The track ‘Evidence’ was born naturally out of the two artists’ mutual appreciation for one another. Speaking with Artrocker magazine last year, Luis Vasquez from The Soft Moon had this to say of John Foxx’s influence on his own music: ‘Foxx’s Metamatic album is what led me to discover the Arp Odyssey, the most crucial instrument in my collection, and the key synthesizer used in creating my unique sound. So, that album is very important to me and what I do.’ With regard to the collaboration, John Foxx said, ‘The Soft Moon are where minimalism maximises into a new universe of possibilities. It’s an absolute joy for us to work with them.’

‘Evidence’ will be released as a one-sided 7 inch single by Captured tracks on 26 June. It also features on the forthcoming Evidence mini-album by John Foxx & The Maths in early September.

Photo by Mike Cooper

John Foxx And The Maths are playing in Madrid on 26 May – check here for more details: HERE

Here’s a new interview by Clubbing Spain.

1. How do you feel right now in terms of your artistic career. What’s your moment now?

At the moment it’s great fun. We feel as though we are on a rising tide. But I’ve also lived long enough to look over the horizon.
My father was a boxer. I said I would never do anything like that, but you know, life can be ironic – being a musician can be very much like boxing. It’s always the moment – until you are forgotten. Then you figure out how to survive until the next round. 

2. From time to time do you listen to records like Metamatic?

Very rarely. I have no wish to imitate my younger self. Even if he did have a few good ideas.

3. The Quiet Man is your book (any relation with John Ford’s movie?). Are your preparing any other?

The name was just a coincidence. My Quiet Man lives in a modern city that changes shape – no connection with the John Ford character. I’m still writing those stories because I get lots of ideas for songs from them. The main theme is a man, a woman and a city – the things we all have to deal with.

4. By the way, what do you think was new about your first solo album?

I think it was the first electronic album by a British artist. It contained songs, not instrumentals. The songs had a different shape because of the synthesizers. The machines made a new kind of music. I had to figure out how to sing along with them.

5. Why dressing with “ties” was so important in your artistic look?

It was a reversal of Punk conventions – I was trying to destroy something I loved.

6. Do you think that the punk sound of the 70s eclipsed your music as Ultravox?

Not at all. We were punks originally, and we could blast anyone else off any stage, at that time. By 1977 we were a very powerful live band, making a totally ruthless, vicious sort of music. We had figured out how to make it even louder and deeper and more powerful by using synthesizers. No one else was doing anything like that, at the time. A little later, everyone else was doing it and punk was dead. But actually it wasn’t dead, it had simply been transformed and absorbed into this new form. I suppose we were really the first Electropunks and the first New Wave band.

7. Have your recovered your relationship with old members of Ultravox?

There was never really any serious disagreement with the band. I urgently had to find another way of life – that life of touring was deeply damaging to me at the time. I was also completely fascinated by the possibilities of drum machines and synthesizers and wanted to design a new kind of music with these new instruments. This was equally urgent. I also knew it was likely to be unsuccessful – and you could not ask a band to sit around for a year while you chased an idea as risky as that. So I split. It was the best thing for both of us. In the end we all got what we wanted.

8. By the way, I saw Gareth Jones last year at Madrid. He was explaining some aspects from Metamatics recording. You once said that Jones is a kind “psychoanalyst of sound”. Is that true? How was the recording of that album?

I think I said that Gareth was interested in Freud and in psychology. He was a deeply intelligent co-conspiritor, who had only just begun work in a studio. I think Metamatic was his first serious project. I had tried a few other engineers before him, but they were not intuitive, or intelligent, or perceptive enough.
You have to remember that at the time, electronic music was completely radical and most engineers did not understand it at all. They could only deal with real drums and guitars and those conventional structures. Gareth was the only person I met who was flexible, intelligent and eager enough to make radical sounds and restructure everything in the way I needed. As we know, he became a major producer of this kind of music afterwards. Making Metamatic was a great adventure for both of us and it defined both of our lives afterwards.

9. How is your relationship with Gary Numan?

We get on very well. I have deep respect for Gary. His music was the best of that era, and he is the only artist to have travelled beyond his generation – he has done this more than once, and his music is still absolutely contemporary – in fact is influence is still growing. He is unique, and so is his music.

10. In your opinion, who is doing the best electro-pop right now.

I hear many good things – Crystal Castles, Emeralds, The Knife, Burial, Xeno and Oaklander, The Soft Moon, Matthew Dear, Gazelle Twin, LCD Sound System, Skrillex – All in their very different ways.

11. Is electro-pop always nostalgic music?

It should never be nostalgic. That is the trap. It will kill you.

John Foxx & The Maths (John Foxx/Benge/Hannah Peel/Serafina Steer) will be playing a warm-up show for the forthcoming Bestival appearance at Cargo in London on Wed 5 September. They’ll be performing material from their three albums - Interplay, The Shape Of Things and a new mini-album Evidence which is also due out in September – along with classic tracks from across Foxx’s career. Support is from Tara Busch who will be performing her new electronic sci-fi symphony, I Speak Machine.

You can buy VIP tickets HERE.

Standard tickets are available HERE

And HERE

He built the ship in the garden shed. Twelve years old. Ruined industrial town. Dark factories empty now. Only a few still in operation. Great brick chimneys on every street. Stone walls fallen in, showing traces of rooms and colourwash sections. Fires at night. Dark canals. A long way to go. Weeds in the cobbled streets. Torn colour comics on a wet pavement behind the cotton mill on Corporation Street. Pools from old processes seen from the train line, chemical lodges and toxic waste pits.

Clean waterways among trees in some valleys. Damsel flies, water beetle, great crested newts. Smell of wet stone, green leaves and deep pools. Water rills and stone channels under streets and alleys, emerging between houses.

Nearby, stagnant rivers full of black mud, red worms and other mutated things. Pale insects coming from the walls of those derelict houses near the old gas works, looking like dusty pineapples with lobster legs but grey and beige, the colours of generation in forgotten, polluted walls.

Dreamed they were there, then found a few days later. Magical effect of that calm certainty remained with him for life. Connection to other systems. Stillness and wonder.

Other things generating in the weeds and chemical fallout of a hundred years. Radioactive bluebottles with tiny vestigial wings. Biting houseflies. Long grey worms still squirming in dogshit.

Railway crossing. Lost path to a lonely fountain, a holy place by two birch and hawthorn trees between railway lines and bridges. Quite forgotten. Wooden signal boxes with rows of metal levers illuminated by yellow light at night. Coming back from shift work in dusty blue overalls. Budgerigar in a tarnished cage against the window. Smell of coal gas and oily cotton.

Collected things for years, arranging them in the dark wooden shed. Tarpaper roof covered in rampant pink roses.

Gathering the forces together. Process of Instinctive Recognition. Brass pipes and sprigots from the munition works, glass tubes and electrical devices wrapped in greased brown paper. Nameless circuitry and voltaic remedies. Diagrams of anatomy and magneto stimulation points. Connecting maps and musical scores and anatomical diagrams. Gradually linking everything useful he came across in the ruined factories and workshops of this industrial town. Inevitability of escape and a deep instinct to use everything available.

The first dismay in these bleak industrial ruins replaced by calm certainty, then a dawning realisation of all the unique power sources available here. He would sense something was needed, then a couple of nights later he would dream of it and where it could be found or he would get a clear picture of it in his mind. Uncles contributed to the collection. Bringing glass tubes and fused X-ray filaments, ultraviolet lamps and stoppered glass bottles of permanganates and glycerine.

Books on a makeshift shelf. Green, navy blue and maroon cloth covers, gold lettering – The Young Chemist, Principles of Magnetism and Electricity. Weather Patterns. Locating Your Psychic Energies.

Wired the fragments together, carefully uniting batteries and metals and alloys and biological wastes and components from the mills. Unnameable industrial by-products resembling amphibians and soft boiled eggs and formless spawn, some of them still alive. Arranged in linked Kilner jars of dense liquids and connected to batteries made from interreacting fats, acids and metals via video recorders and carbide lamps.

Fragmented clues to another existence discerned from tiny phrases and sentences discovered in books and coloured comics and magazines. Glimpses of possibilities assembled and acted upon. He placed sheets of lead, copper, zinc, leather and fat between selected pages of Weekend magazine, Tit Bits, Knowledge, reproductions of Turner paintings and etchings of anatomica.

Pornographic magazines discovered on the moors were layered with maps, musical scores, artificial food colouring, preservatives and acids suspended in setting lotion in a series of lead and felt lined biscuit boxes. Ghost of a lost boy among bottles and worn workbenches. Did you see someone transparent like an old photograph? only there for a moment, just passing through.

Any defunct technology was appropriated and co-opted into the system. Fragmented bird and animal skeletons from an abandoned slaughterhouse on Blackburn Road, wired together in ingenious combinations with television aerials and things living in formaldehyde. Adapted to ferocious chemical environments.

Cast iron frame and steel strings of a grand piano wired up to aquariums via the wings of roadside bird and animal remains, linked to galvanised tanks of canal water and iron filings on the tarpaper roof.

Electric shock generators amplified through rows of tiny bottles of Woolworth California Poppy. Wired into miniature Japanese tape recorders and regulated by components from Timex Dan Dare watches. Connected through alloy strips and gold leaf and bottles of sulphate crystals from the abandoned chemistry labs of Heapey Bleach Works. Accumulated and stored in cans of film from behind the Plaza, Pavillion and Empire cinemas in town. Suspended in brilliantine and opiate cough mixtures. Carbon arc lamp inserted as a catalyst.

Rescued mechanical and household items – old sewing machines and gas masks and shop tills strung on weaving machines and psychic detection kits with litmus papers, holy water and tungsten and steel filaments and gas mantles.

Later he discovered how to co-opt entire districts. Wired up slag heaps and electrical pylons and even the slow micro-energies released by decaying mill buildings. Systems of silver paper, Gloy and malt vinegar inserted between the damp stones. Thin copper wire and brass stair rods discharging into canals, then distributed back along polluted waterways via gas and water pipes and sewer lines.

In this way he hooked up factories and filter beds and various churches of Psychic Healing. Collecting funds of luminous psychic energies into makeshift battery systems from front room seances, itinerate faith healers and a lucky catholic exorcism. Silver foil wrapped wedges of gum tied with copper wire around iron bars carefully wound with ammonia soaked string. Rubber tubes condensing through Kilner jars full of blowfly chrysalises layered in mercury from smashed barometers. Smell of sour milk and candle wax.

Leaching atmospheric energies from telephone systems, weather and radar fields via adapted transistor aerials.

Then he found he could access radiated sexual desire, guilt and deviancy tensions of all varieties, along with drug and alcohol addiction patterning, via silver paper surreptitiously stuck onto exterior windows with animal glue. Transformed and filtered via old Dansettes and valved radios attached to a cream leatherette-covered Elizabethan tape recorder. Fixed by advertisements for dynamic tension, soldiering wire reels, a pound note machine and wollen clothing soaked in mild acids and caustic soda in water from the canal circuits. Maintained by links from clandestinely wired iron beds in Chorley Hospital. Voltage finally boosted by cluster burst discharges of cruelty, fear, greed, envy, frustration, conflict, despair, inspiration, joy, insight, grief, ecstasy and anger from all over Greater Manchester.

The final improvement was when he discovered a steady state access to all these emissions, carried on the electromagnetic cages of domestic electrical wiring from all the rooms in every city and town of the locality. Made it quite easy to gain lift off, maintain escape velocity and provide inter-dimensional transport for decades.

Around thirteen years old by now. Left with a glad heart into a marvellous adventure, though slightly afraid when finally looking down on rapidly retreating streets and cities, then the blue and distant Earth.

Seemed also to be penetrating time and place as well as distance . . . Travelling without moving. Not sure where to. Some odd effects of memory as though superimposed over another film of himself. Dark versions of New York, Paris, Rome and London through some other lives led in those rooms. Apartment with passing lights from cars and a woman there. Somehow he knew her well. Smell of powder and lipstick. Adult concerns he could only guess at.

He knew that other people couldn’t see him properly. Always once removed, like a projected film on smoke and water. They tended to be restless in his company, looking away into the middle distance during conversation. So he didn’t mind leaving. Froze the scene into a still, then abstracted himself like a cut-out photo. Glad to see it all go, in a way.

Those places – moving through them all now. Bleak rooms and yards, sometimes sunlit. Knew he was from somewhere else and there was something to do. All instructions came in dreams or calm detached insight, always clear and correct. Wiring paths solved, grey mists of confusion cleared and the way forward appeared.

He knew he had only to place his hand in an enamel basin of clear water by the side of the armchair – final connective link – and the whole apparatus flickered forward like a broken film. Simultaneous forward and reverse live video layers blurring the the district for a few seconds as they synchronised into smooth, effortless dream velocity. Through dark clouds of coal gas and electricity, towards all these other cities. Shimmering molecular interplay around and through them. Time like a slow film. Mirrors growing darker in the immediate district. Warm starlight and movie colours and voices. Somewhere else to go . . .

Drift of cold places beneath motorways and along endless roads. From labyrinths of New York and Chicago to Club Gibus in Paris. Old Woman proprietor spitting nearby. Hotel on the street. White static on screen over faces lost and faces found. Don’t forget me. Another life or two lived out in places long ago and far away. Forgetting down the years. Only a thin thread pulled out of black dirt between flagstones along an East End street by warehouses. Cracked tarmac over shiny black cobblestones along the Seine.  The bar overlooking the Vatican. Up cold steps a hundred years from now . . . shattered times . . . the smell of coal gas and broken hotels in the cruel light of day. Living like a ghost . . . always returning, circulating like stars around some magnetic pole lost among the population. Empty shoes under the table. Cigarette burns in the formica surface. Dead friends turning away. Who is this anyway . . . then falling, suddenly losing balance. Most embarrassing.

Where to now? Used to receive instructions. Always imagined they were internal. Never seriously considered possibility of an external source. All gone quiet for some considerable time. Perhaps been abandoned.

Waited for a long time before leaving the room. Must make my way alone now. All support systems vanished.

Trying to put the pieces together. Along the motorway tunnels all alone. Somewhere to go to along the canals and railway sidings. Ghost coming home. No maps at all, no understanding of the slow violence of time and memory. Across Europe from Los Angeles. Displaced skin. Uncomfortable transmission failing. All power sources used up. Bulldozed . . . built over streets beneath this very motorway, or one exactly like this in some other place . . . towns and cities re-arranged . . .

He returned years later. Still a young man, or so he assumed. Though he could not guess what he looked like. Away so long. Reassembled right on Market Street and no one noticed. It was mid-winter, the streets were cold and he went by the big windows of the butchers shop in the centre of town. Thornley’s written in gold on the glass. Sawdust spilling out onto the black stone pavements from the bare boards inside. White marble counters and sides of pork slung from hooks in the boarded ceiling. Warm smell of roast meats from basement kitchens below the streets. He realised that he could no longer eat and turned away. Beer and tobacco from The Royal Oak Hotel. Never want anything like that again. Looked into houses at dusk from icy wet streets. Warm in there. Resigned longing, as if something had broken.

Everything seemed changed. Shops were different. The Arcade. The Human Bat versus The Robot Gangster still in a window but strangely transparent now. Shop empty . . . flakes of limewash on the bare floor. Mill shop gone. Vague shopkeeper almost there. Marketplace deserted under sodium lights. Loneliness of empty cinemas. The Royal. Damp smell of leaky ceiling on gold painted plaster. Wide road driven through the centre of town. Steely Lane overgrown by ghost meadows. Duxbury Woods built over. Endless road links. Supermarkets and petrol stations out there now. Shadows of stupidity.  Smiling councillors superimposed over a lost town far away. Christmas on the market and farmers bringing fresh food with the taste of coal smoke. Fading away. Built over. Money changing hands quietly, then you leave. Smile across the years. No place here. Chorley Guardian abandoned. Ruins and leaves above the factory wastes.

Walking at sunset over Rivington. The library closed. Ghost books in gold lettering with moving illustrations. One falls open. Naked figure beside an oasis in the desert. Ruined houses and bus station beyond. He goes away but the book vanishes before he gets home. Never gets home this time. Never arrived. Lost.

Perhaps they forgot. Where can we go to. Reach my hand across the years. It is too late, they have gone. Too far. Your hand appears in books and songs, in dreams.

She awakes from sleeping in the armchair, waiting for her son to arrive. Make-up on the delicate old face. Standing by the window, gazing out. Bus depot over the road. Lights on all night. Passing by. Engineer whistling. Walks by. Waiting. Never arrives, not for years.

Left you there too long. Can’t retrieve this damage done. Just a ghost, still waiting. One day I will arrive, you will see. Gone away now far too long.

No one seemed to recognise him, they all seemed uneasy or afraid, as if it were somehow important not to acknowledge him at all. Turn away. Deny that presence.

He was faded and transparent, resembling several other people. And there was something forlorn, fundamentally altered. He could not realise that he radiated a terrible loneliness of unfathomable distance and time. Displayed indications of other conditions not dependent on any premise recognised here. All this glimpsed unconsciously through proximity and transmitted as a howling void of terror and distance and disembodiment. Of course everyone turned away. Down wet stone streets forever.

When he was a child he knew he had dreamed of this. His grandfather would tell him the story. The Astronauts Return. Unknown and unrecognised, a long lost play at Santy’s Theatre. He was fascinated, not realising it had already happened, even then. Through the Odeon foyer, Cinema Manager Mr Green says ”hello” then looks puzzled. He too is transparent. Fading dinner jacket with silk lapels by filmstar photos on the deco staircase. Cigarette smell of the big green moquette and chrome sofa in the foyer.

Through the town, displaced and unacknowledged. It had already happened. He looked in a shop window. Dark clothes. Can’t quite make out the face somehow. Blue skies then intermittent rain. The old street empty now. Overgrown in part. Rearranged.

Shadow of the pilot on lupins growing from the sand. Must have been years. Projected film across his face as he spoke to the woman from the pet shop. Then the sequence in Woolworth - stole a toy gun, beaten by his father. Sobbing alone up the stairs. Other kids playing in the streets all around. Isolating agony. Dread in the pit of the stomach. Never forgotten.

Glimpses of uncles returned from war lost among market stalls. New concrete roadway empty and weed grown. Built by mistake through the fields. Grass covered building from the train. Watched him as if they knew. Eyes far away and still kind but knowing they could not speak. Knowing it had already happened. Navy blue gabardine coat and black beret. Cycle clips. Along the canal.

Father and mother still there. He was now much older than his parents. They walk by with a shudder. Lifted up to the sky on his father’s shoulders in the park. Summer Sunset. Going home now. Sees them go by, a series of shadows. Himself there as a child. Small, unknowing. Years before, from a distance. What happened, where did he go to? Maps and diaries contained in music scores and diagrams he can no longer read.

Dark Victorian shop on Steely Lane. Smell of the foundry behind dim stone walls. Wet streets. Black soot on every surface. Glass bottles. Slippery Elm Food, Asfoetida, Liquorice Root, Sarsapiralla. Smooth, dim, deal tables and benches. Dark smell of cordials and tinctures and woody substances, herbs and remedies. No one comes. Mrs Gent – Proprieter. Temperance Bar. Lost lodges and waterways in the grounds of abandoned factories. Groups of children playing. Hide out there for years becoming the guardian of this place. Never seen. Never recover the maps. The engines long since dismantled, dispersed, taken away by enterprising junk dealers. Now disguised on the scrapyard near the railway.

Childhood friends injured by wrecked fighter planes and a room full of fibreglass. Old electrical devices exploded with water and chains. Just a ghost now, waiting for the ship to arrive.

One night it comes down hovering then goes away swiftly without landing. Burnt patch in the rhododendrons. One child dreams of this and visits the site. Dream memory recognised through the years. 1957. He feels a sudden inconsolable grief and loss. Terrible dreams of returning. Grief of awakening replayed over and over. Those days are gone.

The mortal fear and despair of those left behind. Kids avoid the spot, sensing something dark there, a shadow on the garden. Sit still and someone will come. Always in hope. Someday, someone will come. Just wait.

This is the new mix of Gazelle Twin’s ‘Changelings’ by John Foxx And The Maths. It’s part of an album The Entire City Remixed which is due for release on 4 June. For more details please visit: www.gazelletwin.com

John Foxx And The Maths are playing in Madrid on 26 May – check here for more details: HERE

Here’s a new interview by KSK magazine with John in the run up to the concert.

Or you can read the full English transcript below.

1. – How do you define John Foxx, as an artist?.

Foxx: Oh, I think he’s an outsider with his own agenda – someone in the margins – and determined to stay there. Always a little bemused by what the mainstream does.

2. – In mid-late eighties the first digital synthesizers began to appear. At first we thought it would be the end of the analog era in terms of music making, but nearly thirty years later, there now appears to be a perfect combination of analog and digital, for the creating and composing of music. What do you think about all this, since you have seen and experienced it all as John Foxx over the years?

It has been a fascinating journey, from the beginning of synthesizer music, then through the digital area, when analogue synthesizers were almost forgotten.

Now we are recovering that original analogue sound world through new digital technology. It is rather like rediscovering an Amazon forest after it has been forgotten for decades.

3. – In the late eighties, what induced you to take a break of more than a decade from music?

 It felt comfortable to remain anonymous. A great luxury. I walked and explored the city. I lived like a ghost for five or more years. This gave me a new set of ideas and perspectives and eventually, a new, more useful version of myself. I think the previous version was completely worn out – but I didn’t have a replacement. So I had to wait.

Very slowly, this new person emerged, formed from all those years of walking and exploration.

I think this sort of thing happens to many people at some time in their life. You simply have to wait and allow your instincts to realign you properly, before you can begin to function effectively again.

4. – During this period, did you write or collaborate with other artists or musicians?

Mostly, I returned to visual arts – photography and image making. I was fortunate to have complete freedom to work on the very first computer imaging system, some years before Photoshop became available, so I could make quite new combinations of images. Some of the images appeared as book covers in the UK and America. I also wrote many sections of a book – “The Quiet Man”, worked on my Cathedral Oceans project and made some recordings of piano music with Harold Budd, an artist I have a great admiration for.

Eventually I felt ready to re-emerge, so I released two records in 1997. Since then, I’ve been working on various films, music and imagery – from ‘Tiny Colour Movies’ to ‘Interplay’ with Benge last year, and now ‘The Shape of Things’.

5. – The year 2011 could be defined as a creative year especially for John Foxx. Would you say this present era is beginning to appreciate your principles as a creator of music?

It seems that the world has moved into alignment with what I’ve been doing.

It’s always fascinating what new generations choose to base their music on. It seems that some of them have chosen mine.

6. – No doubt, you are an “icon” of electronic music of several generations, and inspired hundreds of artists. Are you flattered or afraid that?  Do you feel “committed” to what the public expects of each new release, are you ever afraid that you may disappoint them if you pursue something unpopular or difficult?

I can only make music that interests me. It has to feel like an adventure, otherwise it’s not worth doing.  If other people enjoy the results I’m naturally very pleased.

If you consider other opinions too much, you can become paralysed. I find it is more practical to follow my own instincts and enthusiasms.

7. – There are many fans who are also creators of music and would like to know what inspires you to compose music, when do you record? How is a typical day of John Foxx?

I get most of my ideas from walking in the city – usually London. At its best, this is an almost dreamlike, experience.  You may witness small dramas, meet people by coincidence. The city is the greatest source of stories.

All my songs are really concerned with a man a woman and a city. They seem to be written from the point of view of the quiet man, who is someone living anonymously in a modern city, trying to maintain some sort of dignity against the odds, ever hopeful of romance. As I suppose we all are.

Working with Benge has been a great inspiration recently, then playing live with Hannah and Serafina accelerated everything even more. This is the best band I’ve ever worked with. Benge is very good thinker – completely dedicated to sound and music and synthesis, and Hannah and Serafina are ferociously good. I get lots of ideas from simply hearing them all play.

8. – In Spain, you are very appreciated as an artist. The last time you appeared in concert was thirty years ago in Madrid (apart from acting in other disciplines – presenting “Tiny Colour Movies” in Caixaforum – Barcelona / 2008). Do you think there is any specific reason for remaining memorable to Spain, is this perhaps something to do with our country itself?

I feel a great affinity with Spain, and I hope this may be some sort of unconscious recognition of this.

I first arrived in your country in 1966.  I had hitch-hiked from the North of England, across France. I was seventeen years old and wanted to see the country of Picasso, Bunuel, Dali and Gaudi. They were all formative influences on me.

 I thought Un Chien Andalou was the most important avant-garde film ever made – the first true piece of the cinema of the unconscious. Those scenes of empty urban avenues still affect my songwriting.

And Picasso’s early drawings still seem the most beautiful modern works I’ve seen. I still look at them from time to time to remind myself of what is possible. The Gaudi cathedral entrance in Barcelona is the most significant piece of sculpture Europe has produced, outside classical Rome and Greece.

At that time, Spain was a completely exotic country to an Englishman. It was a completely different world. I was entranced. I visited Barcelona and travelled to Figueras and along the coast to Rosas, Ampurias and Cadaques, trying to understand the country of Dali and Picasso. It was a wonderful journey.

 I’m not a very nostalgic person, but I do have good memories of those days. The very clear and beautiful sensations of Spain, the landscape, the food, the villages, towns, cities and people I met, brought everything I had experienced through art into a much truer perspective.

So, when my records had some success here I was very pleased.

9. – You are considered a particularly modern and avant-garde artist, with many interests in making and exploring art. Could you tell us about these other aspects of John Foxx that the public may not be aware of?

Well – film has been a major preoccupation and now it’s possible to make this much more easily than before –so I’ve begun to make small films that work with music. The one I’m working on at the moment is called ‘Electricity and Ghosts’ –

I realized recently that we have more ghosts than any previous civilisation. Modern media replays images of people who are long dead, but we still see them walking and talking constantly in our homes, on television screens – Marilyn Monroe, Chaplin, Bogart, Kennedy – and dozens more – these are our modern ghosts.

Each one of us also leaves a trail of ghosts – every time we make a recording of ourselves, we add another one to the thousands that already exist. A recording of any kind –a photograph, a video, even a phone message – is a strange thing – it is a shadow, a ghost, an externalized memory that can easily live longer than us.

So I wanted to make some recordings that acknowledge this ghostly quality.

I’ve used recordings of a piano at home, with all the ambient sounds left in. You can hear faint traces of people walking downstairs through the walls and faint conversations from the street outside.

Plus I’ve added fragments of recordings of various kinds – some I made of empty rooms, and some using the background sounds from home videos and incidental recordings from old cassettes.

So you have a record of piano music and behind it is this shadow record of all these ghosts.

10. – In these times of global economic crises, internet, piracy, etc., how do you see the present and the future of both the music industry, of music and of art (including the artists themselves)?

Well, that’s a very big question – I guess the longer you live the more you begin to realize that change is the only constant.

 Popular music has just completed a very exciting era, from the 1950’s to now – very similar to the golden age of Hollywood in the film industry.

Eras pass and new ones are emerging. Music is still in the ascendant – more people listen to more music than ever before – and more different kinds of music, simply because of the technology.  It is the means of delivery that has altered, and this has caused much disruption, even confusion – but to musicians, not the users. The film industry is being affected in the same way, and so will publishing – newspapers, books etc.

What concerns me is that Apple are now almost totally in control of the means of distribution of all this media – and when systems gain such power, they usually become distorted by it. So we will see,

New kinds of art are always made possible by small shifts in technology – for instance, portable, large-scale film projection is now possible for the first time, so we are seeing some beautiful new work designed for that. In the near future we’ll have sunsets at both ends of the sky and buildings that appear to dissolve and reform.

It seems to be unexpected combinations of media that cause the most disruption –phones with movie cameras, plus the internet, for instance.  Add tweeting and Youtube and the possibilities are terrifying. Everyone will film themselves  doing everything from now on, so we will all need to be much more guarded.

 I think much more political use will be made of these media – sometimes by outside organizations as well as covert mainstream politics and business.

As for music – Benge and I have recently become interested in the recording studio as a musical instrument, it would be a great evolutionary step to compose music using conventional classical instruments –violin, viola, cello etc., but with musicians who are capable of understanding and reacting to the new possibilities of a modern recording studio as a compositional environment.

This is something that seems to have been ignored by classical players and composers and it seems such a wasted opportunity. An entirely new genre could be developed, so we’ve just begun work with a marvelous classically trained violinist, and the results so far are very exciting.

There is still so much to be explored and I’m beginning to realize a single lifetime is too little.  I began work with the band after I left art school in 1975, thinking I would spend just one year in music, then get back to being a painter.

It’s been a very interesting ride so far.

TWO DISC LIMITED EDITION IS AVAILABLE HERE

STANDARD 16 TRACK EDITION IS AVAILABLE HERE

John Foxx And The Maths will be playing a show in Sala Caracol on 26 May, 2012.

For tickets and more information please visit HERE

There are still some copies left of The Shape Of Things limited edition double CD at the Official Shop HERE. This version also features a hard-back book designed by Jonathan Barnbrook.

Two anniversaries to celebrate!

Thirty five years ago in Feb 1977, Ultravox! released their debut single, ‘Dangerous Rhythm’, backed by the electronic ballad ‘My Sex’ on the B-side. This was followed by the debut album, Ultravox!
Meanwhile, in January 1980, the first electronic record of the new decade came out – John Foxx’s solo debut, Metamatic.