John Foxx takes a journey through his musical history and once round The Garden

John Foxx first came to fame as the founder of Ultravox, and later established himself as one of the leading solo artists in the electropop field. But, as he's quick to point out, the stark textures of his 'Metamatic' album don't indicate a gloomy disposition. The follow-up 'The Garden' had a more optimistic feel, and gave the name to his spacious studio in London's Bishopsgate. As he explained, the new album 'The Golden Section' introduces some new ideas, but also expresses feelings he's been dealing with in music since the days of 'Metamatic'.

"After Ultravox I knew I wanted to do that album, because I thought it was the way music was going and I knew nobody else had done it before. I couldn't really ask the rest of the band to go out on a limb like that, and I don't think they've gone very much towards that style now; they're quite traditional, which is fine.

"Metamatic was a kind of design exercise; I thought 'I'll limit myself to 8- track for a start, no acoustic instruments, heavy treatment on the vocals, play as much of it as I can myself, no real drums and no cymbals.' And I stuck to it all the way through, which is unusual for me!

"Jake Durant played some bass and John Barker played some keyboards — things I couldn't play, like chords! I mainly played guitar with Ultravox, not in the style of a lead guitarist but just in simple chords. The guitar was handy to carry around and write tunes on, but now I use one of the little Casios. I started to get interested in synths in Ultravox; I wanted Billy (Currie) to get one and actually paid for it with my record company advance. That was an old ARP Odyssey, which I think he's still got, and I've got hold of another one as well, it's a beautiful instrument, there are certain sounds on it that you can't get out of anything else; I can really get my rocks off soloing with it because it's so meaty. It's not too easy to use and it's a bit clumsy to repatch, but for one or two sounds on stage it's wonderfully powerful. The other keyboard on Metamatic was an Elka Rhapsody string machine, which has quite a lot of guts if you amp it up and treat it like a guitar; it's great through a Marshall guitar amp.

"There were just four instruments on Metamatic, the two keyboards, an ARP sequencer and a Roland CR78 although it's quite weak-sounding by itself and we had to use some tricks to improve it. We used two tracks for the bass drum and on one of them we concentrated on getting the mid and bass right and on gating it using Scamp gates, which let the sound through and close again with a sort of click to give quite a tight sound with all the frequencies in it but with only a short duration. We used that on all the drums, and because the CR78 hasn't got separate outputs we separated the drums on the desk by isolating each sound and gating it carefully so we could mix accurately. We could have a massively loud bass drum and just fade the hi-hats in and out as we wanted them; you couldn't re-sync the drums so you had to start with them and guess what was going to happen in the mix, and add percussion from the white noise or ring modulator of the ARP afterwards. I wasn't really interested in polysynths then because I didn't want to use any chords if I could avoid it. In fact there are only two or three examples of chords on the album, on the end of 'Underpass' and 'Touch and Go' for instance.

Searching for A Sound

"I was looking for a very hard, unemotional and 'designed' sound for Metamatic, something like Bauhaus music (not the band, the architecture!) because I was very interested in a stripped-down feel which had to do with the way I was feeling at the time. I felt detached from everything that was going on because what I was doing wasn't particularly fashionable at the time, but I thought 'to hell with it!' That was exactly what I wanted to do and I was determined to pursue it right to the end, I was searching for a sound without feeling.

"I thought the commercial success of 'Underpass' was quite funny at first. I was very pleased about it because it's very pleasant when people respond to an idea as extreme as that, but a month after the album was finished I'd become interested in something else and wanted to go in a different direction. Singles were coming out and I had to do things for them like Top of the Pops, and by that time I felt a bit dislocated from Metamatic. I tend to do that a lot — when I'm doing something I'm totally committed to it, but something else quickly becomes apparent and I become terrifically excited by it and drop everything else!"

Working In The Garden

"Over the next 18 months my work was financed by sales of Metamatic and things became quite easy — I could do more or less as I wanted, there was no pressure and I just pursued the idea of 'The Garden'. Meanwhile I released some tracks that had been recorded for 'Metamatic' as double-pack singles, because they wouldn't fit onto the album. I pre-recorded lots and lots of songs for The Garden too, then just sifted through and finished off the ones I liked best. If you start songs off on tape you can get some perspective on them before deciding on their final form because you can listen to them on speakers and get a bit of distance. In fact I felt some of them were incompatible with the mood of The Garden so I just left them. On the other hand, Systems of Romance had been written at the time of the album of that name and had been kept back for three or four years; I've got a whole fund of tapes and it's useful to go back to an old idea and work on it in a new light.

"While I was recording The Garden I got very interested in the idea of England and being English..."

"I put together the existing studio gear to record The Garden and decided that this equipment should decide the sound of the album in the same way that the few synths decided the sound of the first album. Also I was working with Duncan (Bridgeman) who was playing Prophet and bass, and I'd just got the first Linn drum machine in England. We had Robin Simon on guitar and Jo Dworniak on bass, with Philip Roberts on drums, and it felt much more like a band than before. We played through songs, rehearsed them like a band which I enjoyed, and because we were working out in the country it was all very happy and relaxed. We'd work all night and go out into the fields in the morning and set up microphones there!

"While I was doing The Garden I got very interested in the idea of England and being English, and in the concepts of decay and re-birth represented by the ruined church. These aren't meant to be morbid ideas any more than Metamatic was intended to be morbid, it was intended to be detached and cool. After that there was a flood of ugly, morbid music which I disliked intensely, I didn't want to be a part of it. At the start of the unemployment problem I wanted to avoid doing anything despondent, although some of the statements were fairly hard and I wasn't going to do simple happy love songs because I'm not that sort of person. The Garden was too big a change in a way, a lot of people wanted me to refine the Metamatic style and perhaps turn it into what the Human League became with all the advantages of better sequencing and Linn Drums; but people still write to me now and say they've just heard it and enjoyed it, so it isn't outdated yet."

A Flavour Of England?

"I gave The Garden an English flavour, but like most people I had started off writing songs using the vocabulary of Soul music, only I suppressed it for years! But eventually I thought that if everybody else was using this vocabulary which wasn't even English, why shouldn't I? It was part of my life, part of what I'd been listening to since I was a kid, so on the new album I've decided to go for it. It was a return to a much more simple-hearted approach to making music, but it's also to do with crafting songs carefully and not overstating them. Because it's 1983 and not 1963 there'll be the same level of technology and production, but if you listen to songs like 'All Those Years Ago' you can hear the influence of Lennon and McCartney and all those people.

"The album's called The Golden Section, which in painting is the proportion by which everything works; there isn't a song of that title, it's just a gentle pun because I wanted to keep a sense of proportion all the way through the album! It's been produced by Zeus B. Held, who played some keyboards, and some sequencer on 'Endlessly'.

"I've used the Juno 60 a lot, it's quite cheap but very good quality. Also there's the ARP, a Simmons kit, an Emulator for some cellos and the AMS delay, which you can use to replace bass drums or snares by triggering a short sample on it from tape.

"I'm also working on an album of longer instrumental pieces which began from some of the slow pieces on The Garden. Each one uses very long patterns rather than recognisable rhythms, it's a sort of systems music similar to some of Philip Glass' stuff. I've no idea when I'll be able to finish it though."

Studio Gear

"The desk in The Garden is an Amek, which I was really pleased to buy because it's British. We make the best desks but in some ways we don't make the best multitrack machines, so I bought an MCI, although nowadays I'd probably get an Otari because it's a bit cheaper and it would match the colour of the studio! The desk can be doubled up from 30 to 60 inputs because you can use all the monitor channels as inputs. You can gang any of the faders together by assigning them to a group, which is useful for doing a dub mix. The desk is automation ready and Amek are supposed to be producing a system, but I might buy the Melquist system before that. Not many people seem interested in automation but I like it because it gives you more detail, and finer detail. You can get whole shifts in sound at once, which I like doing, and the only way to do that otherwise is to physically cut the tape. I don't like doing that too often because you don't always know how you want the song to turn out until it's too late.

"The effects are fairly conventional, in fact there aren't a lot of them. Apart from the AMS delay there's a selection of gates and compressors, an Auto-Panner called PANSCAN, an MXR Flanger/Doubler, a Roland Digital Delay, twin dbx and of course the Lexicon Digital Reverb. The vocals are treated quite heavily again now, with telephone effects and the use of different space echoes at different points of the song. There's some harmoniser on 'A Kind of Wave' and some backwards reverb using reversed tape, which is a pretty standard effect. I'm working more on the vocals now; recently I've started singing in close harmony with myself so that it sounds like one voice, but thickened. There's quite a lot of that on the new album if you listen out for it!"