JOHN FOXX’S SEMINAL DEBUT SOLO ALBUM METAMATIC, SOUNDS AS SCARILY RELEVANT TODAY AS IT DID BACK IN 1980. CLASSIC POP SITS DOWN WITH ITS CREATOR TO TALK ABOUT HIS MASTERPIECE, WHALE SONG AND, MOST OF ALL, THE MAGIC OF PURE SYNTH SIMPLICITY…

ANDY JONES

JOHN FOXX

In 1980, following his departure from Ultravox, John Foxx released one of the first synth masterpieces, Metamatic, which is being reissued as a 3CD set

“Anyway, sorry, I digress – I usually do,” John Foxx says at several points during our interview, but it’s always a fascinating trip down whichever rabbit hole this particular fox decides to travel. We end up talking about whales in oceans and their connection to us singing in caves.

But Foxx is here to talk about Metamatic, a recording that some might argue was the first solo synth-pop album ever made. It was certainly Foxx’s first solo offering, released at the dawn of 1980 after he had left the first incarnation of Ultravox, a band he’d created some four years and three albums earlier.

Let’s not forget, 1980 was a year in which there was an ‘everything goes’ attitude in our pop world… a world where The Nolans sat alongside David Bowie, The Boomtown Rats nestled neatly next to Prince, where even the theme tune to Blue Peter could enter the chart. Yet the fact that Underpass, the first single from Metamatic, became a hit, too, still seems extraordinary, at least on the face of it. Looking back more closely at that time, perhaps it does make sense – Underpass was so cold and dystopian that only a 1980’s Cold War concrete backdrop could have been its home. And cycling around, as history inevitably does, Underpass and Metamatic sound as extraordinary and prescient today as they did back then.

A switch in names & careers

After three more solo albums John became disillusioned with music and took a long break, reverting back to his real name Dennis Leigh to become a successful graphic artist (his work also appeared on many book covers by writers including Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson and Anthony Burgess).

“I stopped because I was completely out of fashion with the scene at the time,” he says. “It was all sort of mid-80s, imitation white soul – perfect pop and all that kind of crap. Those Armani suits with the big shoulders – it wasn’t me. It’s interesting, suits are an indicator – all of that music was a bit broad and wide, too. It all looked boring and it sounded boring so I thought ‘sod that, I’m off’.” “It was nice to make another career doing something else I’d wanted to do.