Androgynous with a capital A, always dressed in a gray suit, sporting an immaculate haircut -- this tall thin guy had to be gay, went the logic of the day. For a 16-year-old living outside Chicago, just looking at Foxx's picture was enough to be considered homosexually inclined. Owning one of his synth-driven albums was the epitome of suburban sexual subversion, given that Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Iron Maiden were the accepted currency of the day. Actually, Foxx may have been music's first metrosexual.
Foxx may be blazing a return to public view but without the spectacle of doddering old farts donning hairpieces and reuniting in another hopelessly mercenary "Remember the '80s" tour. By virtue of his obscurity, Foxx won't have to dodge many red-carpet ambushes or celebrity makeovers as he embarks on a comeback trail that he's turned into a broad modern boulevard. Instead of remaining famous for a hit single or best-selling album (the closest he's come was in 1980 with "Underpass," from his solo debut, Metamatic), Foxx is less known for any of his particular compositions than for his imagination, lucidity, and vision.
A child intellectual from Chorley in Lancashire, Foxx's musically inauspicious origins trace to Tiger Lily (active from 1973-76). Foxx and his bandmates from the Royal College of Art then took the name Ultravox, with the band's debut (produced by Brian Eno and Steve Lillywhite) standing as the first example of what was to become electro-punk. On the cover of Ultravox! Foxx was pictured in front of a blown-up television, eyes rolling back in his head in a Diane Arbus pose of apoplexy, the edges of his pinstriped suit burned and charred as if from an explosion. A car crash, perhaps? Ultravox always thought of itself as a harbinger of a twisted future, and Foxx, singing the body (and mind) electric, could scream louder and whisper more quietly than any other frontman before or since.
"I Want to Be a Machine," he declared on that memorable 1977 debut. Over a piano-and-strings background, Foxx sang "My Sex" through a futuristic filter: "My sex is often solo/sometimes it short-circuits, then/Sometimes it's a golden glow/My sex is a wanting wardrobe I still explore/With all the bodies I've known/And those I want to know."
Of course, Kraftwerk had already mandated the use of synthesizers to celebrate the idea of man-machine fusion and its future-shock aftereffects. Foxx co-opted that and put a uniquely British spin on things, in conjunction with his indoctrinated Catholicism -- not its belief systems but its pastoral quasimysticism.
Two more Foxx/Ultravox albums followed -- 1977's Ha! Ha! Ha!, with more of a glam-punk feel, was still capable of unleashing devastating ballads, like the immortal "Hiroshima Mon Amour": "We meet beneath the autumn lake/Where only echoes penetrate/Walk through Polaroids of the past/Futures fused like shattered glass /The sun's so low/Turns our silhouettes to gold/Hiroshima, mon amour."
The miraculous and overlooked Systems of Romance (1978) remains a masterwork that manages to be alienating and mechanical as well as incredibly warm, musical, and human. Moving toward stately ballads, Systems found Ultravox maturing into something resembling the New Romantics movement afoot in England at the time (Duran Duran, et al.). But the album failed to sell, Foxx departed after this record, and Midge Ure took over, propelling Ultravox into the mainstream. But Foxx's pioneering work with Ultravox set at least one other artist on a similar path: Gary Numan. Clash guitarist Mick Jones offered Foxx a slot in his band, but the singer declined.
Foxx is a synthesist in the classic sense; that is, he has never constructed anything truly original, except in the way that he has brought together various source materials in new ways. But his stylistic vision was way ahead of the curve. Foxx adopted a secondary persona -- "The Quiet Man" -- as a way of detachment.
Believing the synthesizer to be the most relevant tool of modern music, Foxx created his masterpiece, 1980's Metamatic, using little else. The shiveringly cold sound of the machines -- and Foxx's voice doing its damnedest to approximate another -- is echoed within songs like "He's a Liquid," "Metal Beat," and "No-One Driving."
Lyrically, Foxx revealed an obsession with the architecture and psyche of the urban landscape. The dimensions of time, nostalgia, dreams, and imagination are stretched until they lose a sense of individuality. Foxx's anonymous tales place the listener at the center of an enormous stage production, a sort of inner reality show where fiction is all around and reality is invented as we go along. Everything about the technological milieu and the endless grid of the city, even the most familiar things, is infinitely mysterious. Foxx developed his own language on Metamatic using symbols of city life: stairways, streets, escalators, elevators, and especially the automobile. Setting the tone for the cyber-punk fiction of sci-fi authors like J.G. Ballard and William Gibson, Foxx's seminal solo debut conjured up a pre-Matrix shadow world.
