Metamatic Forums John Foxx John Foxx Poll to find our favourite John Foxx songs

hey hey - thanks for organising this Mike. Disappointng that you got so few voters, but sadly that was always going ot be the way of it.
No surprises in the top 3, but great to see A Million Cars up there among the favourites. It's a track that really has grabbed everybody right from the first time we heard it on on Janice Long's Radio 2 show. Ditto Broken Furniture - one of my own favourites.

Metanym - highest placed CO piece, and significantly so I think.


Plaza and Mr No are both lower than I would have expected.

Excellent stuff though. Cheers

And a HAPPY NEW YEAR

Mx

Thanks Mike, for counting those votes!

It's good to see that there are so many DIFFERENT songs listed. Shows how diverse and of high quality JF's work is, I think.

The biggest surprise for me is Skyscraper at place 20. It was one of my fav's (and ranking high), but I didn't expect that it would make it into other lists as well.

A little disappointed for me was the ranking of Never Been Here Before . It sums up almost all the qualities of JF's poppy work.

My number one was Dislocation , it was and still is the high-water mark of John's work.

Gonna play me some 'forgotten' songs now. That will cost me an hour or two. Thankx again Mike!

Very interesting results with a nice variety from his entire career. Thanks for doing this!

I deliberately tried NOT to select any songs that had well-known alternate versions. I didn't include "Hiroshima Mon Amour" or "Underpass" or "Burning Car" on my list because I wasn't allowed to specify which version I preferred . . . .

Thankyou for all the "thankyou's"!

One surprise for me: Dancing Like A Gun received no votes. All the other singles from John's first three solo albums gained points, and tracks from The Garden generally did well. Maybe this track is overshadowed by others on the album?

Or maybe it's because the dropout/stereo panning on the CD versions is terribly annoying, as has been discussed in other threads. Personally I'm quite fond of the song but can only listen to it on vinyl, which eliminates it from my iPod and makes it not very fresh in my mind. Pity.

Don't know Mike. Dancing Like A Gun was never a favourite of mine. A bit too New Romantic for me, I guess. But on the album it works well.
But dropout on the cd version Lele? I didn't notice. But I'm waiting on a new stereo, so I'll listen again.

Re: "Dancing Like a Gun": The balance (of channels? of stereo panning? whatever) is way off in the CD versions of it that appear in "The Garden" and the 2008 reissue, "Modern Art," and "Glimmer." Listen specifically to the first verse. The second line ("Can you feel that heartbeat . . .") is considerably softer than the opening line, as are the lines that begin with "Through crowded streets . . ." and "And gold leaf on their . . . ." Then, all of a sudden, after several barely audible lines, you get a markedly louder cry of "NERVE GAS" that seems to come out of nowhere, which is actually kind of funny. This was not a problem on my vinyl versions of the song but on all the CDs the difference in volume between some of these lines is something I've yet been able to adjust, renders headphone-listening and iPod-playing impossible, and distracts immensely from the pleasure of the song.

At least it does for me, that is.

I don't want to distract from the thread here, but am I listening to the same song?

I just played 'Dancing'... on my CD player (with headphones) and through itunes on an iMac 5.1.

The vocal channels are split so that ALL the lines are played through the right speaker, with every other line coming through another channel via the LEFT speaker as well. The words "Nerve Gas" do the same thing - coming in on two vocal channels one through each speaker.
Every word is nonetheless perfectly clear and none of the lines seem particularly 'louder' than the other, and I don't get the impression they 'dropout' very much at all, certainly not enough to render listening difficult.
I can't therefore agree that its 'wrong' - isn't it just a technique?

John does a similar thing quite a lot (presents two or more vocal channels/layers) on many songs - perhaps just to a more obvious extent on this one?

Interesting observations Lele. I don't have a clue about the technical terms to describe this kind of technique, but the song sounds perfectly fine and audible to my untrained ears.

I'm at the office now and have three versions of the song in my iTunes (it's an iMac on a firmwide network; I have a Mac at home, too). I've replayed them all with headphones in, tried different headphones and replayed them, even put the headphones in the wrong ears and replayed them. They all sound like karaoke-harmony versions with much of the lyrics barely audible. "NERVE GAS" is considerably louder than the lines immediately preceding and following it, no matter what headphones I use or what ear the appropriate headphone is in. My stereo is old and crappy, whereas my electronics (computers, CD players, iPods) are all pretty recent and reliable, yet no electronic version of this song sounds to me like the vinyl version, which went from one speaker/headphone to the other but at the same volume. I passed a battery of hearing tests last Spring with flying colors, so I know I'm not deaf but I know we're getting off thread, so I'll just sigh and say that I must have gotten faulty pressings of all four CDs on which this track appears.

A very interesting list - thanks again Mike for doing it.
I'll look into it in more detail, although I was pleased to see Underpass is stil the JF ueber-song and that relative newbie A Million Cars has an excellent placing