ABOVE: Stills from ‘The Projectionst’ by ‘Alan Marker’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

In Melbourne a few months back, I had occasion to see John Foxx’s live soundtrack performance and presentation of Tiny Colour Movies, a selection of found-film fragments. Regular readers will recall that I interviewed Foxx in 2006, when the TCM album had just been released. At the time John was maintaining the line that the album was the soundtrack to a found-film collection owned by one Arnold Weizcs-Bryant, who, we were told, collects home movies and ‘repurposed movie fragments’, indeed any type of film produced outside of commercial considerations and not meant for public consumption. John, so the story goes, attended a private screening of Arnold’s collection and was compelled to create a soundtrack to accompany these resonant images, what he calls ‘tiny colour movies’.

According to the TCM liner notes:

Arnold stipulates that the movies he collects must be short — none is more than seven or eight minutes long, and some have a duration of only a few seconds. He insists that these represent a new kind of art. One which is only now becoming possible to recognise. Photography has recently become acknowledged as a new technological art form and commercial cinema is currently undergoing this kind of reassessment … these ideas cross over with Stanley Brakhage. Indeed Arnold was very excited when he discovered Brakhage’s work a few years ago, since he feels it confirms many of his long held views about the aesthetic beauty and cultural significance of film fragments.

John Foxx, TCM liner notes (2006).

ABOVE: ‘Stray Sinatra Neurone’ by ‘Max Forbert’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

One of the filmmakers in Arnold’s collection is a certain Max Forbert, who makes what John terms ‘assemblage movies’. Forbert, supposedly a janitor in Hollywood, collected film scraps saved from the cutting-room floors he was sweeping for a living and later compiled them into his own sampled productions, a fragment of which was found by Arnold after Forbert’s death:

This is a section of a Forbert film that he identifies as using cutting room outtakes from a Sinatra movie, among others which remain unidentified. Shots are: Back view of a man in a suit looking through the window of a set interior (too tall for Sinatra — possibly an extra brought in to test-light a scene). Some brief outdoor shots of cars driving through a glittering downtown New York. Close-up of a woman applying deep red lipstick — again this appears to be a test shot of make-up and lighting. Location shots of Paris and Rome. Intricately cut together, these damaged fragments become an almost tactile essay on the sensual textures and enigmatic images that film can make available.

Foxx, TCM liner notes.

In the liner notes, John talks of the beauty of the imperfections in the films, the scratches and grain, the bleaching from wear and age, ‘elements which only add to the mystery, the emotional and intellectual resonance, and the sensual appreciation, of film’. Tiny Colour Movies, then, is not only an interesting document but also one that has overtly Ballardian overtones. For starters, there’s Ballard’s own interest in the subversive potential of home movies. But also, as I tried to tease out in the interview, The Atrocity Exhibition features many examples similar to what John identifies as a ‘sample film aesthetic’ in the Weizcs-Bryant collection, including therapeutic DIY film groups designed to aid the recovery of schizhophrenic patients:

Cine-films as group therapy. Patients were encouraged to form a film production unit, and were given full freedom as to choice of subject matter, cast and technique. In all cases explicitly pornographic films were made. Two films in particular were examined: (1) A montage sequence using portions of the faces of (a) Madame Ky, (b) Jeanne Moreau, (c) Jacqueline Kennedy (Johnson oath-taking). The use of a concealed stroboscopic device produced a major optical flutter in the audience, culminating in psychomotor disturbances and aggressive attacks directed against the still photographs of the subjects hung from the walls of the theatre. (2) A film of automobile accidents devised as a cinematic version of Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed. By chance it was found that slow-motion sequences of this film had a marked sedative effect, reducing blood pressure, respiration and pulse rates. Hypnagogic images were produced freely by patients. The film was also found to have a marked erotic content.

J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

Throughout Atrocity, T-, the book’s troubled protagonist, stitches and sutures together fragments from the media landscape — TV broadcasts, snatches of film, billboard representations of movie stars, the Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination (even the ‘time music of the quasars’, derived from a strange contraption on his roof, a sculpture consisting of ‘antennae of metal aerials’) — into a form that will make sense to his disordered psyche. This is most clearly expressed in Ballard’s dictum that politics today has become a branch of advertising that sells personalities rather than policies, and that as a result politicians involve us in their fantasies without our consent — fantasies of power, ego, domination, celebrity, lust, all disguised as governance but which are really designed to place us in peripheral roles as impotent bystanders in the major decisions affecting our lives. In Atrocity, then, Ballard’s schizophrenic patients involve politicians in their fantasies, notably the hapless figure of Ronald Reagan:

The conceptual role of Reagan. Fragments of Reagan’s cinetized postures were used in the construction of model psychodramas in which the Reagan-figure played the role of husband, doctor, insurance salesman, marriage counsellor, etc. The failure of these roles to express any meaning reveals the non-functional character of Reagan. Reagan’s success therefore indicates society’s periodic need to re-conceptualize its political leaders. Reagan thus appears as a series of posture concepts, basic equations which re-formulate the roles of aggression and anality… In assembly kit tests Reagan’s face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection. Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.

ABOVE: T- devising the ‘optimum sex death of Ronald Reagan’ in Jonathan Weiss’s film of The Atrocity Exhibition.

Essentially, T- reclaims the inner space he feels has been invaded by media and advertising — the colonisation of the subconscious and the stealing of his memories — repopulating it with a collaged, open-ended landscape of images drawn from the free circulation of signs and signals of what we can now view, with hindsight, as Ballard’s own proto version of hyperreality.

As Ballard says,

The media landscape of the present day is a map in search of a territory. A huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content. How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant? What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash? Faced with these charged events, prepackaged emotions already in place, we can only stitch together a set of emergency scenarios, just as our sleeping minds extemporize a narrative from the unrelated memories that veer through the cortical night. In the waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality, images of a blood-spattered widow, the chromium trim of a limousine windshield, the stylized glamour of a motorcade, fuse together to provide a secondary narrative with very different meanings.

J.G. Ballard, annotations (1994) to The Atrocity Exhibition.

This strategy of treating all media and perceptual inputs as equal, with no distinction between the inner world of fantasy and the outer world of reality, seems a clear precursor to the kind of culture-jamming hacktivism that would reach a peak in the 90s with the sound artists Negativland and their followers:

Negativland occupies itself with recontextualizing captured fragments to create something entirely new — a psychological impact based on a new juxtaposition of diverse elements, ripped from their usual context, chewed up, and spit out as a new form of hearing the world around us.

As audio artists, we pursue a uniquely contemporary and wholly appropriate creative process which inevitably emerges out of our electronic age of media saturation and the reproducing technologies available to all consumers.

Negativland, Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 (1995).

ABOVE: JGB in London Orbital.

More explicitly, Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, in the film version of London Orbital, acknowledge a clear debt to Ballard, whose influence over the film looms large, both in the interview with him in the middle section and in the reading by Sinclair of JGB’s ‘What I Believe’ that frames it. Sinclair and Petit see the Bluewater shopping centre, ‘Ground Zero’ for the film’s aesthetic, as an architecture mediated by technology, specifically the omniscient CCTV cameras which in their endless, plastic and formless state create what the filmmakers call ‘a new nostalgia, a new boredom, a new kind of time’. If everything is filmable then, Petit and Sinclair’s method of resistance is to become like the surveillance camera, to always be open and to always be filming but to locate the degradations in the tape, the fraying at the edges, recovering and recycling elements of old technologies, what Esther Leslie calls an ‘aesthetic of refuse’, drawing on the double meaning of ‘refuse’: as both rubbish, in that if everything is filmable then everything is junk, valueless; and as resistance, ie refusing to be dissolved into the ‘electronic slums’, to use Petit’s term. Thus Sinclair inserts his home movies into the end of the film, recovering a memory that is in danger of being overwritten yet still framed in the logic of the image, both inside and outside at once — an aesthetic that instantly recalls Atrocity and many other Ballard stories.

Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies project seems a direct descendant of this lineage, especially given this statement of John’s from our interview:

Movies will be played with, just as sound was sampled, for fun and surrealism. Simply because it can be done. I remember positing this five years ago in a talk at the London College of Music and Media. Around that time, I made a movie called A Man Made of Shadows from several other movies. This made a new movie from existing films by collaging, repurposing, hommaging, stealing, sampling, appropriating. Whatever you like to call it. ‘Repurposing’ is my current fave term, along with ‘theft’. Watch out Hollywood. Movies had better get used to this because it will happen. Inevitable.
…
We’ll also need to develop new aesthetics of film, to regard elements formerly regarded as faults as intrinsic qualities inherent in film itself. The beauty of scratches, bleached out film ends, emulsion faults, grain, frameslip, etc. Just as we now value surface scratches in audio sampling.

ABOVE: Stills from ‘Lost New York’ by ‘George Wilkes’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

So, freighted with all of this intertextual baggage, I was therefore very excited to learn that John was bringing the Arnold collection to Melbourne; I knew he’d premiered it overseas with a live soundtrack, but that’s about all I knew. I hadn’t really done much research on John since we last communicated, but I still harboured the suspicion that, as I detailed in the afterword to the interview, Arnold and the filmmakers were fictitious personas and that the films were in fact John’s own inventions. I sensed various clues that gave the game away including the name of one of the filmmakers, ‘Alan Marker’. This seemed far too close to the aura of Chris Marker (but with an amusingly British first name), especially given John’s stated admiration for La Jetée, which of course is also about memory being overwritten and recovered.

I felt there were more clues, not least the fact that the synopses of the various filmmakers and their motivations in the liner notes to the album resembled John’s own very individualistic short stories, especially one he wrote a while back called ‘The Quiet Man’ (for even with the best of intentions the best of artists can find it hard to disguise their ‘voice’ when inhabiting alter egos):

The old newscasts affected him greatly, the Kennedy Assassination, the images of Christine Keeler, early Beatles footage, all in a slightly worn Black and White. He edited together a film containing all these images and more, and played it constantly. He found it profoundly moving, the images gaining even more emotive power with each viewing. All these characters of his past moving in old daylight, waving and smiling and moving on.

One of his favourite films was The Swimmer starring Burt Lancaster, and he often played this without the soundtrack, drowning in the crude beauty of its early technicolour.

At home, too, he kept a small 8mm projector for playing home movies that he came across in his exploration of the city’s deserted apartments. He was fascinated by all the tiny intimate details of these films, the jerky figures waving from seaside and garden at weddings and birthdays and baptisms, records of whole families and their pets growing and changing through the years.

John Foxx, ‘The Quiet Man’, 1978.

In fact, my musings sparked off quite a bit of debate in various forums about the nature of Arnold, with many people, including myself, initially believing the entire story of Mr Weizcs-Bryant and his amazing collection of found film.

But John remained tight-lipped… or so I thought. More on that later.

ABOVE: ‘Skyscraper’ by ‘Jerry Golden’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

From the first film of the performance, I was drawn into the degraded beauty of the Super 8 footage and the blown-out and colour-saturated celluloid on display. And yes, this was clearly found footage, the genuine article. It appeared I was wrong — you can’t fake period details, hairstyles and cars, on John’s limited budget. But it had been assembled artfully, like the looped film of traffic on LA freeways drawing out the beauty of this perpetual motion sculpture. Or time-lapsed shadows and sunlight passing across buildings, slowed down or reversed, the motion of the elements becoming imperceptible, the buildings and backgrounds the same but not quite as shadows gently ripple across them as if the fabric of time and molecular space was slowly re-weaving itself. When a building became covered completely in shadow, the film was edited so that another building emerged from the black and into daylight, a slow modernist dance of compacted grace and proportion. It seemed a trick of the mind designed to evoke the passing of civilisation, like the classic Ballardian ideal that treats reality as just a stage set that can be pulled away at any moment.

At this point, I thought I might need to re-assess: if these films were genuine, maybe Arnold was, too.

There was much to enjoy throughout the program. Extraterrestrial, sun-soaked clouds magnified to massive proportions so that they seemed composed of nothing but pure colour and grain. Flickering film projected onto women’s faces, turning them into shapeshifting cats and dogs with whiskers and elongated ears. A naked woman underwater, swimming among the wrecks of submerged automobiles as the sunlight from above the surface turns her and everything it touches into a blue dream.

ABOVE: Stills from ‘Underwater Automobiles’ by ‘Robert Rouncefield’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

But then I began to imagine that John had made a very clever play: he’d inserted what I was sure were his own films into the found footage. The giveaway for me was twofold. First, the film ‘Smokescreen’ by ‘Unknown’ featuring a man walking into a series of smoke-filled rooms — we never see his face as it is either obscured by smoke, or he is filmed from the side or behind. In the liner notes, Arnold says this:

I saw these marvellously lit sequences which seemed to have a very definite story, yet there is no explanation or development or resolution. We can have no idea what the filmmaker had in mind. Because of this lack of resolution, they seem strangely suspended. You begin to make connections, you feel compelled to write a story. But there is none. There can be none. The effect is tantalising, like a damaged and incomplete fragment of memory.

But, I’m sure, both the film and this explanation is very obviously the voice of Foxx; this film, to me, is another iteration of Foxx’s ‘quiet man’ persona, the ghost moving through the streets of the city, his identity never quite coalescing, always escaping the gaze. As John has said, ‘The point of view I’ve always worked from is that of a ghost in the city — someone who is a sort of drifting, detached onlooker — but still vulnerable and trying against the odds to maintain a sort of dignity in the face of all the static.’

ABOVE: ‘Smokescreen’ by ‘Unknown’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

There appeared to be more confirmation in the film ‘A Peripheral Character’ by ‘Evan Parker’, a montage of shots supposedly featuring a mysterious extra from Hollywood films:

He has appeared in dozens of major Hollywood movies and American television series, yet he is completely unknown to the public. He appears as a background character, a passer-by, often wearing a grey suit, or a raincoat. His calm unhurried walk, his spectacles, his lapel flower and his habit of turning his head briefly (seemingly so that his face will be momentarily on the film), are what eventually make him distinctive. The film was researched and assembled by the man who first discovered his existence, Evan Parker. Parker is an academic whose field is the evolution of Hollywood. In the course of his studies, Parker watched hundreds of films and had begun to speculate about making a study of the extras, those figures passing by in the background. That is when he began to notice one who appeared to be present in several movies. Intrigued, Parker began a search and was surprised to discover the presence of this figure in dozens of major and minor Hollywood movies. This is a slow-motion montage of all the clips of his appearances so far discovered. His identity remains unknown.

TCM liner notes.

Note the reference to the GREY suit!

‘A Peripheral Character’ is an intriguing concept and very well put together, but at times you could tell John had judiciously selected clips of not the same mysterious person, but of similar looking actors from dozens of films, always with their face half turned away, or shot from behind, or bending over — you might just be convinced if you weren’t paying close enough attention that you were viewing just the one ghost in the city.

By the program’s end, I felt as if I’d finally worked it out for sure: that ‘Arnold Weizcs-Bryant’ was merely another psuedonym for Dennis Leigh (Foxx’s real name), and that it was indeed John Foxx himself who is the passionate collector of found footage, the underground filmmaker inspired by what he has stumbled across to create his own ‘sample films’, his own ‘tiny colour movies’…

And the live music? Well, it was classic Foxx, yes, lovely electronic washes drifting as timelessly as the shadows and sunlight of the films. I do like John’s work, but even so I have to say I was disappointed that there didn’t seem to be much improvisation, given that this was ostensibly a live performance of the soundtrack. Tracks stopped and started exactly when the films did, and it all seemed a bit too perfectly sequenced, too faithful to the CD. I would have liked more of a continuous flow, more segues to sustain the atmosphere, more improv, more of the scratches, collages and squelches that John so admires in the films, for as good as the music is, it just seems far too clean, too digital in the live context to suit the conceptual conceit of the films themselves. As a standalone CD it’s great; as an audiovisual package, I’m not so sure.

And then it was question time, and John appeared from behind his bank of keyboards, dressed head to toe in black like a handsomer version of Lux Interior. Before the show I’d thought of sticking my hand up and asking him if Arnold really did exist, but as I was watching the films I decided it just didn’t matter at all to me anymore. Whatever the answer, either way, John’s assemblage of the results had become compelling — if John wanted to keep up the pretense, if indeed that’s what it was, I was happy to play along. Besides I’d already voiced my suspicions two years ago and I didn’t want to seem like a curmudgeon or a stalker by hounding him forever more about it. Also, I was curious to see if anyone else in the audience would broach the subject. Perhaps no-one even cares…

ABOVE: Stills from ‘A Peripheral Character’ by ‘Evan Parker’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

Questions were asked about Ultravox, about the soundtrack and always John’s answers were mystical, evasive, talking of dreams and flight. Then someone asked him about the Hollywood extra. ‘Did you ever ask Arnold if he had any info on the extra, or whether he’d tried to trace his identity?’ John fidgeted, looked a little uncomfortable. ‘Er… no’ he replied. The mere mention of Arnold appeared to be making him nervous.

Then someone else stuck up a hand. ‘John, I read the piece on Ballardian where you talk about the influence of J.G. Ballard on your work.’ Ah, he’d read my interview, meaning he’d know of the afterword where I first expressed my doubts! We were getting warm, no doubt about it, but would this guy pop the burning question? But ‘Which of his novels is your favourite?’ was the interrogation and the moment had passed again.

A few more questions and then someone asked John if he wanted a beer. He quickly said he’d love one, but then just as quickly said his goodbyes and hustled off the stage, always the enigma, always elusive, never to be seen again. The end.

And I couldn’t help but think of part 2 of our interview, for I was greatly surprised to see him in Melbourne in the first place.

Because when I asked him if he would ever tour Australia, this is what he said: ‘I’d like to. But it will most likely be as drifting molecules about twenty years from now…’

POSTSCRIPT: After the screening, my dormant interest in John Foxx was reignited and I went Googling for more information. As I mentioned, all I really knew of the background to this project was what had emerged in our interview. As far as I knew, for others, as it was for me, the mystery was still sustainable. Little did I know that John had recently come clean! In this post on John’s forum, for example, it’s claimed that ‘The footage that JF and Mike Barker use in TCM is bought at car boot sales, jumble sales and at market stalls. Sometimes people put their home movie collections up for grabs on ebay… this is then digitised and re-edited to produce TCM.’

And this is confirmed in an interview John did just before the Melbourne screening:

I used to buy reels of film (from Brick Lane and Portobello Road markets) and didn’t know what they were and view them to see if there was anything interesting on them. Eventually I amassed all this stuff and didn’t quite know what to do with it. Then I saw this collector’s reel of films one night and thought ‘Yeah — that’s exactly right! It is finite. It does have a place in history’. And some of it is unique and some of the stories behind the pieces are very interesting too. It’s like reading an obituary; which is something I like — it’s not morbid at all. It’s very interesting because you get a summation of someone’s life and their achievements…

So, is it actually John’s collection on display? It would appear that way, yes, judging by this interview. It would appear that Arnold is John, just as John is Dennis. And what of the filmmakers and their backstories? As I wrote in the afterword to the 2006 interview, after mulling over the ‘Frank Watts’ film:

Urban drift; walking through the city; submitting to psychic entry points … surely this is yet another brilliantly evocative John Foxx short story? Yes — the more I think about it, the more I think that’s the case … re-reading the liner notes, the parallels with these ‘filmmakers’, with their obsessions and aesthetics, to Foxx himself now seem all too obvious (let’s not forget that ‘John Foxx’ is a character that Dennis Leigh himself has said he inhabits because ‘John Foxx is smarter than me’).

Arnold’s ‘filmmakers’ are called Robert Rouncefield; Jerry Golden; Earnst Lubin — like ‘John Foxx’, these are humdrum yet fanciful names, mythical yet ordinary, dull names to the point of incandescence. Their bios and summaries exhibit all the traits of the condensed novels in The Atrocity Exhibition.

But there would be one final nail in the coffin…

ABOVE: John Foxx answering audience questions after the Sydney screening of TCM.

Something else I found in my latest research was this video of John’s Q&A after the Sydney performance of TCM. Note that this was filmed the day after the Melbourne gig. Now recall the Melbourne audience member who asked John if he wanted a beer. Finally, watch the Sydney video: as the uploader writes, ‘Note the beer in his hand. Someone from the audience was kind enough to rush off and get him one.’

Someone had obviously been taking notes in Melbourne, had flown up to Sydney, and wasn’t letting John rush off the stage without a drink this time!

Perhaps they thought the beer might loosen his tongue just a little. Indeed, it appears that way for in this Q&A John is far more expansive and revealing than in the session I attended, and even goes so far as to say that some of the TCM movies are outright fiction, ‘complete lies’ as he calls them, created by him under the guise of a fictitious filmmaker and inserted into the program to mess with the audience’s perception:

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Did you cut some of those movies up?

JOHN FOXX: Oh, some of them were invented. And some aren’t. And I want to use these films as a way of telling stories. And being dishonest. Because I think dishonesty’s really interesting. What do you call someone who tries to convince you that something is true when it’s not? You call them a liar, don’t you? So what do you call an author? And that’s the thing that really interests me, is that line between truth and fiction. So some things are true in the movies, and some are complete lies. And I think it’s very interesting to try and work out which is which. Some of them are totally fabricated and some aren’t. But they’re all made up of the real thing.

So what one of the filmmakers practices, in other words cutting Hollywood up into pieces and reassembling it, I’ve been doing as well. And I want to continue doing that, because I think film is raw material now, to be used in any way we want. We’ve all grown up with that stuff. And I even dream it. Because I went to the cinema when I was 7, 6, 5 years old in Lancashire. And Lancashire was so grey, in England, and the cinema was so grey, everything merged together. You know, I was usually covered in soot when I was a kid, and everything was in black and white, the factory chimneys and smoke and all that, and when I looked on the screen it was the same thing. So all my memories of it are mixed up in the movies, old science fiction movies and utter rubbish. None of which I could understand as a kid, so I had to make things up with a kit from my own mind. It became a part of my dream language. And I still dream it. So I think we all mix stuff in strange ways because it’s in our heads, isn’t it? We’ve grown up with it. So why not reassemble it in the way we want to? Because we own it, you know — we don’t have to be dominated by it. It’s ours for God’s sake, not theirs — we own it.

However, I’m glad I went into the screening not knowing about John’s admission. It meant there was still a bit of mystery and wonder about the project, it meant I could ‘script’ the story a little bit as I tried to link and crosslink various ideas and theories — using a ‘kit’ from my own mind.

Does John’s admission matter in the end? No — the project stands on its own merits. I was reminded of how many people still take Empire of the Sun to be Ballard’s autobiography, and how they are often greatly surprised and sometimes angry to discover the book is as ‘fictional’ as the rest of his novels. In this day and age, surely it is not too farfetched to suggest that authenticity is just another mask? I personally love the idea of creating a character and inhabiting it so that the boundaries become blurred, inhabiting the interzones and interstitial zones, ‘the yes or no of the borderzone’ to borrow a phrase from Atrocity, escaping definition and classification.

As does Ballard, for that matter, who has his own passion for the idea of faked newsreels, and the notion of fiction passed off as truth:

The fake war newsreel (and most war newsreels are faked to some extent, usually filmed on manoeuvres) has always intrigued me — my version of Platoon, Full Metal Jacket or All Quiet on the Western Front would be a newsreel compilation so artfully faked as to convince the audience that it was real, while at the same time reminding them that it might be wholly contrived. The great Italian neo-realist, Roberto Rossellini, drew close to this in Open City and Paisa.

J.G. Ballard, annotations to The Atrocity Exhibition, 1994.

For anyone interested in Ballard — especially Atrocity — and experimental film, John Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies performance is highly recommended. I’m not sure any of it is especially ‘cutting edge’ — Foxx’s liner notes, for example, state that the Alan Marker stuff (as commanding as it is, one of my favourites from the set) is ‘surely unique in the history of filmmaking’, yet I saw the exact same technique performed with skulls and ghost imagery last week in Melbourne by Australian artists who’d been practising it for some time. And overall, in terms of experimental and repurposed film, the phenomenal, unparalleled work of the likes of Guy Sherwin, the old master, and Ben Russell and Ben Rivers, the heirs, is certainly more of an assault in both audio and visual terms.

What Tiny Colour Movies undoubtedly is, however, is Foxxian: too cold by half for some, beautiful and sad for others, an industrial spiritualism and an unalloyed sensuality of machines.

Arnold Weizcs-Bryant: R.I.P.

..:: Previously:
+ John Foxx: A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture, part 1
+ John Foxx: A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture, part 2

..:: More information::
+ Metamatic: John Foxx’s official site
+ Tiny Colour Movies official site

John Foxx live at Shrewsbury, 1998. © Extreme Voice.

This is part 2 of my interview with John Foxx, former lead singer of Ultravox before the band’s Midge Ure era, and an on-and-off solo artist for the past 25 years. Foxx’s Ultravox purveyed a damned, dreamy, paranoid — and often playful — weave of electronics and motorik-tinged new-wave beats: seductive, lush and totally unique. Later, his first solo album, Metamatic (1980), birthed the all-synthetic ‘metal beat’ sound, a streamlined, neon-punk electroclash that continues to exert a palpable influence today, with its blend of ‘monochromatic, urban surrealism’ and supercharged Kraftwerkian analogue motor. All of this was heady stuff for one Gary Numan, an unabashed fan of the group, who took Foxx’s blueprint and rebooted it with a mainstream sheen.

I spoke to John on the back of the release of his latest album, Tiny Colour Movies, and the remastering and re-release of the three Foxx-led Ultravox albums: Ultravox! (1977), Ha! Ha! Ha! (1977) and Systems of Romance (1978).

Simon Sellars

Note: Part 1 is here.
————————————————————————————————————————————

John, I have to make a confession: in 1980, when Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’ was a huge hit, I became a fan of the Midge Ure version of the band. I was dimly aware that there was a previous incarnation led by you, but at that time I never bothered exploring it. The music press was so vitriolic to your version, as an impressionable kid reading the NME and Melody Maker in distant Australia, I never questioned it.

Don’t worry — I’ll protect you at the trials. There are several aspects to this. If anyone has the patience — mine’s threadbare. Here goes. First, I always enjoyed moving countercurrent. Much easier to swim that way. You can watch things from a distance. Very early on, we decided to investigate and develop lots of what had then been declared ungood and which we felt were manifesting themselves and were worth recording. These included psychedelia, electronics, cyberpunk, environments and elements suggested by the likes of Ballard and Burroughs, cheap European music and modes, and strange English pop, such as some aspects of the Shadows and Billy Fury which seemed to relate to a sort of undiscovered English retrofuturism. We were interested in a sort of ripped and burnt glamour. I was also taken with a detached, still stance. And some new things: Urban Bipedal RExploration. The City as Memory.

Pretty much everything that made life worth living, really.

We never saw ourselves as being in any way counter to what was happening, and nor did the other bands we knew. It’s true that some of the press of the moment seemed caught up in an enthusiastic, but surprisingly conservative view of what was admissible to the party. Whose party was it, exactly? As to the causes of this, I’m not sure – I suspect they may have felt caught off guard by the whole thing and had to swiftly cobble together some orthodox view to deal with it.

Ultravox have come in for their share of criticism since Island Records launched them with a bang eight months ago and amidst the flashing lights and polyvinyl jackets the band looked like they would bow out with a whimper. However, if their Marquee appearance was anything to go by, Ultravox are finally ‘getting it all together’. They were patchy enough and the bad bits were well on the mediocre side — obligatory loud and throbbing guitar and some empty posturing. But the good bits were quite blinding in their excellence and power. In places Ultravox were almost awe-inspiring”.

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Chas de Whalley, New Musical Express, September 1977.
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John Foxx ‘s controversial polyvinyl jacket, 1977.

Today, with ‘UltraFoxx’ getting namechecked by loads of people (including me), I just can’t comprehend the hate that was directed at your version of the band. Has the benefit of hindsight given you any insight into a cultural and critical climate that must have stung quite a bit?

It was an interesting play of peculiarly English, inverted class snobbery. I’ll attempt to explain something of this. We were entirely a working class band, so we were determined not to act out the pleb role the more middle-class writers seemed to expect. It would be letting the side down. We weren’t interested in pretending to be dumb, because we weren’t. We wanted a much wider frame. I suspect this irritated a few people entranced by their own view of what constituted the correct vision of punk behaviour and mores. A strange farce of inverted English class etiquettes ensued.

Later Vivienne Westwood named her shop ‘Nostalgie De Bou’ — a typically apt French term which means a nostalgia felt by the middle classes for the land, the mud, which they would not, of course, deign to touch themselves, but enjoyed vicariously through observing peasants. It also perfectly encompasses such activities as slumming and going to Harlem, as well as the Georgian predilection for a Sunday outing to watch the lunatics incarcerated in Bedlam. So, as usual, Vivienne was spot on.

Our stance was much less convoluted and more akin to my father’s ambitions as a boxer — to get out of the bloody mud and get out of those bloody towns and live like a human being for as long as possible. Get free enough to be able to redesign ourselves. Have some adventures along the way. Sure we were clumsy at times and we stumbled and got things wrong even according to our own lights, but we knew what those lights were and we certainly weren’t going to take instruction from any wet mockney.

By early 1977 we decided to let the whole thing rush by us while we made a still place to conduct our own experiments. It was all dead by early ’78 anyway — a beautiful bit of upheaval at just the right time. In retrospect, I think that was a good thing, because we became the first new wave band after punk fell off its perch. We got a brief time and space to make Systems of Romance, which contains several blueprints, including New Psychedelia, Electro, New Guitar, — many of these are still present in the gene code. I still see things through a sort of punk lens — one eye only, though. It’s always been valuable.

Although they are one of the most important British art rock bands, Ultravox have always been ignored or sneered at in the UK. But with re-mastered versions of their first three LPs just re-released, featuring extra tracks and sleeve notes … it’s long past time to rescue their legacy as synthetic rock pioneers…

The first three Ultravox albums, recorded when the band were led by John Foxx … have been most scandalously neglected … Systems of Romance produced a template for synthetic rock that Gary Numan, Duran Duran and others would follow. In Chicago and Detroit, the future producers of techno and house also listened attentively. This was rock from the future, all the more compelling at a time — now — when groups reheating twenty-five year old ideas are being sold to us as new”.

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K-punk, Fact Magazine, July 2006.
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Ultravox. L to r: John Foxx, Warren Cann, Billy Currie, Chris Cross, Robin Simon.

Why is the time right to remaster and re-release the first three Ultravox albums?

I think perhaps because they are getting mentioned with increasing frequency on people’s DNA checklists. It’s taken this long to allow a clearer view of just what was laid down there.

Brian Eno produced the first album. Is it safe to say that you took more from this partnership than the rest of the band? [Ultravox drummer] Warren Cann is quoted as saying that working with Eno “was absolutely NOT what we had actually envisaged. Eno was far more of a conceptualist, an ideas man”, and that Eno’s ideas were pretty much discarded in favour of a group production effort. Whereas you’ve said on a few occasions that you’ve been inspired by his work and theory.

Warren Cann, after undergoing Enossification. Altogether, now: “He wants to be a machine…”

I think Billy, Chris and I enjoyed Eno’s involvement a lot. I think Warren did too, and I also valued Warren’s scepticism. When we got to doing ‘My Sex’ it was the three of us working in the studio with Brian.

I was alert to the fact that there were certain forms of music that couldn’t be arrived at in any other way than operating in a recording studio and I wanted to discover what this could mean for us. Eno encouraged that and things took off in a new way, one that became a long stream of work: ‘My Sex’, ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’, ‘Dislocation’, ‘Just for a Moment’, and onward to ‘Lieutenant 030′, ‘Glimmer’ and ‘Mr No’, ‘The Garden’, ‘Smoke’, and today with ‘A Room As Big as a City’ and ‘Never Let Me Go’.

I stole a cathode face from newscasts
And a crumbling fugue of songs
From the reservoir of video souls
In the lakes beneath my tongue
In flesh of ash and silent movies

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– ‘I Want to Be A Machine’, Ultravox, 1977 (written by John Foxx)
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So his involvement was valuable for that. And for many other things, too: I also felt liberated from the usual ‘hands off the controls’ attitude of engineers at that time. We’d grown very tired of ‘can’t do that’. Brian encouraged use of the studio as a means of communal transport. Can do. Just drive the damn thing. Lets see what this does. The fact that he may not have been so technical wasn’t the issue. What mattered was the view of the craft we were operating.

Later, when Billy and I used to drop into Bob Marley sessions run by Lee Perry at Basing St studios, we saw a similar view of the all hands operating the spacecraft/ouija board. The studio becomes an organic extension of communal desire, and you suddenly experience an important event, piloted by Perry. It was something like that we glimpsed through Eno’s presence.

You once said you like to instil an emotional response in your listeners, and I experienced that the other day with Cathedral Oceans III. The feeling is extremely difficult to describe and I’m well aware that it will vary from listener to listener, but I felt dislocated, surreal, nostalgic, melancholy and sad all at once. I’m always amazed when music does this to me, and it always feels mystical and magical to me — a process beyond reason, theory and language. However, I know some theoretically minded musicians who argue that emotion in music is purely a function of music as ‘language’, a language they say is heavily influenced by film and visual mediums — certain chord sequences representing doom and tragedy, for example. They conclude that intrinsically there is no emotion in music. Can you explain a bit more about the role of emotion in your own work — and how you believe it’s generated?

Big subject – but fascinating. Here goes. What you say is accurate. At best, I think music operates mercifully beyond the reach of language and the intellect at first — one of the few forms capable of getting through the remaining gaps in a civilised psyche. It allows us to be Sensual Civilised Primitives — and don’t we just love that.

So, you have to experience the stuff first: sensuality as a vital component of intellect. Only then can you begin to apply intellect to choreograph your reactions, to begin our usual crafty dance out of experience. Enough to begin to categorise and connect, maybe even justify and compress what happened to you and reconcile this with other experienced elements — memory etc — to finally allow you to talk about it.

This first experience is the ‘Pleasure Despite’: it happens despite ideas and neuroses and discomfort and all the other necessary static. That is partly why it can provide such an efficient private transport — or connector. It only becomes anything akin to language afterwards — after the experience.

Language isn’t experience. Very far from it. Yet music is experience. A subjective surrender to something that can efficiently bypass most of our filters. Speaks to us directly. Also — it only exists in time. Music can never be experienced as a whole, except through memory. Therefore it requires a massive amount of a sort of seemingly passive — but actually tremendously active — subjective attention and objective connectivity to maintain its resonances throughout the duration of a piece.

A sort of furious knitting takes place. At one very simple level, the process is vaguely analogous to saying ‘blue room’ to a hundred people. What you do in that instant is create a hundred Blue Rooms in those heads — rooms that have never existed before and will never be the same again. They are manifested through all the neural pathways corresponding to ‘Blue Room,’ filtered through individual experiences and memories to date. If you were to say ‘Blue Room’ again to those people a year later, there would be a further layer of memory on the ‘Blue Room’ palimpsest, and so on, for the rest of their lives.

Music does all this in a much more abstract and subtle way, the neural equivalent of several cities worth of rooms and interior and exterior spaces of every imaginable hue. That’s just a little of how I think it operates- the listening, subjective bit. How it gets generated and transmitted is another story.

JG Ballard photo © Steve Double.

I’ve enjoyed the various short stories of yours that are reproduced all over the web — there’s a lot of Ballard in them, as we’ve discovered. What’s the status of your mooted ‘Quiet Man’ book of short stories? Will it ever be released?

It exists mainly as a means to write songs. Things get manifested there and I move them into music. There’s been some talk of releasing sections that have been read and recorded recently. K-punk did one that I haven’t heard yet, but which seems to have been of interest. Hard to say how it would work as a book. I think it’s probably better as fragments.

I’m doing some Super-8 filming of ‘The Quiet Man’ for a project called ‘Grey Suit Music’. It’s continuing something I began in 1978, and contains some scenes shot then using Eddie Milov from Gloria Mundi.

Do you have a novel or film script in you?

That’s a challenge which I’d love to take on one day. But it would take much more of that time thing, of which I have none at present. Barely time to take a walk.

What on Earth is going on with the track ‘Ray 1/Ray 2′, from your album with Louis, Crash and Burn? Surely this is a Billy Joel parody — a cheeky nod and a wink to ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’? You once said you wanted to bring a ‘more instinctive, human element’ into your work — a sense of play. Is this an example?

Yes. Technofun. It’s Subterranean Homesick Electron Rock of the most shameless kind. Leave Billy Joel out of it though, and insert Dylan Drunk, backed up by the Virtual Velvets. A long list of TechnoLies and SellSpeak. I’m always fascinated by the jargon of certain trades and their delicious absurdity. We fell over several times recording that.

What’s your position on the free trading and downloading of music? Mainstream artists react against downloading, pointing to lost income, while underground musicians say that they get no income from CDs anyway, and rather more from concerts and gigs, so therefore they welcome ‘illegal’ downloading as a promotional tool…

It will obviously be the only way you can derive income from music in future, apart from playing live. At present it’s a mess. Everyone involved acted too slowly and the rug was duly pulled. Survivors may be OK in future. But it will all take time to sort out. Not many people have it.

The next generation will benefit most. Work it out: 1% of the net downloading x 1 song at 1p = ? I haven’t done the figures — Negroponte did it in dollars but that was some time ago and things change daily. Of course, the usual suspects will inevitably attempt to interpose themselves between you and the money.

Why don’t you offer mp3 downloads on the Metamatic site? Tiny Colour Movies is on iTunes, but it’s DRM-protected and the bit rate, as with all iTunes wares, is a ridiculous 128kbps. I think most music lovers want to pay for downloads but part of the reason they continue to download illegally is because official stores like iTunes are so expensive and so restrictive in terms of the sonic quality and the rights management of the music. There has to be a better way, and I’m just wondering why more artists don’t offer downloads on their web sites. Cutting out the middleman, this could be done at a reasonable price and at CD quality, and I truly believe that the artist would in fact make more money this way.

Things will improve. Evolution takes time, administration, attention, persistence, knowledge. Plus effective distribution of music is actually only a single fraction of the aspects of the entity we like to call ‘musician’ — which is actually a swarm organism. It will cease to exist without all the buzzing components that make up its substance. The web simply can’t carry all that yet. I’m sure it will one day. But not quite yet.

You once described the music of the mid-80s as a “double-breasted dumbness”. Who excites and inspires you among the current crop of artists?

Mercifully it’s all become much more various since the mid 80s. I like elements and aspects of Depth through Surface, Peaches, Goldfrapp, Ladytron, Adult, Perspects, White Stripes, Radiohead, Robin Guthrie, Harold Budd, Oasis, The La’s, Aphex Twin, Vincent Gallo, M82, Fatal Love Triangle, BuzzBoy, Blofish, The Boards of Canada, Radon, Virus 252, Formal Equation, Louis Gordon, The Virtual Girls, Composite Human, Restricted Vision, Iggy Pop, The Machine Harmony Committee, Touch, Cannibal Clothing.

You’ve said that your career was shaped by your public image — that of a ghost among the city, finding dignity among the static — and that you had no choice in adopting that persona because you didn’t like being observed when you didn’t want to be. In some ways, it seems adopting such an outlook was prescient, in fact necessary for survival, given the rise of reality TV and the severely devolved notion of private space these days.

I think any sort of career I have is more a long accident. It is firmly shaped by deep personal inadequacies. Not shy but innately reserved. No good at being the object of attention in public. Need to go in for repairs frequently. Begin to feel like a shadow – time to leave swiftly. Only thing I could do was manifest someone who was tailored by all this, then operate him at one remove, in order to survive at all. No choice. Either that or: 1) Give it up. 2) Perish by degrees. 3) Hire someone else to do it for me. Being short of funds at the time I did the next best thing. What would you do?

John Foxx and his admirer, Gary Numan, as seen by Japanese magazine Music Life.

Does the rise of “reality” culture — mediated by technology — fill you with dread? Or do you still believe, as you once said, that “we’re now entering a world where technology is more elegant. There are problems and we can see them — social, political, etcetera — but things will work themselves out”.

Technology is elegant and we aren’t. An interesting effect of technology is it enables people to do the opposite of many previous norms.

For example, we can…

• Be dirty and have long hair (not that the two necessarily go together, of course). We have soap and antiseptics: no lice, fleas or septicaemia.
• Pierce ourselves for fun and status – with antiseptics and antibiotics.
• Have many sexual partners: we have contraceptives and some effective STD treatments.
• Get impossibly fat: we have liposuction and media attention for the truly high achieving.
• Become drug addicts: we have clinics and media attention.
• Wipe out small populations of civilians: we have remote devices (fortunately this looks like coming to an end).
• Use everything up: we have oil (fortunately this looks like coming to an end).
• Move and live and holiday away from home: we have transport (ditto)
• Buy pornography in the supermarket: we now have conventional media forced to compete with the Internet.
• Die of body development: we have steroids and ingestible synthetic hormones.
• Wear Nylon: we have effective deodorants and anti-perspirants.
• Drive everywhere and expect a road: we have cars.
• Live packed into vast cities: we have antibiotics, transport, aircon, water filtering, heating, sewers, and everything else which supports the ecology.
• Have fun surgery: we have developed lifesaving techniques we can now misuse for entertainment, art and money.
• Talk to anyone in the world, in public: we have mobile phones – closest thing to telepathy — yet people still shout.

I think that statement of mine you refer to was evidence of a desire to go home after being exhausted by questioning. Sure, it all may work itself out — but it’s going to need some very acute and constant current awareness. Logic is a form of insanity and needs to be judiciously suspended occasionally, in order to check on what is actually happening. Technologies operate in similar ways and likewise can create self-justifying ecologies of thought and behaviour. I think we constantly need to keep checking and suspending.

I can’t look at Big Brother or any sort of reality show. Brat Panto. Might watch the Cronenberg Variation if it arrives.

Will your Antonioni soundtrack ever be released?

No. It’s long gone.

Will you ever tour Australia?

I’d like to. But it will most likely be as drifting molecules about twenty years from now.

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..:: LINKS
+ A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture: The John Foxx Interview Part 1 of this conversation
+ Metamatic Official John Foxx site
+ Cathedral Oceans Official site
+ Lively (and obsessive) Foxx forum at the official Ultravox site
+ K-punk review of the first three Ultravox albums
+ ‘Old sunlight from other times and other lives’: John Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies K-punk analysis
+ Rockwrok UltraFoxx tribute site