one of modern music’s most enigmatic and interesting figures, carving a highly singular path throughout his life that’s taken in 60s psychedelia, the birth of synth pop and pop and long periods living in total anonymity.
Still best known as the creative powerhouse behind 70s syth pioneers Ultravox, he nevertheless actively rejected the mainstream fame that Midge Ure later found through the band, as he followed his Outsider instincts and jumped into the unknown.
“It was absolutely clear that Ultravox were going to break big very soon. Every gig we played had queues around the block. I knew I'd be locked into a band for at least another five contractual, responsible, endlessly touring years, if I stayed,” he recalls.
“The grey suit, a synthesizer and the possibility of creating a beautiful tranquil anonymity was beckoning. It was an offer I couldn't refuse.”
The grey suit he’s referring to was a second hand outfit he picked up in a charity shop after leaving the band, to pursue his next artistic persona of ‘the Quiet Man’.
“The biggest surprise (and relief) was gaining access to a form of invisibility. Just by inhabiting this grey suit from Oxfam, I'd become a sort of modern ghost. No one looked twice. It was so simple to step right out of the world. I was thrilled after years of having to attract attention through being in a band - I could now walk around unnoticed. At the time I deeply needed that. There wasn't much drama involved in the whole episode, the figure of the Quiet Man is really an anti-drama device. Though I learnt an awful lot about identity and how to make it liquid through that whole period.”
On much of his walkabouts he explored the abandoned railway tracks of inner London districts like Finsbury Park and Hoxton, though more recently he’s set off on walking trips around Europe. Travelling has also brought him into greater contact with churches and more specifically Cathedrals, the inspiration behind his latest album Cathedral Oceans Part 111.Meeting up with me in a Japanese restaurant for lunch one day he’s charming company and an excellent raconteur, though soon after, he emails to say he’s concerned he’s not expressed himself fully, do I mind him emailing some fresh thoughts. One week later, he sends back such interesting, illuminating and well expressed ideas that I’ve run his comments, unedited and uncut.
Skrufff (Jonty Skrufff): Starting with the album Cathedral Oceans Part 111: a 20 year ongoing project: what determines when you go back to it?
John Foxx: “I first got interested in the effects of singing and architecture when I was (briefly) in a school choir. I'd go into the church alone, just before practise, because I really enjoyed singing into that huge echoing space. I realise now that I was beginning to improvise, to make up my own music. It was based on the form of the music I sang in the choir, but much looser and more organic. Got all kinds of strange and fascinating sensations - mainly concerning physical dispersal, a sense of losing my own boundaries and integrating with something much bigger. Later when swimming (in a warm ocean for the first time) I got similar sensations and began to make connections with the oceanic properties of sound and architecture.
Even at the time it was clear that these were not specifically religious experiences. Later I began to understand that they are a part of the common human spectrum of experiences - and ones which often tend to be co-opted by religions for their own purposes. I decided to cut out the middleman and go direct, as much as I could.
It's taken all that time firstly to arrive at some understanding of what happens and then to gain enough confidence and experience to become able to make music like this. At the moment the music seems to be altering in form, becoming more abstract and less dependent on previous forms, so it's a constantly evolving body of work. I really love the idea of pursuing an investigation - and through that
developing a body of work - over a lifetime.
Skrufff: How much is there a religious element to your work? (Do you believe in magic: perceive music as being more than about entertainment- if so, what?)
John Foxx: “Some distinctions need to be established here, so thanks for raising that point. I must be clear that there certainly isn't a religious aspect to my music. I’d differentiate between religion and what is usually called spiritual. Religions can be power and control structures, which rely on potentially dangerous dogmas. Even spiritual' is a misleading word and I prefer not to use it - too much new age -and old age- baggage. I prefer to operate on the basis that music is something intrinsic to humans and to some animals. If we care to take the whole concept far enough, we can see that all matter is composed of vibrations. At the most basic level, what we call music is organised noise, organised vibration, which is designed to affect anyone in its field. And we spend a great deal of time and effort organising it into what is -at best, I believe - a huge, ever shifting and evolving supra-linguistic communications matrix. One which operates through efficiently bypassing established, conscious, critical faculties and appealing direct to the core.
Skrufff: How easy has it been to make a living through music all these years (what’s been the toughest period/ biggest obstacle you’ve had to overcome?)
John Foxx: “Not difficult. If I'd made more money it might have been more difficult, because then you get more professionalized eyes on what you do, and more advice. Of course one can always use more money, but as it is I can pursue what I want without concerning myself unduly about those other pressures. I have enough to do this project then on to the next. As Iggy once said so beautifully, if you forget about success- if you can just lay that aside - it's astounding what you can achieve - the whole thing becomes limitless. I did quit for a couple of years to do some visual investigations, when I lost my way for a while. But even then I continued to write small piano pieces and some songs. Got drawn right back in again eventually, of course. Seems to be necessary at a deep cellular level. I even dream I'm singing and becoming other things through that, if I don’t make music for any significant period.”
Skrufff: What is the key to longevity?
John Foxx: “I've never thought that much about it. Initially, I didn't expect it all to last more than one album. I'm just pleased that there's so much left to pursue - don't feel as though I've really hit my stride yet. All the people I admire - Picasso, Duchamp, John Lee Hooker, Cary Grant, Dickens, Satie, Monet, and many others, all simply carried on doing what they had to do. They certainly didn't even attempt to rely on looking 'youthful' or acting out 'youngness'. If I thought about it, that entire celeb youth/ area has always been what I feel its important to avoid - I got work to do - investigations to pursue. Entire unknown territories without a footprint yet.”
Skrufff: What do you make of today’s celebrity culture?
John Foxx: “I think it's entirely inevitable, given the proliferation of media and media forms -many of which are geared to exploit credulity and cruelty in audiences. It’s also a little sad, a little strange - and a little dangerous. There's a huge difference between the subtle, long term, attention-gaining strategies practised through some forms of art - and the naked desire to attract attention for its own sake, at any price. I often feel we are only inches away from an electronic form of the Coliseum in Rome - people and animals dismembered in various ingenious ways for public delight.”
Skrufff: Dipping into your past: why did you actively avoid meeting William Burroughs?
John Foxx: “I misjudged the time by several hours. He hated unpunctuality. I think I unconsciously wanted to miss him. He was so important and so original. That writhing technicolour intelligence. At the same time I remain deeply ambivalent about what he was as a father, as a husband, as a man.”
Skrufff: Who’s been the most stimulating, inspiring person you’ve met?
John Foxx: “I think Harold Budd and Eno, they both laid down a new aspect of modern music and they both constantly test the boundaries.”
Skrufff: And the scariest?
John Foxx: “The most frightening person was someone I once worked with peripherally for some weeks as a student before realising they were not at all interested in the function they were employed to perform, but in controlling and manipulating the people they were in charge of. Couldn't get out of there fast enough. First encounter with the section of the world which instinctively seeks to gain control through administration.
Skrufff: Seems like absolutely everybody calls themselves punk’ these days: why do you think it’s so popular?
John Foxx: “Punk seems to becomes potent again when it is hybridised with some other form which lacks innate virility and energy - for instance Electropunk, Technopunk, Cyberpunk. McClaren and Westwood accurately synthesised and distilled the most Potent and apposite youth stance of the age. It still has power as a component even though the original movement burnt itself out into formal conservatism in two years flat.
Skrufff: What does the term mean to you, what do you think it represents to others?
John Foxx: “I take it to mean a brave, defiant even romantic celebration and living out of values which are held to be useless by the dominant status quo.”
Skrufff: Why has there never been a hippy revival’: how come that seminal counter-cultural movement has never actively been revisited/ recycled?
John Foxx: “That’s a good question. I always liked the possibilities inherent in early hippy culture. Technohippies, Psychedelia etc. Multimedia in its original form was a hippy invention, meaning an immersive transportative environment, a systematic derangement of all the senses though a discriminating and intelligent investigation of the properties of various chemicals, media and other experiences, all functioning together. A throwing off of the fetters of subliminal control and consumption. Great ideas, even if you don't always want to practise them.
Of course it degenerated almost immediately into drug binging and a vile form of passive sloth. This further ossified into a particularly unimaginative formalised conventionalism, less conceptually rich than the thing it was rebelling against. This rebellion-free zone was usually manifested sartorially through check shirts, faded denim, long hair and complacent, habitual, domestic cannabis consumption.
I remember being in a room full of such beings in 1972. Seemed a far cry from the days of the 24hour Technicolour Dream and the Arts Lab and Mark Boyle's installations and lightshows. All gone, replaced by these tartan sheep. Felt so alone. What a place to land a crippled ship.”
John Foxx: “Interesting though, that this hippy style still has some remaining currency, even though it may be the culture that cannot be claimed. Most of today’s official current youth style seems firmly based on it - flares, hair, pharmaceutical trends, philosophies, attitudes, and literature. Most twenty year olds would look quite at home in 1968. Now this is downright weird, because 1968 was almost forty years ago. So this is the temporal equivalent of the Beatles generation dressing as Fred Astaire. Bands in1968 did not imitate early Frank Sinatra, which is the equivalent of what Oasis and many others are up to.
I think that the 1960's are so present in this era for several reasons: firstly because society wasn't quite diverse enough then - most people dressed up as hippies for the weekend, went to clubs then back to the old nine to five on Monday. Very few were able to examine the implications through living it all out.
John Foxx: “Another major factor was technological - the technologies of the time were simply not able to perform well enough to cope with the blueprints being laid down then. It took another forty years for computers and projectors and VR and even psycho-pharmaceuticals to emerge which would service and make practical the initial concepts of hippydom and psychedelia.
It was also a time when everything got scrutinised and fundamentally revalued, yet most people simply weren't aware of what was being made available through all this process- it took forty years for the news to trickle out into the general population and for them to be in a position to begin to act on and act out some of those concepts. So the sixties are actually being played out now. The eras are interleaved in ways never possible before.
John Foxx: Official Cathedral Oceans is out now on Fullfill Records.
http://www.officialcathedraloceans.com
Interview by: Jonty Skrufff (Skrufff.com)
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