Destroyer & John Foxx- Rome (Neu Los Angeles Remix)

Remember

1 City | 2 Lives | 3 Reasons | 4 Nights
Remember | Remember Me | This Way


Lyric excerpt "Remember" by John Foxx/Nation 12

Burning Car

She was dressed in a white suit
and she looked like a bride too

...Then I looked at the sunset
and it felt like a stage set

...As I looked at my watch and face
I remembered the time and place

...and I breathed in the night perfume
as we met in the dark room.

It´s a burning car.

Glimmering Through All These Years

One of my all time heroes, the amazing John Foxx is going to release "Glimmer" a "Best of" double CD in late september.

After leaving Ultravox in 1979, Foxx recorded "Metamatic" one of the most amazing and era defining albums of 1980.

Fed on an a healthy diet of J.G. Ballard and "dressed in european grey", Foxx wanted "to make a kind of music which might have happened if America had never existed. A sort of minimalist European urban electronic folk music. I had a picture of a future jukebox in some lost European motorway service station. I just listened to it play what became 'Metamatic.'"


His sparse electronic arrangements paired with his passionate but equally detached voice are a perfect backing for Foxx´ fantastic lyrical talents. He was the herald of a new romantic world view, which embraced the all surrounding brutal architecture and found new meanings and equations in human interaction with machines.

Technically "Metamatic" is certainly not a quantum-leap in electronic music. Only one year later Kraftwerk would set new standards with "Computerwelt" and The Human League`s "Dare" re-defined electronic pop. By this time the Foxx debut sounded like it came from another era.

During his next three albums, Foxx would move towards a more conventional take on romanticism. He was asked by Michelangelo Antonioni to provide the soundtrack for "Identificazion di una donna" and went into musical hiatus after his Beatle-esque "In Mysterious Ways" in 1985.


Foxx returned to music with lots of collaborations and different projects in 1990 and is currently busier than ever.

The Best-of compilation "Glimmer" tries to give a vast overview over his influential oevre. Included are some of his collaborations (i am missing the amazing "Remember" from his Nation 12 period)

CD1:
Glimmer
Plaza
No-One Driving
Underpass
Quiet City
Dislocation
030
Twilight's Last Gleaming
Sunset Rising
Cities Of Light 5
Europe After The Rain
Hiroshima Mon Amour
The Garden

CD2:
Through My Sleeping
Endlessly
My Sex
He's A Liquid
Carcrash Flashback V2
Dancing Like A Gun
Just For A Moment
Dislocated (with Jori Hulkkonen)
Burning Car
Miles Away
Stepping Sideways (with Harold Budd)
Free Robot (with Metamatics)
No-One Driving (early version)
Plaza (extended version)
Burning Car (Dub Terror/Karborn 2008 mix)

More on John Foxx on the official Metamatic and the fansite
Quiet City

What´s Inside the Box?

Film 1





























What is inside the box? The end of the movie!

The stills are from "Kiss me deadly", a 1955 "Mike Hammer/Mickey Spillane"-film which was directed by Robert Aldrich.

Apparantly the ending of the film was changed shortly after its debut in the USA. Because the film did bad business and some religious nuts objected to the immorality of it all, the final minute of the film was edited in a way that suggested that the Mike Hammer-character and his secretary/fuck-buddy actually died in the fiery inferno that is unleashed after "the box" is opened.

I think this is a very rare case of changing an already bleak "happy ending" to an even bleaker one to increase the box-office.

For decades the mutilated ending was heralded as a stroke of genius and it was even suggested that the bumpy editing inspired the French Nouvelle Vague.

This is very unlikely because it seems that the originally intended ending was kept intact for the international market!
Francois Truffaut clearly describes the full ending in his critique and I remember having videotaped the original ending off of German tv sometime in the late 80s or early nineties. (I hope this will remain the only "Truffaut and me"-sentence I will ever write).

It is quite ironic that many great American directors salivated over this lost ending and even constructed whole theories about it, while the rest of the world watched the full version. To top it all: The short ending is actually the better one!

Hiroshima Mon Amour

Somehow we drifted off too far
communicate like distant stars
distant voices down the phone
the sunlit dust
the smell of roses drifts so slow
someone waits behind the door

Hiroshima Mon Amour

Riding inter-city trains
dressed in european grey
driving out to echo beach
a million memories in the trees and sands
oh no, how can I ever let them go

Hiroshima Mon Amour

Meet beneath the autumn lake
where only echoes penetrate
walk through polaroids of the past
pictured fused like shattered glass
the sun´s so low
turns our silhouettes to gold

Hiroshima Mon Amour



Lyrics by John Foxx, performed by Ultravox
Picture from the "Flight Attendants"-series by Brian Finke