John Foxx

Among the countless bands who rode the wave of English new wave, John Foxx's Ultravox! were without doubt one of the most original and talented: led by a singer and frontman of great charisma and culture, forever in love with futurism, and boasting an outstanding musician in keyboardist/violinist Billy Currie, they released three records that were extraordinary in both inspiration and innovation, before their leader decided, in 1979, to leave the band to pursue a solo career.

Stripped of the trappings that made (and would continue to make, even in the more "pop" guise of the post-Foxx era led by Scotsman Midge Ure) the Ultravox sound so unique, rich and beautiful, both in its more "baroque" and its more rock-oriented incarnations, Foxx (real name Dennis Leigh) shuts himself away in a kind of deliberate isolation, with only his synthesizers for musical "company", pushing to its extreme conclusions the evolution his band had already been undergoing, moving out of the ashes of punk and new wave towards a music built on a strong electronic, "synthetic" foundation. Foxx now embraces synth-pop without reservation - at the time not yet the dominant trend of the decade it would go on to become, in its most crassly commercial mutations, but rather an "intellectual" fashion to which artists coming from both punk, like Gary Numan (as well as Foxx himself), and the avant-garde, like Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark or Human League, were converting, with varying degrees of success.

Foxx isn't chasing easy success, and that's not why he turns to synth-pop: his goal, if anything, is to stage chilling psychodramas in which the voice is left alone to wander a labyrinth with walls of metal, wrapped in half-light. A "natural" son of Kraftwerk and Brian Eno, Foxx stages that same "land of technology" that fed the nightmares and thoughts of new wave and industrial music, on which the nascent cyberpunk culture was also beginning to feed. But while the themes are often shared, the detached, aristocratic approach of the former Ultravox leader makes this an almost unique case right from the start. This is no longer a record that stages the "fear" of technology and its attendant attempted "exorcism", as per the new wave manual - it's more the notebook of an observer wandering through the ultra-modern scenery of the metropolis, content merely to watch, listen and capture its spirit.

Kraftwerk's pioneering, towering body of work, which theorized and demonstrated the potential of electronic instruments applied to "pop" - and which also managed to pull off the impossible feat of giving "warmth" to a music that is by its very nature "cold" and anti-emotional, namely electronic music - is a treasure trove that Foxx draws on to build the backdrops and sets against which he stages his desolate songs, as cold and robotic as his music yet quivering with life and expressiveness. It's the "Metal Beat" that marks out the rhythms and tempos of the narrative, as well as of the life of the metropolis - a life in which, behind a surface where everything appears geometrically perfect, linear, organized and precise to the millimetre, disintegration and disorientation lie hidden. "Metal Beat" (also the name of Foxx's own label) is the robotic, mechanical track par excellence, the manifesto of Foxx's paranoid modernism, in which the void is filled only by the impersonal voice, refracted by echo, and by scattered metallic clangs.

"A New Kind of Man" is the figure who wanders through this scenario, immersed in the rhythms and spaces of modernity and technology, an integral part of a rigorously controlled, emotionless mechanism: a cinematic tale, dripping with disjointed, visionary imagery, it is in many ways the most representative track on the record, a genuine anthem to alienation and depersonalization.

But the record's masterpieces don't end there: the homogeneity of the arrangements is balanced by memorable melodies that slip in through the corners and edges of the labyrinth. Above all there's the extraordinary "No-One Driving", another parade of moving images, of indistinct figures slipping away into greyness and anonymity, but above all a desperate melody of immediate impact, of superb beauty, of enormous emotional weight. The amount of detail packed into each of these tracks is endless: every piece is an extremely dense mix, built with meticulous care. Everything is steeped in an icy, composed underlying neurosis that only occasionally flares into real tension, like a shiver running down the spine for a moment, within an only apparent calm: Brian Eno lurks around the corner in the neutral, impassive delivery of "Plaza", a kind of "architectural" study, symbol of Foxx's modernism and intellectual approach.

But besides providing the foundation, the synths also act as a spectral counter-melody, verging on the "gothic", both here and, above all, in the pulsing stasis of "He's A Liquid". Another unforgettable melody is that of "Blurred Girl", a disconsolate, romantic poem about love, loneliness and distance, steeped in that decadent, "Mitteleuropean" flavour that passed from Bowie down to the new generation of the most refined synth-wave artists (besides Foxx and Ultravox, how could one forget the great Japan, led by David Sylvian).

The absolute masterpiece of the record is probably "Underpass", which is also its darkest, most anguished track. A song that brings to mind the record's stunning cover image: with synths painting neurotic arabesques and gusts with an "ambient" flavour, bringing glimmers of light that seem to be reflected off cold metal plating, off the chrome surfaces that make up the environment Foxx moves through. And his hand reaches out to touch that light - a light, however, that is only a reflection.

To close, Foxx places the two most experimental episodes: the disorienting "Tidal Wave", launched at the pace of obsessive exotic rhythms, and above all the lengthy "Touch And Go", in which the synthetic rhythms grow more breathless, edging close to the implacable metronomic pulse of industrial music; but the ideas that pile up on top of each other are countless, making this track the most experimental, yet perhaps also the most catchy. The mix indeed also features light ambient touches, sparkling "spatial" openings and almost childlike pop hooks. The voice itself becomes part of the "synthesized" mix, the melody frozen and robotic in pure Kraftwerk style. And the instrumental coda, fading out slowly and gradually, is the perfect close to a journey such as the one undertaken by this record.

A manifesto record for a style and a genre that would become the unmistakable signature, for better or worse, of an entire decade, "Metamatic" also carries the not-insignificant symbolic weight of having inaugurated that very decade. John Foxx was not just heir to and continuer of the invaluable lessons of Kraftwerk, Eno and Bowie. John Foxx was, above all, a supremely gifted genius, an artist of "superior" calibre, capable of making his art unique, of transfiguring - according to his own deeply personal vision and songwriting - a style that for almost all the other pioneers and standard-bearers of synth-pop would, over the years, become mere routine. For the others, not for him.

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29/10/2006