Metamatic Forums John Foxx John Foxx and Louis Gordon Shifting City advertising and reviews

I've been thinking about Shifting City recently - mainly because I've been updating my review of it (still ongoing...)

I just wondered, for those of you who had patiently waited for a new release from John for so long, what kind of advertising (if any) there was for the album at the time, and how it was received by the music press?

Was it marketed with Cathedral Oceans, since they were released on the same day?

I seem to recall just leafing through the racks in Virgin Megastore in Brighton in 1997, and coming across it... I remember being "oh! is this a NEW John Foxx album?" I was quite confused cos the date on it was maybe 1995? (Or was that Cathedral Oceans... which I also found too).

So basically, I didn't encounter any advertising for it and just chanced across it - and was quite delighted by it when I got it home! (cos it wasn't schite like most 90s synth-pop-band comeback albums! But in fact really rather good and contemporary sounding, without losing own sound)

I do recall then finding an interview with John about it in "Future Music" magazine though.

I found a copy iin HMV iin 1997 but it was before I was a fan of John's music. I only had SOR, so at the time I obviously hadn't been looking for it. It just caught my eye as it was "that weird bloke from Ultravox!"

Slightly OT but on the subject of Future Music I vaguely remember an edition of FM with Metamatic samples on the 'free' CD .. I think that may have been around that time .. or later .. not sure, they're very hazy years for me.

I seen an advertisment in nme or sounds, and it just stated John playing live in something called 'Exotour'. It was a small color ad in the back pages. It was the first i had heard from John since late '85.

yeah I think the 'free Metamatic samples' in Future Music was that same article which accompanied the release of Cathedral Oceans and Shifting City.
John explained where he'd met Louis Gordon and stuff in it.

I wonder if anybody still has this... it would be very interesting to read. Well I'd like to read it anyway

Yeah similar story here. I had my weekly wander into Sister Ray and saw 'Shifting City' and 'Cathedral Oceans' sitting side by side to each other! I remember the day clearly as Heaven 17 were doing a gig that evening at Heaven! Like Feline, I was confused by the copyright dates and stood there thinking "How the hell did I miss these by two years!?". Brian who owns Sister Ray was as confused as I was.

So, two Foxx albums in one day and Heaven 17 did 'Being Boiled' Wo-hoooo!

I have a copy of this interview together with the permission to reproduce it on this site. Please bear with me, and it'll be one of the first items to make its way into the Media Archive.

Rob

Great - this 'ere media archive is going to be like a holy grail of all things Foxx!

Will look forward to it.

That's the point - if only I could find some time to actually work on it...

Rob

If you want any help with anything (that doesn't involve programming!), you can always give me a shout.

I'd stopped buying the music press years ago. So I can't add much to this discussion as I'd never seen any advertising.
I guess in a way Modern Art was an advertising medium in the fact that Shifting City was mentioned on this album when reading the track listing along with Cathredral Oceans.
Still it took me another 8 weeks to track down the albums eventually buying them at the Mean Fiddler in Sept 2001.

I think looking back pre June 2001 that I was ever going to hear a new JF album or hear from him again. I'd always thought he'd given up music after IMW. Modern Art, Shifting City and CO rekindled my interest in Johns music. So Here We Go

Peter

I mysteriously vanished a few years after John Foxx, so I didn't know anything until I heard about Crash and Burn. So I had a rather nice goody bag to fill when I started to look into it!

Did anyone actually get Shifting City or Cathedral Oceans in 1995? First I heard of them was in 1998, at this site or the old Ultravox forum, and I ordered them through a local record store shortly thereafter. Never saw anything in print about them, but I wasn't buying a whole lot of UK music papers or magazines.

Both Cathedral Oceans and Shifting City were released on the 24th of March, 2007. The 2005 date (on both sleeves) refers to when the material was originally registered for publishing.

Rob

eh? .. which century Rob?

Should be 1997.

What a great year for music it was too...

Oooops...
Sorry about that...

Yeah, should've been 1997.

Rob

annus terribilis for me .. (or is that horribilis?) .. but I digress ..

Well, briefly continuing the digression, '97 was also the worst year personally I've ever had, for reasons best kept to myself.

But with Depeche Mode's Ultra, Bowie's Earthling, Jarre's Oxygene 7-13 and Numan's Exile, I thought it was a golden time for good music. Of course, had I been into John's solo material at the time, that would have just been the icing on the cake!

I suppose the reason I started this thread was to find out if John's "comeback" was hghly promoted in the press, or if the two albums quietly slid their way on to the shelves...

Ok fair enough Alex . .funnily enough it's also the year I think I first started with internet, albeit on a very limited scale..

perhaps we should start an I Love 1997 thread...

BTW found a review of CO3 in an old-ish Q yesterday .. would you be interested in it for your site? Spoiler: it's unfavourable.

I would certainly be interested in seeing it. I don't have any kind of media archive (yet!) so I'm not sure where it would go.

I do remember a scathing review - probably in Q - where they said John was singing so close to the mic, they could hear how closely he had shaved that morning.

I think that was a review for TPOE though.

Despite being an unfaily unfavourable review, that line did stick in my mind!!

Okay, so I wasn't as late to the party as I was afraid I might have been. As frustrating as it sometimes is to know that some of you already have a CD that I may not get for a few more weeks, it's a lot better than reading about Ultravox in the fall of 1979 and not finding anything by FoxxVox until January 1981.

i have a similar story as the rest of you but i was in los angeles at rockaway records down the street from where i was living. confused, too, by the earlier date printed on 'shifting city' and really happy to see 'cathedral oceans.' i was really elated to find them and kept trying to imagine what the music was going to be like. when i saw louis gordon's name, i thought, for whatever reason, that it was going to be all-instrumental music.