Metamatic Forums John Foxx John Foxx Is John's backcatalogue a complete mess? :)

I ask this rather cheeky question semi-seriously...

A few months ago, my long-serving 160GB iPod got stolen on holiday Anyways to cut a long story short,
this meant I got a new MP3 player, and bit the bullet of re-ripping all my CD collection in lossless format (MONTHS it's taking! months!)

The past week, this has meant I've been going through something like 45 different John Foxx CDs I somehow seem to have amassed over the years (!?!)
Whilst nonetheless feasting on a lot of tunes I hadn't listened to in ages, I couldn't help but notice:

- John's back catalogue is basically a right old mess!

- There's over half a dozen different compilation albums, most of which just have one or two 'exclusive' tracks, the rest being endless duplications.

- All of John's original Virgin albums have been re-issued/re-mastered about 3 or 4 or 5 (!?) times on vinyl and CD, each time with confusingly different selections of bonus tracks (but seldom ever definitive or complete!).

- Even John's albums with Louis Gordon & Harold Budd seem to all have been re-issued/re-packaged at least twice, generally, again, with different bonus tracks (but not definitive/complete).

- Virtually all song-based material (especially the Louis Gordon stuff, also The Maths material) seems to get released as two or three of the following: (1) studio version (2) live-in-rehearsal-studio new arrangement (2) actual live-in-concert version (4) a demo/radioedit/remix version.
Again, these different versions can end up scattered across a bewildering array of different discs.

- A lot of these CDs are now out of print too, making it even harder to fill gaps if you didn't buy them at the time.

- Things reach a new low with the (albeit musically sublime) 'London Overgrown', where you have a previously released track included but retitled, instrumental versions of previously released tracks retitled, and even a track from an old compilation album now seconded to this new set.

- The original 3 Ultravox albums on CD are actually amoung the tidiest of all his releases - they do at least collect all the contemporary non-album tracks with no duplications or omissions.


I'm somewhere between moaning and amused with all this, really, I guess!
On one level I can't say I don't enjoy being a total John Foxx anorak and searching through all these oceans of tracks to work out how many different versions of "A Million Cars", "Endlessly" or "No-one Driving" I actually own.
On the other hand, there does come a point where it's just blimmin' exasperating, and surely starts becoming a barrier to people accessing John's music?

So, what do you think of London Overgrown exactly - is it a new low or musically sublime?

You'll excuse me if "I ask this rather cheeky question semi-seriously..."

Rob

I think it's musicially sublime - the best 'Cathedral Oceans' style album John has put out yet.

But I also think it's the worst yet in terms of confusing his discography!
It includes two previously released tracks, one of which is renamed to obfuscate that fact, and two remixes of previously released tracks, again renamed to obfuscate the fact.

I think you make some interesting points here, in both a serious and audacious way.

Yes, John's catalogue is a little 'untidy' perhaps if you try and wander through it, but that's partly due to his creative nature and the sheer volume of stuff produced in different genres and with different collaborators.

Steve Malins (and Rob) have done a wonderful job in the last ten years trying to find paths through the material, and I think if anything the stuff is now MORE accessible to a wider audience than it has ever been.

Part of the joy of being a Foxx fan is the ability to meander through material in your own direction. Completists will find this infuriating, but that's not the artist or the management's problem. Neither is there ever any obligation on anyone to buy another re-issue - often they are released either to refresh stocks and maintain a High Street presence, to reflect a change of ownership or licensing, or of course to present new material.

For my part, I have to say cataloguing it, keeping track of everything and basically hanging on is immensely fun and I love seeing new issues of John's work, newly presented and (I think fairly) opening his mass of work up to new, younger and different audiences who come to This Jungle from all kinds of backgrounds.

I have also come to believe that no-one, probably not even Foxx, has any real idea of exactly what he has recorded let alone where everything is or how to find it. Don't forget, he has not really been managed at all in the past so stuff can be all over the place and of varying degrees of quality.

The titles are indeed exasperating. It drives us all mad trying to ascertain whether material is 'new' or not, or whether it is a variation of something we have heard before. maybe it's a version of something we haven't heard before that exists in different formats in a shoebox somewhere.
Calling something a title that has been used before is 'a mess' I agree, but it is what it is.

A jungle is 'a mess'. A city of tangled streets is 'a mess'.

Walk. Discover. Enjoy.

I think its only in very recent years (perhaps even within 12 months) that we can now look back over John's career and see it as a whole, and thus start picking a way through it, seeing connections and relevant songs that were not always significant at the time?

Yes, versions exist for different purposes and it is very hard to please everyone in terms of making them accessible. Completists are very few relatively speaking, so the cost of making stuff available has to be considered. Hence the high profile tracks get included again I suppose, for anyone new to John Foxx.

And I am delighted to see more people are now coming on board and 'getting it'.

Waffling of course, but I understand where you are coming from.

Many artists are indeed messy people, and can benefit greatly from having people around them to 'curate' what they are doing.

Rob certainly deserves a medal for his outstanding efforts in that regard!

Most of the dilemmas here are not remotely unique to John!

Myself, I certainly tend to take a "if you've spent time on it, then get it 'finished' and put it out!" attitude to my own music (much to the horror of some of the people I've worked with, who have more of an 'over my dead body' attitude to making public anything they don't think is up to scratch, and who would actually sometimes prefer to delete certain stuff they've moved on from, and pretend it never happened...

Take something like 'Electrofear': I can well imagine some taking the view that "It was important work-in-progress at the time, but it never got finished, it never got released, forget it. The best songs got reused later on. Leave it!" -
but then others will never give over, asking all the time "but what about Electrofear? Can't we hear that? Can't you release it?"

Also all the live versions - you've reworked songs for a new tour, you've got new arrangements. Some are way different to the originals. Do you release a live album? Do you release an idealised live-in-studio version of the new arrangement?
Are you trying to document your activity as an artist? Or are you trying to present definitive versions?
And does this mean too many confusing different versions, not all of them all that good, get released? Does this mean you're diluting the quality of your work?

I know that some artists, for example, just want the "best" version of a song to remain on catalogue - David Sylvian seems to have taken this line with Japan stuff, stopping many of the single edits and so on coming out, or preferring particular live or re-mixed versions to studio originals.

I have to be honest and say, for example, that I still find the original Ultravox! versions of HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR to be about 20 times better than any new versions John has recorded since, whether radio session, live with Louis, live with the Maths...

I agree with most of that too.
Certainly the bits about the updated solo versions of Ultravox / Metamatic tracks...

Documenting the career of an artist is a job for others - and I have made a pretty good stab at it, but whether or not the project will ever be finished remains to be seen.

I think also that attitudes to material being available change as an artist's career develops and they get older, more experienced, more material behind them, different intentions etc.

I think it's fair to say that, to an extent, making money from releasing previous material IS an important consideration, because it can help to fund new work. And also of course it provides an income that is (relatively) easy to generate. There's nothing wrong with that, it is justified and perfectly reasonable. Why not.

Of course artists want the 'best' version of a track to be the one that people hear and I'm sure most artists are perfectionists. They also move on very quickly to new things and new ideas. It's up to us to follow as we will.

Warhol went back to re-doing old things in different ways at the end of his career. Were they 'better' than the originals? Who is to say.

Electrofear is an interesting album, and for me no more incomplete than anything else. It does make a huge difference hearing it for the first time ten years or so after it was recorded because of course it seems out of context with the material John was then recording with Louis.
Had it come out in 1992, for example, would we have received it differently?

Today I finally got to the end of ripping and sorting everything.
(I used "MediaMonkey" as my Librarian software - a good programme).

One conclusion:
"A Man, A Woman & a City" comes off rather better than most of the compilations - although it contains half a dozen tracks that are already released elsewhere, it does appear to be the first physical release for over half a dozen John Foxx & the Maths tracks (even if most of those are remixes) - particularly if you include the three 'deluxe' download tracks.
Almost makes up for the fact that I got so confused over the early months of this year that I actually pre-ordered it twice DOH!

The "20th Century: The Noise" compilation is probably the least value, with only the one tiny new John-noodling-on-a-softsynth track, and mopping up "Splendour" from that Orphée compilation.

The "Glimmer" compilation just has a few scrag-ends, and the old "Modern Art" one actually is essential for 7" single edits.

"Metatronic" is one of the most confused - when you cross off all the duplicates, your left with it having half a bunch of John's solo stuff, someone else's remix of John singing on a Jori Hulkkonen track, and a bunch John Foxx & Louis Gordon live tracks.

That aside, John & Louis' albums are actually more self-contained that it might first appear (i.e., despite their tracks continually popping up on other compilations, you can still assemble a coherent set of Foxx/Gordon-only CDs)... this is blurred a bit though by all the live stuff where they keep talking John's Virgin-era solo tunes and also Ultravox tunes... culminating of course in "A New Kind of Man", which contains them doing all the Metamatic tracks live...

...this is further confused by 'The Maths' trying to tackle lots of Metamatic-era tracks and then getting Robin Simon along to play Ultravox tunes too (on the 'Analogue Circuit' Roundhouse release).

I think I need a cup of tea

Cake, with that?

I'll bring biscuits too. Well done for sorting all your Foxxy music

Nice thread - with valuable opinions all round.

You could argue the start of the mess began a long time ago:

Back in 1990 in the days before information (or after - with the notable exception of Extreme Voice), I started with "No-One Driving", the 7 inch. Only later could/did I discover there was a double-pack too. It took a while to discover that the last few tracks on each side of "The Golden Section" cassette began as B sides or came from another campaign altogether! "Assembly" brought a large part of "The Garden" to CD but not all. It took decades to realise the 12 inch of "Like A Miracle" actually contained an extended remix. To a degree, the rereleases and compilations have tidied up that kind of mess (all nicely on CD for a start), whilst introducing many new loose threads. I look at the A to Z on this very site and wonder if I have even heard of some of them (though I realise not all the references are to songs). So many questions. Does "Miles Away" belong with the other 1980 singles/B sides (I always thought so back in the day) is just one of them. The main question though (and I feel we have been pretty spoiled, since 2003 in particular) - can we have some more please?