JOHN FOXX WEEK: Xeno & Oaklander Pay Tribute

How and when did you discover John Foxx?
   
Liz Wendelbo: There were different phases of discovery of John Foxx's work in my life. First through Ultravox pop songs that were played on local FM radio shows in Strasbourg France where I grew up. Later I started collecting vinyl and I was besotted by the concepts of John Foxx's cover art work - the photos: his hand reaching for the light on Metamatic the album. Then more recently I was hypnotised by John Foxx's music videos and art films.

Sean McBride: In 1996 I bought, second hand, the 'No One Driving' double 7".  This for me, along with the obscure NorwegianBurning the Midnight Sun compilation LP, functioned as a lost paradigm and entry for and into what has hitherto been called Minimal Elektroniks.  The voice and synthesizers perfectly balanced, neither more important, neither more spectacular, the life affirming melancholy of the rise and fall of the machine and the human.

Do you think early Ultravox were ahead of their time - recording tracks such as 'My Sex' and 'I Want To Be A Machine' back in 1976?

Sean: Of Course. 'There was definitely an eschewing of the carefree noodling and platitudes of naive romance that characterized a lot of 70s rock and glam.  There is a self-imposed distance that at once suggests the breakdown of the current era as well as the singer’s own undoing and gradual transmogrification into some man-machine entity.  This is evident in many of Ultravox's songs, chiefly in the subtle chorusing and flanging on the voice.

Do you have a favourite John Foxx track?
   
Liz: ''Burning Car', I like its unexpected violence. Very urban, contemporary and apocalyptic. It's also an interesting reference to 'erasing', getting rid of the unnecessary, the superfluous, the absurd luxury of western culture: the automobile, and its futuristic symbol, the beauty of speed, mechanisation, and fetish appeal - the shiny metal. And seeing that on fire, it is a strong image. It's also quite hypnotising - flames, their glow, their hunger.'


    
Is there any album that you feel has been particularly important to you and others in terms of inspiration?
   
Liz: 'For me it would have to be The Garden.
   
Sean: It is hard to encapsulate in this questionnaire - from synthpop, New Romantic, Industrial dance, EBM, et al - the consequences of Metamatic are far reaching and still being felt.  I quite like the Cathedral Oceans series as well as his work with Harold Budd - Translucence / Drift Music.

Has his influence been more than musical? In terms of design, artwork and so on?
   
Liz: John Foxx appeals to me in aspects of performance art and his eye for empty and quiet spaces. In his photos and his videos I like how his body relates / and is alienated by a place, a car, a path, trees, a room. These are existential themes that I guess are symbolised in his affection for the 'suit'; this ordinary yet elegant suit that keeps on re-occurring in his work (as seen on the A New Kind of Man album cover photo, and 'Miles Away' single).

The suit being a shell, but also a quiet expression of elegance and negation, like in the book he wrote and subsequent short Super 8 film and CD that were made The Quiet Man. The main character is not extra-ordinary, he is just a quiet man - with a drifting imagination and a penchant for dystopia. His fantasies of London overgrown with plants and abandoned stately buildings erase the mediocre everyday in favour of an enchanted and subtly decadent poetic lifestyle. These are visions that I have every day, so they speak to me personally.

I often imagine New York empty and desolate, with ivy crawling all over skyscrapers, and having tea in the deserted lobby of a glitzy mid-town bank, all copper and glass. This idea most definitely seeps into the films that I make, and the lyrics that we write for Xeno & Oaklander. One of my films, from the Sets & Lights 16mm short film I've just finished, is set in a brutalist concrete bunker overgrown with ivy and wild plants. Sean and I are seen as mere silhouettes as if we were the last inhabitants on earth after a devastating event - slowly drifting down corridors.'

Why do you think that many people are only just discovering John Foxx's music now?

Sean: Maybe because he's influencing many people who were born a decade or two after his initial output.  I was five when Metamatic debuted.

CLICK HERE TO BUY TICKETS TO SEE XENO & OAKLANDER
PERFORM WITH JOHN FOXX AND THE MATHS
ON 27 OCTOBER @ XOYO, LONDON