Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - "Electricity" (1980)

Why are you into all the best things? Remember?

John Foxx & Robin Guthrie - Mirrorball (2009)

At the dawn of the 1980s, John Foxx released Metamatic, a landmark electro-pop album that fused the synth-dominated sound just then coming into vogue in the UK with some of the more avant-garde tendencies of kraut-rock. The result was nothing less than a techno-punk masterpiece. However, as the 1980s progressed, Foxx's albums became less and less distinguishable from the contemporary pop mainstream, and when In Mysterious Ways was released in October of 1985, it was virtually ignored by fans and press alike, causing Foxx to put his music career on hiatus. For the remainder of the 1980s and into the 1990s, Foxx (using his birth name Dennis Leigh) worked as a graphic designer, creating covers for well-known books such as Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, and even teaching graphic design at a university in Leeds. While the rise of acid-house, which Foxx correctly surmised was deeply influenced by his best early 1980s work, inspired him to briefly resurrect his music career as Nation 12, it would be his second return to music in the late 1990s that would yield, among other innovative recordings, his ambient masterpiece Cathedral Oceans, which he collaborated on with Louis Gordon, a Manchester musician who would become a collaborative presence on many of Foxx's future recording ventures.

Robin Guthrie with Jaguar in hand

In 2005, Foxx made some live appearances playing beside Robin Guthrie, whose spidery, cascading, effects-laden guitar-work created the dazzling soundscapes that, along with Elizabeth Fraser's unparalleled vocals, made The Cocteau Twins sound so distinctive. Borne out of these appearances was a collaborative project called Mirrorball, released in 2009, the sound of which is entirely what one might expect from these singular musicians who, at this point in their careers, might be better described as sound engineers. On standout track "Estrellita," Guthrie's familiar, squishy arpeggios provide a gorgeous backdrop to Foxx's lovely, seemingly improvised vocals. As I was listening to this song for the first time, I inevitably found myself wishing Guthrie would resurrect the Cocteaus in some form, though he has said repeatedly that he would see this as a regression musically- yah, whatever Robin. Another memorable track is "Spectroscope," which highlights Foxx's ghostly vocals, and provides them with an eerily dramatic yet musically spare backdrop. However, the highpoint of Mirrorball is "Sunshower." Here, Foxx's baritone vocals are a little more aggressive and meld beautifully with Guthrie's restrained guitar-work, creating a truly memorable track, which is always a feat on an ambient-inclined album. If I have a criticism of the album, it's the overly manicured production, which I realize is nearly synonymous with ambient works like this, but can occasionally push the aesthetic into new age territory. Nevertheless, well worth hearing.

John Foxx - Metamatic (1980/2007) / The Garden (1981/2008)

Despite being a seminal figure in the rise of experimental synth-pop during the late 1970s, John Foxx has never received the level of notoriety lavished on fellow synth-pioneers Kraftwerk and Gary Numan.  Nevertheless, Foxx's uniquely detached vocal style as well as his consistently challenging approach to electronic music, both of which he progressively developed during his tenure in Ultravox(!), were clearly major influences on Numan as well as any number of lesser new wave artists who littered the musical landscape throughout the early 1980s. In fact, aside from David Sylvian's mature work with Japan, it would be hard to find a more trailblazing figure in post-glam electro-pop. Foxx (then known as Dennis Leigh) spent much of the mid-1970s in a marginal glam band called Tiger Lilly, but in the aftermath of the rise of the punk movement, he, along with violinist Billy Currie, formed Ultravox! whose first three albums, Ultravox!, Ha!-Ha!Ha!, and Systems of Romance, trace an increasingly experimental progression from glam and krautrock-inspired post-punk to a more lush yet minimalist, synth-dominated sound that points ahead to Foxx's even more groundbreaking solo work. Perhaps due to Ultravox's unselfconsciously experimental nature, the U.K. press was always dismissive of Foxx's version of the band. John Foxx: "Very early on, we decided to investigate and develop lots of what had then been declared ungood and which we felt were manifesting themselves and were worth recording. These included psychedelia, electronics, cyberpunk, environments and elements suggested by the likes of Ballard and Burroughs, cheap European music and modes, and strange English pop, such as some aspects of The Shadows and Billy Fury which seemed to relate to a sort of English retro-futurism. We were interested in a sort of ripped and burnt glamour. I was also taken with a detached, still stance."

Ostensibly, Foxx's decision to go solo after Ultravox's brilliant third album, Systems of Romance, had to do with the band's increasingly difficult circumstances, which included being dropped by their label, Island, on the eve of a U.S. tour. However, Foxx has suggested his departure was inevitable given his desire to pursue his own muse without interference: "The band thing is a phase- like being in a gang. You can't really be part of a gang all your life; it begins to feel undignified and it stunts your growth, unless you want to be a teenager forever. Some do. Some don't. The benefits were the Gestalt- where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, a very powerful experience- and working in a closed society with people who have the same aim. Of course, the aims almost inevitably diverge as you all grow. The point of view I've always worked from is that of a ghost in the city- someone who is a sort of drifting, detached onlooker- but still vulnerable and trying against all odds to maintain a sort of dignity in the face of all the static." Foxx would take this "ghost in the city" approach to a new level on his inimitable debut LP, Metamatic, quite possibly the most important electro-pop album of the eighties. Recorded in a small studio in North London, which Foxx once described as "an eight track cupboard [...] Very basic, very scruffy, very good," the album represents quite a departure from his work with Ultravox, as it completely dispenses with conventional instruments (and in the process, Foxx's punk origins), instead relying entirely on synthetic textures, and in doing so, achieving a chilly, mechanized aesthetic that is both aurally challenging and artistically compelling.

Foxx: "I lived alone in Finsbury Park, spent my spare time walking the disused train lines, cycled to the studio everyday and wobbled back at dawn, imagining I was the Marcel Duchamp of electropop. Metamatic was the result. It was the first British electronic pop album. It was minimal, primitive technopunk. Carcrash music tailored by Burtons." Both lyrically and musically, Metamatic conjures dystopian images of isolated individuals navigating cold landscapes populated only by architecture and machines, with a recurring theme being disconnection. For example, on the stunningly strange opening track, "Plaza," Foxx's dis-attached vocals are surrounded by several synths all sounding as though entirely isolated from each other. This gives the song an eerie dislocated feel that contrasts sharply with the rather straightforwardly descriptive lyrics. The most recognizably pop-oriented song on the album is "Underpass," an electro-pop masterpiece that manages to be minimalist and incredibly catchy at the same time; it's melodramatic synthesizers and Foxx's heavily treated robotic vocals create another dark tale of unbridgeable distances, but the tension is undercut by the song's inherent danceability. While Metamatic ultimately proved to be the least outwardly accessible of Foxx's 1980s solo albums, it also proved to be his greatest, as its follow-up, The Garden, though a fine piece of synth-driven pop in its own right, signaled a step toward a more conventionally melodic sound that Foxx would continue to explore, despite diminishing returns, for the remainder of the decade until dropping out of public view in 1986; however, it did not take long for his considerable influence to be felt. Foxx: "All the same sounds surfaced again after 1987, reanimated with beautiful new rhythms, as the beginnings of acid. I recognized the vocabulary immediately. A new underground at last. Adventure was possible again after the double-breasted dumbness of the mid-eighties."

John Foxx - "Underpass" (1980)

It's a crime how little-known John Foxx is. After three incredible records with the original incarnation of Ultravox (the last of which, Systems of Romance, is a masterpiece), he made one of the most important synth albums of the eighties, Metamatic. In fact, it's really too cool to be called a "synth album." If you've never heard it, stay tuned, because I will be posting it along with his second album, The Garden (both deluxe editions), in a few days. Everything about this song makes me long for the cold concrete edges of 1980...