JOHN FOXX & THE MATHS REDISCOVER THE POWER OF THE ELECTRIC GUITAR AND “DARK, WRITHING GLAMOUR.”
JOHN FOXX made his vinyl debut in 1975 with Tiger Lily’s glam cover of Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’. One year ago, at home in London, the veteran electronic pathfinder sat down and played through the music he’d recorded since. “I don’t often do that,” he says, “and I was really dissatisfied. A lot I thought I’d touched on, the sound and emotional qualities and the violence, I hadn’t done it. That made me determined to make this record, to fill these aspirational gaps.”
Assisted by his “peak people” The Maths – synthesizerist/producer Benge, violinist/ keyboardist Hannah Peel and guitarist Robin Simon – work began in April at Benge’s Cornish analogue refuge MemeTune. Simon first played with Foxx on Ultravox’s 1978 album Systems Of Romance and is, it seems, central to the vision.
“It’s more guitar-heavy,” says Foxx, who notes a pre-album revisiting of the Velvets, Neu! and his own more six-string oriented work. “I’m interested in guitars again. It’s a fabulous instrument and I always liked them, in fact I only ever took them out years ago as a reaction to the overkill of punk, to see what would happen. Now, it’s a challenge to do things that aren’t clichéd, and if anyone can do that it’s Robin. I’ve never heard a more cliché-free guitarist. Give him a song and he gives you three back, straight away.
“It’s about recovering some of that wildness and physicality that the guitar can do like nothing else,” he continues. “It’s got to be really ferocious, proper rock, with all the best sides of punk and the Velvets, with feedback, expressive playing, on the edge of out-of-control. I started off as a painter and I got to value gestural stuff. With that, you get something unexpected… you’ve got to ambush yourself, take yourself by surprise.”
They’re taking an organic, intuitive, primitivist approach, he adds, using numerous single-take vocals and live synth performances, while Benge plays real drums over programmed patterns. Theme-wise, Foxx talks of the ambivalence and animal power of beauty, and what he calls the “dark writhing glamour” of the urban style milieu.
Individually, The Dance concerns social interactions and how they’re mirrored in higher power relations, My Ghost reflects on personal mortality and extinction, and Strange Beauty wonders about how things that mesmerise us can also be dangerous, in Ballardian fashion.
“Some of it’s about losing people, and time,” he says. “I’m older now. But you’re still alive, you still have that excitement, energy and aggression. You want that to come out.”
With Foxx and Benge reconvening in late summer, and 20 pieces to be refined into 10 songs, the singer also has longer-term plans. He’s working on recordings by Harold Budd, a new solo piano album and the all-synth Musique Electron project.
“[Analogue synthesizers] always call to me,” he says. “I switch on a Roland CR78 and off I go. It’s the biggest stimulus you can get, being in Benge’s cave. Get the big Moog going and we get a song straight away.”
“You’ve got to ambush yourself, take yourself by surprise.” JOHN FOXX