i’m not sure anyone in 1977, listening to Ultravox’s spectacular album Ha! Ha! Ha!, could have imagined what the band’s lead singer, John Foxx, would be doing in just three years’ time. One of the most pumped-up albums of the late ’70s, Ha! Ha! Ha! was partly fuelled by the raw, messy energy of punk, fused with a slick art rock attitude to form something irresistible and unstoppable. However, closing track ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ was a powerful indication that while electronics had clearly been in the mix beforehand, the band was quite prepared to place them front and centre. Systems of Romance (1978) tentatively took further steps in that direction, with somewhat cleaner, synth-shaped textures, though the post-punk spirit still reigned supreme for much of the album. Once again, though, closing track ‘Just For A Moment’ went far beyond, leaping sideways into an electronic parallel universe, a place for “Listening to the music the machines make”. Picking up threads from earlier tracks ‘Quiet Men’ and ‘Dislocation’, the song has a spare, pared-back, meditative atmosphere, filled with a drum machine heartbeat and fragile synth chords; a piano, halfway through, is the only overt acoustic presence, aside from Foxx’s by turns cool and passionate vocals.
These are clues, sure, but they still only hint at what was to come. As with other groups during this period, disagreements within Ultravox about their future sound and direction led Foxx to decide to quit the band and go it alone. A little over a year later, in January 1980, he released Metamatic. Though its title borrows from Jean Tinguely, it’s also a neat encapsulation of everything the album is articulating. Transcendence and machinery, thought and mechanism – a machine for transformation? ‘Meta’ also suggests self-awareness, which in turn reflects Metamatic back on Foxx’s recalibration (reinvention is surely too strong) of his musical personality on this remarkable album.
In his embracing of electronics, Gary Numan – a stylistic sponge like David Bowie before him – had adopted a persona (literally: “new man”), hoping that image might work in tandem with music and words to convey disaffected gloom. Fad Gadget more powerfully pitted incongruous aural and verbal types against each other – pop-experimental, acoustic-electronic, pitch-noise, upbeat-apocalyptic – to tap into a deep vein of distrust and disquiet. John Foxx, by contrast, opted for an almost passive yet multifaceted demeanour: clean, sharp, illuminated, less monochrome than light-bleached, intense, austere, alert. A quiet man, certainly; dislocated, maybe – but also, crucially, electric.
In some ways Metamatic is just as daunting a prospect today as it was 46 years ago. Among other things, its emotional temperature is hard to read. Look at the artwork for the perfect metaphor: tactile, physical connection – yet with an anonymous, flat, illuminated square. Is it a futuristic inversion of Kubrick’s apes encountering the black monolith? Did the light being emitted trigger the hand’s touch, or vice versa? Perhaps this is neither ‘man-machine’ (Kraftwerk) nor ‘man vs. machine’ (Fad Gadget) nor ‘man as machine’ (Numan), but simply ‘man and machine’ – adjacent, touching, simpatico.
The most archetypal song on the album is the one that opens it, ‘Plaza’. Steady, measured beats; a wavering fifth; some bass stings; followed by the most glorious opening out, synth chords tilting obliquely, while a bassline gets going. Brisk yet slow, restrained yet punchy, cool above yet warm below, cautious yet energetic, understated yet radical. Foxx navigates the skewed tonality via fluid shifts between singing and speaking, in a structure where verses and choruses are replaced by a loud outward refrain and more muted inner reflections. ‘Plaza’ is familiarity refracted, made strange, for all its brightness somehow conveying a nocturnal atmosphere.
The extent to which Foxx has recalibrated as a ‘quiet man’ on Metamatic can be felt above all in the nature of the music’s propulsion. A track like ‘ROckWrok’ (from Ha! Ha! Ha!) is inconceivable in this soundworld. The drum machines provide context, order, a metric grid – but, rarely, pace. This in turn feeds back into its unique aesthetic, shaped by lines and curves, suggested by Foxx’s (J. G. Ballard-inspired) lyrics as a night-time journey through a barren, futuristic cityscape. We explore the ‘Underpass’, where its languid pace is treated to the most effusive tune and bassline while the lyrics sound connected and disconnected, ancient and modern, simultaneously. The bright synth melody can’t cover up their numbness, “Lifting a receiver / Nobody I know … Well, I used to remember / Now it’s all gone”.
‘No-One Driving’ moves at the same speed, and here the lyrics speak of a different cause for detachment: unclear vision, blurry, foggy and faded, a landscape of memories and vapour trails, “the old streets overgrown”. Part of the reason for the music’s nocturnal atmosphere is the implied lack of people, though isolation may well be perceptual rather than actual. The electronics are largely limited to bare bones beats, a burbling bassline conveying motion (with, entirely appropriately, echoes of Kraftwerk’s ‘Metropolis’) and a countermelody practically as strong as Foxx’s vocals. When his voice rises – both here and elsewhere – it repeatedly begs the question of whether it’s simply a rising phrase, or rising emotion. “There’s no-one driving” – cool observation or heated exclamation?
‘030’ reinforces the former possibility, a track leaning into Numan-esque roboticisms, with more than a slight echo of Tubeway Army’s ‘The Life Machine’. While the synths – panned hard to left and right – seem to be striving for melodic uplift (the beats merely count time), Foxx moves between them with analytic detachment, observing, describing, listing: “Male caucasian / Pattern scarring … Sunlit concrete / Missing since 1963”. Forensic and clinical, yet it’s also subject to the same, all too human, issues with perception explored earlier, “Voices merging / Faces blurring / Voices blurring / Faces merging”. The robotics are evidently malfunctioning.
By contrast, while ‘A Blurred Girl’ suggests further myopic effects, they’re subject to strong, emotionally-charged memories. Foxx’s voice veers between a deadened, resigned undertone and an imploring urgency that both laments what’s gone as well as what might have been: “Standing so close / Never quite touching”. Here, too, synth melodies emerge from the periphery, with a more pronounced melancholy, their elegant contours seemingly responding to the very points where Foxx’s voice becomes most flat. ‘Metal Beat’ distils this pervading disaffection – arguably to a point of extremity – in its plain, industrial metallics and cold minimalism. The disorientation and disconnect is total: “Drift in / Drift out / We’re gone / I’m here / Click on / Click off / No, no / Don’t get too near.”
The malfunctions, and the detachment they cause, aren’t limited to vision. In ‘Tidal Wave’ Foxx sings how, “You’re speaking / Can’t hear you / No sound at all”, language reduced to curt diagnostics rather than eloquence. The track moves with the gait and momentum of a dilapidated engine, not driving the music but (as in ‘030’), simply marking time passing. Recurring synth stings – “goes by my windows” – are almost the only musical element to intrude on the song’s monotonous circling trudge. At the centre they extend into a strong melody, but the contrast with Foxx’s own vocal line is stark: stuck in a relentless, repeating holding pattern, blank and observational. The metaphorical tidal wave has presumably passed by already, and we’re witnessing some of its aftermath.
The interaction on the album’s artwork – physicality and abstraction, biology meets geometry – is picked up in one of the most stripped-back songs, ‘He’s a Liquid’. “He’s an angle / She’s a tangent”, Foxx narrates, his voice emotionally abstruse. Again it’s the electronics that seem to act as both counterpoint and partial mouthpiece. In lieu of an actual chorus, the synths describe an arching melody, embellished with moments of glitter. There’s a slight instability, even a queasiness, in the tune as it continues, returning to that aspect of harmonic ambiguity heard in ‘Plaza’. It feels in keeping with Foxx’s reduction of human qualities and identities to a litany of opposing objects and concepts. But while the incompatibility of the recounted relationship is clear, “his” (Foxx’s?) nature is less so. It’s purposefully ambiguous, but the reduction of self to a liquid suggests a fundamental breaking down of elements, and a complete loss of integrity.
Whether some kind of answer is to be found in ‘A New Kind of Man’ is debatable. The imagery is filmic (redolent of Fad Gadget’s ‘The Box’), its narrative a perhaps idealised depiction of transformation, transcending the current self and situation. Such a different attitude requires a different music, and here the electronics are contrastingly bright and intense, driving and chattery, sharp and angular. Like an art rock track reconfigured for machines, Foxx nonetheless cleaves to his remote vocal delivery, almost entirely spoken, while the synths again do the heavy lifting, even waxing lyrically in a central faux-guitar solo. It’s all a dream, a fiction, brought to an end in an instant as “… someone says his name / He waved out of the film again / He turned and he flickered and he walked away …”.
The way John Foxx closes Metamatic is extremely striking and unexpectedly moving. Everything that’s gone before has come from a place of disorientation, separation, isolation and uncertainty. Lyrically, reality is abstracted; connections are memories and possibilities; movement isn’t exactly aimless or circular, but fruitless and repetitive. Musically, the relationship between voice and electronics has always been, as i described it above, ‘man and machine’, adjacent, touching, simpatico – indeed, the music often acts either to expand on the subtext or to try to counter it. Yet in ‘Touch and Go’, Metamatic encroaches upon both synthesis and transcendence.
The words remain troubled. The atmosphere is illuminated by “shatter light”, and the nocturnal city has now lost its order in a “sea of seats” and “tangled-up streets”. More memories pass by, of “meetings in the park”, “fires from years ago”, recollections that are again distanced as if through filmic separation, viewing “friends / Through this tiny lens”. Yet in spite of all that: “Now it’s springtime / On the moving stairway / Time to start again”. The song considers possibilities of tangibility and clarity, of space and colour, water and warmth, connection and friendship.
The music matches this uplifted outlook completely: brisk, punchy bass and beats with lengthy countermelodies, while Foxx – consistent to the last – flits between speech and song. It’s here, at the end, that acuity returns, and perceptions are resharpened. As such, while ‘Touch and Go’ aspires, the title is an apt, perfect double meaning: in addition to its obvious suggestion of an outcome that’s far from certain, it’s entirely possible that any attempts at connection could amount to the same failure as before, a literal case of touch and go. Yet in spite of that, in spite of everything, Metamatic ends with three words combining more than a trace of defiance and triumph: “So let’s go”.
