Metamatic Forums John Foxx John Foxx 80s videos

This has come up on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlLZ5inMcFk

24 1/2 mins of 80s Foxx-age, including a très bizarre Lose All Sense of Time..

01. He's a Liquid
02. Underpass
03. No-One Driving
04. Miles Away
05. Dancing Like a Gun
06. Endlessly
07. Stars On Fire
08. Lose All Sense of Time

uploaded by www. paralisisnyc.com

I've the old VHS of Videos circa the '90s, not watched it since then, is Lose All Sense Of Time Mr Leigh's handiwork on that tape, can't recall

I believe so.

It's the most interesting one of the set.
I've always liked the elements of 'Miles Away' that link with JOhn moving on from the Metamatic into The Garden...

Which is what the songs all about, n'est-ce pas? "there's a new man at the edge of me..." etc.

Great stuff anyway - forgot to thank Federica Martini for putting this up on facebook.

I bought this VHS titled simply 'John Foxx' when I visited London the first time. I still got the casette. My favourites of it are He's A Liquid, Dancing Like A Gun and Endlessly.

Thank you for providing the link. I've been trying to track down the video for Endlessly for a while (it looks like it was filmed on a budget of 55p). Was there only an excerpt of Stars on Fire completed and no full video?

Lose All Sense of Time is not unlike the video output of Talking Heads. Wonder if Peter Gabriel saw this before devising the video for Sledgehammer?

I like 'Lose All Sense Of Time' as well. At times one is reminded of Terry Gilliam's collage animation during the early 1970s ('Monty Python's Flying Circus').

Also the odd heads atop the parade of human figures remind one, a bit, of the pantheon of Ancient Egypt.

It's my favourite too.
I would love to have John Foxx do more of this kind of thing.

You'll be looking forward to the Metadelic DVD then...

Indeed!

Just watching the Metadelic DVD this morning.

- MILES AWAY is mostly a collage of archive footage, 1920s to 1950s I guess, a lot of it in New York, transport, technology, big architecture... interspersed with a few shots of John. To be honest, it's not really collaged and cut together in a way which makes a lot of sense to me as regards fitting the music! And of course most of the footage is grainy as hell.

- EUROPE AFTER THE RAIN is just from Top of the Pops. The audio is stereo though, whilst the BBC broadcast in mono in those days, so I'm guessing they've replaced the original soundtrack here with a clean WAV from the album... this may explain why the sound sync is a bit hopeless in places - or maybe John just wasn't very good at miming! Not sure why they put a drum kit on stage with no drummer! But ToTP was ever thus...

- DANCING LIKE A GUN - very much shot on video, with quite a few fancy video effects & tricks.... it's all very staged and teetering on the brink of being utterly ludicrous I love it! lol Like some guy in a suit doing karate kicks (enhanced with overlayed video sparks) in time to the electro-snares. Basically, the song itself is a bit wierd and off-kilter for a pop single, and I think the visuals fit it well and give the right atmosphere, even it's a slightly bonkers atmosphere that was always going to struggle a bit to win the public over...

ENDLESSLY - this one looks like it was shot on 16mm film - as such, it's a shame we're lumbered these days with a slightly grotty telecine transfer-to-video from 1983 - if the original film negatives still existed, you could re-scan them and make this look *stunning*... but even in its present form its really rather nice, quite refined and elegant on a budget, and I like John struggling up the spiral stairs. I guess to the public of the time, it maybe came across as a poor-man's-Duran-Duran-cum-Brideshead-Revisted, but I like it

STARS ON FIRE - this is only 1 minute long? It's quite a nice animation, with 'Quantel paintbox' spinning video cubes and nice zooms onto prints of John's face, animated light cones on faces of Madonnas etc - I was really rather enjoying it and disappointed when it faded out after only a minute!

LOSE ALL SENSE OF TIME - utterly bizzare! Poised somewhere between Terry Gilliam and the surrealist collages of Max Ernst, the images John has chosen seem to have absolutely bugger all to do with the rather bland mid-80s pop music of the song.


Whilst this is a good companion to the DVD on Metatronic, am I not right in thinking that the original canonical promo video for UNDERPASS has not yet been released? We got a "black and white" edit on Metratronic which appears to be missing a lot of footage (seen elsewhere, in colour, in the 'Sinister Subway' remix)