Metamatic Forums John Foxx John Foxx The Best John Foxx B Side

'Mr. No'

I think John has recorded a number of excellent tracks that have ended up merely as B-sides. For me the best are This City,Mr No,This Jungle,A Kind Of Wave and Wings And A Wind.

Think not of them as "merely" B-sides.

Doubtless part of the contractual agreement with Virgin was that Foxx released a certain number of singles, most of which we know were selected by Virgin staff, not Foxx himself.

But on the B-side, he had more freedom to express himself, to put out more 'experimental' tracks that weren't available on albums etc, to explore new ideas.
And in the main, the singles were released to market albums - giving the B-side a different role in marketing the artist?

Underpass, Endlessly etc are merely A sides, available in other formats anyway, doing their thing to fly the label's flag.

The B-side is the hidden treasure they carry that has no ulterior motive other than just to 'be'

Most of John's best tracks are B sides, whereon he was the most free, at that time, to be creative

Swimmer 1 (great track, screeching guitar and mad sax solo).

After all these years, I'm still somewhere between A Kind of Wave and The Lifting Sky

Swimmer 2
To me it's among top-3 John Foxx instrumentals.

I've always loved "Glimmer."

"The Previous Century "* on "Burning Car" takes some beating
This thread has brought back happy memories of Foxx hunting more than a quarter of a century ago His records were neveras easily available as Marti Pellow's ! I remember working in Exeter and going all the way down to Plymouth to get the 7 inch vinyl "Endlessly " on picture disc

*ever the faux futurist , I've updated the title

Biked 15 miles to get the No-One Driving 2 x 7" ...

Glimmer - This City - Mr No ..

..an unbeaten triptych

I wonder if newer fans are still familiar with the concept of the B side, considering the rise of mp3 downloads and mutiple dance remixes have made the concept of putting a totally different song on the other side of the disc curiously old-fashioned?

Leaving that aside, John's B sides have been enormously varied over the years in terms of both style and quality. For me the best ones were of the Golden Section era; hardly surprising considering most of them were to have formed the great lost "In The Glow" album around 1982 (allegedly) before John got a sudden rush of inspiration and wrote a batch of new songs that became The Golden Section.

However for me, one song stands out head and shoulders above the rest, despite being curiously neglected. It's quite possible one of John's best vocal performances, with a great arrangement featuring all sorts of different sounds and a varied song structure of the sort that's been sadly lacking in much of John's post 1995 work. I'm talking of course about "This Jungle", a song which quite possibly could have been a single in its own right in a style that John hadn't really developed before or since.

Honourable mentions must also go to "A Kind Of Wave", "A Woman On A Stairway" and "Dance With Me", all of which evoke a curiously timeless-yet-dated psychedelic feel, like The Quiet Man strolling through an overgrown city populated by the ghosts of former lovers.

Sadly the quality dipped markedly for the "In Mystwerious Ways" era. "Stairway" was a stodgy jam session desperately searching for a melody, "Lumen de Luminee" sounded like a bad tribute band covering "The Garden" and "City Of Light" was just horrible.

I suppose technically the "Drive" EP was a single, in which case "Making Movies" deserves a mention.

But all in all John's made some cracking B sides, which together would make a hell of an album! As the likes of Pet Shop Boys have released a compilation album of B sides, perhaps there's a case for a John Foxx "Alternative" complitation, though I'm struggling to work the "Meta" prefix into the title!