Metamatic Forums John Foxx John Foxx John Wesley Barker Interview

Robin has been promised a walk and a talk with me for ages now and I've let him down. So I thought; if Robin or anyone has questions they want me to answer, we could do a Q & A here. Bearing in mind that I have posted a few comments in the past about Metamatic and my brief and humble playing for John Foxx in the early '80s.

So, fire away if the feeling takes you.

Hi John. Thanks for the opportunity to fire questions at you.

1: How did you come to work with John Foxx? Did you know him prior to the Metamatic sessions?

2:What was your brief on the Metamatic sessions? To play the difficult parts?

3:What kind of music are you into yourself? Do you like electropop? Do you like John's music?

Regards,

Andy

Hi Andy. Thanks for your Questions.

I'll try my best to give full answers with occasional tangential thoughts, bearing in mind that Metamatic was 30 years ago.

Q1: How did you come to work with John Foxx? Did you know him prior to the Metamatic sessions?

A1:The short answer is through Gareth who suggested me to John whom I didn't know before.
Gareth was working at the little studio called Pathway in Grosvenor Avenue, Newington Green London N16. You can still see the little building down an alley way left of the tyre shop and right of No.3 Grosvenor Avenue.

It was a very tiny studio with essentially just 2 rooms. 1 up and 1 down. The playing space lined by boarding with holes, the sort you used to see everywhere at the time in studios as a cheap sound deadening material. As you walked in there was a beaten up piano to your right against the wall and a control room which had been isolated in the corner straight ahead. When I first went to Pathway, there was an 8 track Brenell recorder and a custom desk, I think the monitors were Tannoys, but I can't be sure of that. The three of us, Gareth, John and I could squeeze into the control room, but didn't really need to. Mostly, I received instructions from Gareth who was in the control room and John moved between there and my location was just outside sitting at the Arp Odyssey to begin with.

Gareth had recommended me to John. We knew each other from Brixton and had a number of friends in common in and around our stomping grounds in Brixton Water Lane. I found our first meeting with John a bit tense. I'm a trained musician by discipline and I was thrown in a deep end, trying to please John and at the same time needing to interpret his verbal instructions into musical phrases and ideas. I didn't know then, but this situation crops up a lot with musicians who have a different set of values and understanding to bring to the table outside those of someone like me who has had a very straight 'classical' training. But after all, I was SO up for learning to make music in new ways. To escape the drudgery of classical training. I can't remember the very first thing I played for him, but I think it was the bass part of Underpass. During the recording period, as John and I settled on a working method, I was asked to come repeatedly to play. There were a few (perhaps one or two) writing and rehearsal sessions at his flat in Hornsey.

Q2:What was your brief on the Metamatic sessions? To play the difficult parts?

A2: To begin with, I was asked to play parts John had made up but he explained that he wanted a very precise machine-like rhythmic feel to the parts. My listening at that time included Kraftwerk and Philip Glass and Steve Reich so I locked into the drum machine and we tried to make very accurate parts. It meant both John and Gareth scrutinized every note I played and I'm human, so I learnt how to do drop ins AND drop outs with Gareth. I did feel under a lot of pressure at times but the trade off for me was that I felt I was learning a lot about studio techniques and working with John who has a very strong vision of his intentions. It was a whole new world for me.

Q3: What kind of music are you into yourself? Do you like electropop? Do you like John's music?

A3: I'm into 'music'. I do like electropop and I like John's music. My Prince.org profile has: Sly & the Family Stone, Rashan Roland Kirk, My Bloody Valentine, Miles Davis, James Brown, Ludwig van Beethoven, Van Halen, Toto, Stone Roses, WA Mozart, JS Bach, Donny Hathaway, Sam Cook, Duke Ellington, Stevie Wonder, Jo Zawinul, Weather Report, Zakir Hussein, Igor Stravinsky, Bjork, Joni Mitchell, Bob Marley & The Wailers, Massive Attack, Aretha Franklin, Beach Boys, Jimi Hendrix, MaJiKer, John McLaughlin, Shakti, George Michael, Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny/Lyle Mays, Philip Glass, Michael Jackson, Charlie Parker, Olivier Messiaen, Pandit Hari Prasad Chaurasia, Carlos Santana, Esquivel, The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Florence Foster Jenkins, The Doors, Soft Machine, Radiohead, John Coltrane, Belle & Sebastian, Luciano Berio, Lol Coxhill, Laurie Anderson, Paddy Malone, Camille, Aretha Franklin, Dudu Pukwana, Pierre Boulez, Frou Frou, Goran Bregovic, Anouar Brahem, Beyonce, Janet Jackson, Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, sa Jinder (to be continued...)

See my CDpedia | Library and my Last.fm Music Profile.

Right now I'm listening to Dufay and writing Wind Band music and preparing orchestral treatments for the next B.E.F. Music Of Quality and Distinction album with Martyn Ware.

I am immersed in music and everything there is to do with it. I'm not particularly tribal about it. I don't sign in or sign out of particular artists, styles and genres.

I'm actually quite prickly when someone asks me what I like. Mostly because I don't know what to say - I'm into SO much music. As a listener, I can't switch off the fact that I'm a practitioner.

Hi John, thanks for giving us some insight into your Metamatic experience with Mr Foxx.

quote:- "I'm a trained musician by discipline and I was thrown in a deep end, trying to please John and at the same time needing to interpret his verbal instructions into musical phrases and ideas. I didn't know then, but this situation crops up a lot with musicians who have a different set of values and understanding to bring to the table outside those of someone like me who has had a very straight 'classical' training"


In some ways you've answered something I was going to ask, which was if you consider John as someone whose approach to music is wholly as an experimenter, someone who can only operate by taking leaps in the dark (that fortunately have reaped many rewards), or if you see him as actually being at heart just a good old style music maker with a knack for a great tune, and fortunately for him, cursed with hearing the sound of the future playing away in his head?


Taking the idea of John as an artist who makes music rather than solely as a musician, did he ever introduce any visual material to inspire the sessions, or read out passages from books or his own written thoughts to set the mood, and how fleshed out was his vision of the world of Metamatic beforehand. Also, John seems an understandably private person to me, so I wonder just how comfortable he felt about allowing you to enter into his personal artistic vision, or indeed by how much he had to bring you into it to make it real.


As regards your own creativity, what things other than sound inspire and inform your music.

Cheers,
george.

Hi John - really good to see you here, and thanks for this insight and opportunity.

I understand you worked with Martyn Ware on the first BEF album too, which was recorded at The Garden?
What was your involvement with John Foxx when he was setting up that studio etc - did you get involved with many of his recordings after Metamatic?

Cheers

Hi there John,

Thank-you very much for giving everyone the opportunity to ask you questions directly via this forum - a great idea.

I'll pull all of your answers together - and host them on bespoke pages within the website.
I'm very interested to hear more about your work with Martyn Ware and the British Electric Foundation. Can you please tell us how you originally became involved with B.E.F. and how you were approached to contribute to the new album of Quality and Distinction?

Rob

Thanks for your observations and Question(s). They're interesting questions, but not all that easy to answer. Thanks for providing me with an opportunity for me to say something.

It would have been easy and churlish for me as a classical musician to give in to the instinctive posturing that goes along a narrative such as - Who is this guy? He knows nothing about music? He has no obvious technical aptitude for music. All I knew about him was that he had been in a band which he formed through Melody Maker and left them just as they seem to be getting somewhere. Then I saw his lithographs in his flat and it all clicked. What did I actually know? Well it turned out that I knew nothing. Whereas, to me, John came from the very long tradition of visual artist as performer. Think of William Blake sitting at his harmonium for example.

I wanted to get into doing sessions and what John was doing was interesting and different to what I'd experienced before. The feeling in the music was different. Broody, menacing, insecure, fragile with a gutsy innocence. It was pointless to poke holes in it. I got on board and behind what he was doing, which meant I had to bite my lip a lot and not suggest 'musical' answers to creative debates. I can't honestly say how much John allowed me to enter his personal artistic vision beyond the feeling that he didn't allow me to at all at a concept level, that was always going to be his.
He was my client, I was his keyboard player, my job was to articulate his ideas and suppress my own as much as I could without damaging my own effectiveness as a recording artist. I was playing from dots when there weren't ever going to be any on paper.
At the same time there were serious technical issues to overcome. We had a duophonic synth and a monophonic composer. There's a few 'musical' statements John made which still ring in my ear, e.g. "I don't use chords" - which while I understood him to mean we couldn't because of the technology we had, it was also because he didn't want to compose using chords, he wanted the music to be bare and raw, after all, he played guitar using chords when we rehearsed sometimes. The chords on the end of Underpass were faded out on the released single version but appeared again on the Metatronic extended version, I think these were the result of a late night chordal doodling. Vince Clark is also a strummer as he writes but a synthesist when he records product.

What inspires me other than sound in my musical creativity?

Well, feelings mostly. Feelings arising from places, people, ideas, stories and pictures. But I have never said no to someone asking me to perform or compose, so I've been blessed with a musical journey through life. There's not many roles I haven't done in music and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

B.E.F.

How did I get involved with British Electric Foundation? I can't say for certain, but it must have been Gareth or John or the buzz about Lost Jockey there was at the time or a combination of those and many other things. The early '80s were hectic. I was evangelizing about music a lot in those days. Espousing ideas and configurations to anybody who would fuel the ideas. I'd helped put up plaster board in The Garden and watched it come together. After Pathway, it was a joy. During Metamatic, we had used other studios too including SARM East which we shared with the Buggles for a wee while and I met Gary Langan there which later turned into a string session with ABC. I was asked to do the orchestral component of It's Over by Roy Orbison which Billy MacKenzie sang. I also held work out some keys sitting at the piano with some of the other artists. This led to me being invited to work on The Luxury Gap which was recorded at AIR in Oxford Circus.

The Garden became the haunt of Depeche Mode and Vince and I think it's from those days that Gareth began to get more involved with them and Mute, which he still is to this day.

My music making became more heavily committed to Lost Jockey and a fairly futile search for my own musical identity, AKA ego. I just wanted to be able to do anything anyone asked me to do - and it's pretty much the same to this day. My aggenda is that anyone can be involved in music as a practitioner at some level or another. And oh boy, that gets truer everyday with technology and the Web. I just can't get over how we all spend so much time and invest so much thought and feeling into these little pulsations of air we make to produce organised sound. It's astounding really.

I got a message from Martyn earlier - he's going to the CERN Hadron Collider tomorrow. How amazing is that?

John, thanks for your great reply, it is not only a viewpoint that you have carefully recounted in a wonderfully personal manner, but it is also very beautifully expressed.

And as for a trip to the Hadron Collider, yes I am hugely envious. I'm happy to be counted with the geeky admirers of its popular culture mystique on a fantasy and mythical level

John - thanks from me too for these honest and insightful replies. It's great to have an opportunity to find out more about your work.

I've downloaded some of your more recent pieces, and they in turn have re-introduced me to Philip Glass.

I love the way it all weaves together - classic, popular, electronic etc. I have always been interested int he relationships BETWEEN things (like art and music, like classical and pop) perhaps more than each genre itself. To me, its the mash-up, collision and overlap that creates the most interesting results.

I acknowledge my attraction to borders.

For exampe:

• Longformacus,

• Ludlow,

• Cirque de Gavarnie,

• Broken Hill

Areas of convergence. Mixes, mashups, rasenkreuzungklangwerkezeuge.

Eye of the storm.