Does This Sound Dated To You?

I was looking for something a bit different to listen to the other day and decided to listen to Metamatic by John Fox. I haven't listened to the album as a whole for quite a few years, I have put on things like Underpass and No One Driving but only as individual songs.

What really struck me was that the music hasn't really dated all that much. Foxx's vocal style on the album I think is the main reason that you could date it to the beginning of the 80's but unlike, Foxx's contemporary, Gary Numan whose album Telecon released the same year as Metamatic is definitely of it's time and has not dated well at all. Whereas the track posted, Mr No I think could have been produced anytime in the last thirty years and if I didn't know better and somebody told me that it was recorded a couple of years ago I would probably have believed them. The track was originally a b-side on the No-One Driving single but was included in the 2007 re- release of the album.

John Foxx - Mr No

John Foxx

My first foray into the realms of electronic music began with Gary Numan with the songs Cars and Are Friends Electric when I was ten. I bought or was bought every single and album up until She's Got Claws when I either stopped buying due to the fact that the single was pish or because Numan had came out as a Tory. It would be quite a few years until I could listen to him again after that revelation.

I think that Numan mentioned Ultravox and John Foxx somewhere as I remember asking an older friend about them and him playing me some stuff and me quite liking this strange vocal delivery The music seemed darker and more forboding than that of Numan's. I remember buying a double pack single by Ultravox which contained the tracks Slow Motion, Quiet Men, Hiroshima Mon Amour and Dislocation. However I'm sure that that was after I already had the John Foxx solo singles Underpass and No One's Driving and the album Metamatic.

My dalliance with Foxx and Ultravox pretty much stopped there. I decided to dig out Metamatic which I had replaced on cd a few years ago, recently and was quite amazed that, although it does not sound cutting edge these days it has not dated as badly as some other stuff from that era.

Was it just me, or was John Foxx quite a scary looking bloke back then? The only thing which scared me more at this time was the Parkerilla album cover which I remember seeing in the record dept of Lewis' store in Glasgow around this time.

John Foxx - Underpass