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During October John Foxx will be presenting a series of five programmes for BBC Radio 3 programme The Essay entitled Key Moments...



Episode One - Auntie Elsie’s Upright Piano

For the first programme in the series ‘Key Moments’, composer and performer John Foxx takes us back to the first piano he ever played, at his childhood home in Chorley, Lancashire. His Auntie Elsie gave him her parlour piano - and it was a treasured piece of furniture with its highly polished walnut veneer, brass candlesticks and ivory keys. As a teenager, sitting in his front room for hours after school, John taught himself to play in and started composing his first pieces. These were heavily influenced by hearing Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies, played by a friend at art college in Manchester. John tells us the story of his first piano, his introduction to music and how it led to his career as a pop star, pianist, performer and composer.

Broadcast on Monday the 19th of October 2026 at 21:45 on BBC Radio 3 [LINK]

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Episode Two - The Royal College of Art

For the second programme in John Foxx’s ‘Key Moments’, he takes us to the Royal College of Art in Kensington Gore in the mid-1970s. Here, on the top floor, looking out over Hyde Park, in an abandoned room, John discovered his first grand piano. It was a Bechstein, and he would come up to play and compose on his own in the evenings, with no interruptions. John remembers the moment he opened up the piano lid of a grand for the first time and was able to see the 230 strings vibrating together as he played. It changed his life. The RCA piano has long disappeared, so instead John takes us next door to the Royal College of Music, to the grand piano in the Director’s office. There, he recreates the pieces he composed fifty years ago, experimenting with the sustain pedal and the resonance of the strings. At the end of his time at the Royal College, John formed the band Ultravox and became its lead singer and song-writer, and for a while, his music took a different direction into electronic, avant-garde pop.

Broadcast on Tuesday the 20th of October 2026 at 21:45 on BBC Radio 3 [LINK]

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Episode Three - Marble Arch Studios

In the third programme in the series ‘Key Moments’, composer and performer John Foxx takes us to the moment in his life when Ultravox, the band he formed at Art College, was recording its first album at Marble Arch Studios. It was 1975, and they were recording at weekends in the studios in so called ‘dead time’, when it wasn’t being used. As lead singer and song-writer of Ultravox, John worked with the legendary music producer Steve Lillywhite to create the band’s first hits. Steve and John meet up again now to remember how their collaboration worked then and how the grand piano in the recording studio allowed John to amplify and play with the resonance and reverberation of the music he’d been composing as an art student. This combination of piano, microphones and reverb units has been the basis of all John’s piano music and experimentation for the last 50 years, since that moment in Marble Arch. He says all three are essential to produce the piano sound he’s obsessed with - the magical string resonance and vibration stretched to its limits by technology.

Broadcast on Wednesday the 21st of October 2026 at 21:45 on BBC Radio 3 [LINK]

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Episode Four - Harold Budd and Translucence

For the fourth part of John Foxx’s series ‘Key Moments’, he takes us behind the scenes to recreate one of the most important musical collaborations of his life, working with the avant-garde Californian musician and composer Harold Budd. They met at one of John’s concerts in the late 1980s and went onto work together on an influential double album, Translucence and Drift Music. In the basement of The Piano Shop in Bath, John sets up a Yamaha upright piano and his equipment exactly as he did with Harold. He attaches mics as close as possible to the strings, and as he plays, the sound is fed through the same reverb unit he used then. The recording demonstrates the dreamlike sound of slow, sustained resonance and full piano harmonics which create a timeless musical ‘evanescence’, as John describes it.

Broadcast on Thursday the 22nd of October 2026 at 21:45 on BBC Radio 3 [LINK]

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Episode Five - The Piano of the Future

For the fifth and final part in the series ‘Key Moments’, John steps forward into the future of the piano; this versatile, creative, inspirational musical instrument he is fascinated by and has spent his life exploring. He meets three people who are physically and metaphorically taking the piano apart and reinventing it with AI and robotics and the increasingly porous human/technology interface. Sarah Nicolls is a classically trained pianist who has literally stood the instrument on its head, she has engineered the upright piano, levitating the strings by 45 degrees to be at right angles to the keyboard. Ben Eyes has reprogrammed an old Victorian piano to become robotic, using machine learning to play by itself, with or without human interaction. Lastly, John meets Professor Andrew McPherson, who runs the Augmented Instruments Lab at Imperial College. He’s built a Magnetic Resonance Piano, which produces the beautiful sustain and reverberation sound John has been exploring all his life.

Broadcast on Friday the 23rd of October 2026 at 21:45 on BBC Radio 3 [LINK]

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Rob

Wow.

Thanks for the information Rob