Crash & Burn
John Foxx & Louis Gordon
1. Drive
2. Cinema
3. Broken Furniture
4. Crash and Burn
5. Once In a While
6. Sex Video
7. Sidewalking
8. Ultraviolet/Infrared
9. She Robot
10. Dust and Light
11. Ray 1/Ray 2
12. Smoke
Synthesizer pioneer John Foxx has released Crash And Burn, which he recorded with Mancunian electronic genius Louis Gordon. Crash And Burn is an edgier, more passionate record than Foxx’s previous album, 2001’s The Pleasures of Electricity which concentrated on achieving a sense of rare intimacy in the pretty arrangements. This time around Foxx & Gordon have dreamt up fresh twists on Moroder pop (the neon-lit Sidewalking and Ultraviolet/Infrared), Kraftwerk (the tough-sounding She Robot), electronic-ballads (Smoke and the sleazy croon of Once In A While) and even analogue-fuelled industrial rock (the title-track). The album also opens with one of Foxx’s career bests, Drive, a pounding techno-pop track with an oddly emotional lyric, while Sex Video is set to fire-up in electro clubs any day now.
Chorley-born art student Foxx founded Ultravox! In 1975, working with Brian Eno on the band’s self-titled debut a few months before the ambienteer joined forces with David Bowie. Ultravox! were Britain’s first synthesizer rock band, fusing elements of Krautrockers such as Can, Neu! and Kraftwerk with the English art school heritage of Roxy Music. Foxx left the band in 1979 and a year later released the primitive, stark electro-pop classic, Metamatic, featuring his first solo hit, Underpass. On this album he developed a form of urban, European blues, which would later influence Detroit techno and UK dance acts such as Bomb The Bass’s Tim Simenon who collaborated with Foxx on their Nation 12 project at the end of the ‘80s. More recently Dave Clarke and Adult. have also declared themselves as fans.
In the ‘80s the introspective Englishman designed a personal, romantic style, expressed on albums such as The Garden (’81), The Golden Section (’83) and In Mysterious Ways (’85), but also through painting, graphic design, book jackets and his own, as yet unfinished novel, The Quiet Man. In 1995 he made a characteristically low-key return with a new album, Shifting City, described by Stephen Merritt of The Magnetic Fields as ‘one of the best albums of the nineties’. Over the last 15 years he’s also made occasional tours around churches and botanical gardens in Europe performing excerpts from Cathedral Oceans, an instrumental album and photographic collage inspired by his fascination with ruins and his own childhood experiences of church. He recently held a Cathedral Oceans exhibition in Hoxton Square, London, and is planning to release a DVD of this ‘moving stained glass window’ later this year.
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