Metamatic Forums John Foxx John Foxx and Louis Gordon Your fav. list of John with Louis !

Well here are the votes of the memberD jury (earlier than expected) with all my douze points tracks:

Shifting City
Through My Sleeping
- a toss-up between this and 'Ocean' which was greatly improved on in the live recordings.

Pleasures of Elec.
Nightlife
- Camera a close second

Crash & Burn
Sex Video

Drive Ep
Drive (single edit)

From Trash
A Million Cars
- not an easy choice as for me it's where the pair start to get interesting. Runners up: A Room as Big as a City, The One Who Walks, Impossible

Sideways
Underwater
- again, not an easy choice with 'Silent Way' and 'Sunshine' also on the medals podium.

That concludes the voting. Did I miss any out?
I didn't put the live recordings in.

So we are keen to see your fav. list .

I have to buy these packet too + the Burning car remix vinyl - but will wait for Cargo in October and go direct in the shops..

I assume the both albums of John are "The Golden Section" and "In Mysterious Ways"?


Thanks for your list Member D !
Nightlife is a nice track for a live gig. The later version ( to hear on "...as Big as a city" ) is great too!

And Underwater was an outstanding track on Sideways for me too on my first listens - but later it became a change and now it is Neuro Video for me.

Cheers, Andreas

Andreas, since I first read your post a couple of days ago I've been mulling over this and it wasn't easy to pick out the most outstanding tracks off of each album as I love them all. Louis certainly brought back John from the cold and musically the two together have worked well. So here goes

Shifting City - The title track Shifting City because when I first heard this on Modern Art it blew me away and I like the studio version along with the live version.

Pleasure's Of Electricity - Falling room because I feel John puts his heart into his singing

Crash & Burn - She Robot

Drive EP - Underwater Dreamsex

From Trash - A million Cars

Sideways - Nuero Video.

It's surprisng just how people on this forum differ in their opinions.

Peter

Yes Peter, I know it is a hard work to make the decision for the best track.

Shifting City ... do you remember the great evening we heard this track live for the first time? We were totally enthusiastic and you bought a lot of CD's on that evening. I assume you had only dry bread with water the next days?...


For me, my favourite track was replaced by another one over the years. So my fav. list from today is not the same I had after the first listens.

Had anyone made the same experience?

Andreas

I agree, I do this all the time.

But what I find tends to happen is that after a period of time ( a few weeks/months), I return to my previous favourites!
These don't tend to change much over a long period (I'm talking a year or more...) and form the basis of my All Time Top 100.

Which reminds me, I haven't revisited this for over three years.

Time to start again

This is interesting . I never made this experience for me too. What was happen to me was I find fav. tracks after a few listens - then after some weeks or months and a lot listens it changed to another track. But this track was THE! track for me and it never changed again. But what was happen is I found another nice track which second the fav.one over the years - and this track was replaced from time to time.

Andreas

Calls to close to make But I'll go for" Cities of Light" from TPOE surely this is what John is all about the perfect dichotomy berwen detachment/fascination , I'll go with the majority vote for everything else

This has happened to me with a couple of Foxx tracks, as well as several other examples.

When Your Dress was released and getting radio airplay etc I bought the single and played it hundreds of times, almost 'endlessly' in fact for months. It was far and away the best track John Foxx had done since I had the same experience with Burning Car a few years previously.

Years have passed, and I have listed other tracks among my favourites, but it is the longevity of these two in particular (and perhaps the memories evoked by hearing these tracks again) that makes me never tire of listening to them.
That's maybe because they were SINGLES ??? and written, produced and recorded to be heard in isolation - especially Burning Car. To capture a moment in time. I don't know, but I expect that has something to do with it.

I think that since John Foxx is now an 'album only' artist since his second coming, it has become much harder (and ultimately unrealistic) to lift particular songs out of context and identify them as 'favourites'.

Which (to an extent) explains the difficulty we all faced - and perhaps the artists themselves will - when compiling our hypothetical 'Best of John and Louis' lists.
It may also be a contributing factor among the reasons he and Louis have not released a single.

Doesn't mean that this hasn't been a fun exercise, but I'm wondering if this is why I found it so difficult...

Shifting City - "Here We Go": by track 3 I found something to tell me for sure this was John back from the wilderness.

The Pleasures of Electricity - "Quiet City". Canary Wharf in January after the madness of Christmas gives way to blank cold undecorated nights, but the days begin to start earlier again.

Crash and Burn - "Smoke": a recent revelation, something someone said on here about it being the aftermath of the car crash that is "Ray 1/Ray 2".

Drive EP - "Your Shadow" although "Making Movies" has become a live favourite. I think of "MM" as the real A side of this single.

From Trash - "Impossible", possibly.

Sideways - maybe "Sideways", moody intro followed by ecstatic half-chant.