John Foxx
John Foxx is an English singer, musician, artist, photographer, graphic designer, writer, teacher and lecturer. He was the original lead singer of the new wave band Ultravox, before leaving to embark on a solo career in 1980 with the album Metamatic.
Primarily associated with electronic synthesizer music, he has also pursued a parallel career in graphic design and education. Andy Kellman of AllMusic described Foxx as an influential cult figure whose "detached, jolting vocal style inspired mainstream and underground artists across the decades".
Early life and education
Leigh was born in Chorley, Lancashire, England. His father was a coal miner and pugilist, his mother a millworker. He was raised Catholic and educated at St Mary's Primary and St Augustine Secondary schools. Next he attended Harris College of Art in Preston and then the Royal College of Art in London.During his youth in the 1960s he embraced the lifestyles of a mod and a hippy, while he formed his first band Woolly Fish in 1967 in Preston. He experimented with tape recorders and synthesisers whilst at the Royal College of Art.
Prior to 1973, he was singing and playing a 12-string guitar and occasionally supported Stack Waddy in Manchester, from which he later moved to London in order to escape what he saw as a lack of musical stimulus.
Musical career
Tiger Lily
In April 1974, Leigh formed a band that would eventually be called Tiger Lily, composed of bassist Chris Allen and guitarist Stevie Shears, with Canadian drummer Warren Cann joining shortly afterwards in May 1974. The band played their first gig at the Marquee Club in August 1974, after which Billy Currie was recruited as violinist in October 1974.Tiger Lily released a single in 1975 on Gull Records, the A-side of which was a cover of the Fats Waller track "Ain't Misbehavin'". It was commissioned for a movie of the same name. The B-side was the group's own song "Monkey Jive". Tiger Lily played a few gigs in London pubs between 1974 and 1975.
Ultravox (1976–1979)
After several changes of name, including Fire of London, The Zips and The Damned, the band became Ultravox! in October 1976. The group's style fused punk, glam, electronic, reggae and new wave music. At the same time, Leigh adopted his stage name of John Foxx:Foxx is much more intelligent than I am, better looking, better lit. A kind of naively perfected entity. He's just like a recording, where you can make several performances until you get it right – or make a composite of several successful sections, then discard the rest.
Chris Allen, who had briefly gone by the name Chris St. John, changed his name again, to Chris Cross.
Once the band signed to Island Records, they released three albums during 1977–1978. The debut Ultravox! single, "Dangerous Rhythm", backed with "My Sex", was released on 4 February 1977. Their first album was released three weeks later on 25 February 1977, produced by Steve Lillywhite and the band, with assistance from Brian Eno. It was followed by their second album Ha! Ha! Ha! in October 1977, which included the single "ROckWrok", although both were commercial failures.
For their third album, Systems of Romance, Ultravox abandoned the exclamation mark in their name. Also missing was their first guitarist, Stevie Shears, who was replaced by Robin Simon, from Neo. The album was co-produced by Conny Plank. Two singles were released from the album, "Slow Motion" and "Quiet Men". Sales were modest, but the album did gain the band exposure to a wider audience, including the United States.
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 three future solo songs, "He's a Liquid" and "Touch and Go" and "Walk Away". The latter song was not performed again by Foxx until 1983.
Ultravox were dropped by their record label at the very end of 1978. The band undertook a self-financed tour of the United States in February, during which they performed three new songs, "Touch and Go" and "He's a Liquid", which Foxx later recorded for Metamatic, and "Radio Beach". Foxx left the band at the end of the tour, and returned to solo work. He was replaced by Midge Ure.
Solo career (1980–1985)
After signing to Virgin Records, Foxx achieved two top 40 entries on the UK Singles Chart with his first solo singles, "Underpass" and "No-One Driving". Its parent album Metamatic was released on 17 January 1980, and peaked at No. 18 in the UK Albums Chart. Foxx played most of the synthesisers and "rhythm machines", as they were listed on the sleeve. One of the album's songs, "Metal Beat", takes its name from a CR-78 drum machine sound used on the record. Virgin released the album under the imprint name Metal Beat Records, which was used for Foxx releases throughout his contract with them.The non-album single "Burning Car" followed in July 1980. Spending seven weeks on the UK charts, it reached its peak position at no. 35 in August. Foxx then worked on dozens of tracks for two projected albums, and one of these tracks, "My Face", was released on a flexi-disc given away with Smash Hits in October 1980.
Foxx's next album was The Garden, released in September 1981. It reached No. 24 in the UK Albums Chart. Musically it was a departure from the stark electropop of Metamatic to a sound resembling Ultravox Systems of Romance. The Gardens starting point was "Systems of Romance", written by Foxx for the earlier album but not released at the time. The lead single "Europe After the Rain" became Foxx's fourth and last top 40 hit on the UK Singles Chart during a five-week chart run in August/September 1981.
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.
In 1982, Foxx provided some music for the soundtrack to Michelangelo Antonioni's film Identification of a Woman. In September that year, his third solo LP The Golden Section was released. A development of The Garden, Foxx described the album as a "roots check" of his earliest musical influences, including The Beatles and English psychedelic music. It was followed by a tour, his first live performances since Ultravox.
The album In Mysterious Ways was issued in October 1985, which spent one week at No. 85 in the UK chart. Musically it was not considered a significant advance on the sound of his three previous releases, nor was it a commercial success although the album's lyrics are far more romantic than any of his previous albums. 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.
Withdrawal from the music scene (1985)
After In Mysterious Ways, Foxx temporarily left his career in pop music. He sold his recording studio and returned to his earlier career as a graphic artist, working under his real name of Dennis Leigh. Examples of this work include the book covers of Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry, Anthony Burgess's A Dead Man in Deptford, and several books in the Arden Shakespeare series.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 and Gods. He also worked with LFO and made the music video for their eponymous debut single. Around this time, Foxx also taught on the Graphic Arts and Design degree course at Leeds Metropolitan University.
Re-emergence with Louis Gordon (1997)
On 24 March 1997, Foxx made a return to the music scene with the simultaneous release of two albums, Shifting City and Cathedral Oceans on Metamatic Records. Shifting City was Foxx's first collaboration with Manchester musician Louis Gordon.On 11 October 1997, Foxx played his first public gig since 1983 at The Astoria, London. A limited-edition twelve-track CD entitled Subterranean Omnidelic Exotour was available for purchase by ticketholders. 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.
Three collaborative albums with Louis Gordon were released in late 2006: Live From a Room , a 'live' studio album from the 2003 tour 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 "live in the studio" recordings originally distributed in limited edition during the 1998 Subterranean Omnidelic Exotour were later made available through the double-CD issue "The Golden Section Tour + The Omnidelic Exotour" and the double CD re-issue of "Shifting City" in 2009. The album Retro Future is a live-on-stage performance recorded on the Exotour, on 10 January 1998 at Shrewsbury Music Hall. It was released for Foxx's 2007 Metamatic tour, and was originally limited to 1000 pressings.