Ultravox! predicted the fears of the digital age in Ha! Ha! Ha!
Every sunset you decide for life. As the sun turns away, it’s up to you: will you cover yourself with a warm blanket or the veil of the dark? Can you survive the night, when the ones who need no prophecies take over the city? Or is the only dark you won’t fear the black screen you grip in your hands every day?
When John Foxx stands on stage in 1977, you can barely see him. A distant presence in the gloom, dressed in black, mechanically moving. A robotic human being who screams the digital era’s fears and anxieties out while his band Ultravox! plays painful music. They have just released their second album Ha!Ha!Ha!, where they take their previous record’s producer Brian Eno’s lessons, and mix it with the violent sound of the new punk scene. Billie Currie’s synthesizer became unruly and interlace with Chris Cross’s experimental drum machine to create a landscape of unsettling desolation. A sound that anticipated New Wave and inspired musicians like Gary Human and Massive Attack. Sadly, it’s a less know phase of Utravox. In 1980, Midge Ure replaced Foxx, the exclamation mark disappeared, and Ultravox conquered the world with the pompous album Vienna. But that’s another story.
People talk about Ha!Ha!Ha!, as a prophetic album, especially for its lyrics. When you recognize contemporariness in something made in the past, it’s comforting but it can be a justification for your failed attempts to make a difference. A warm blanket. If it’s true that we figure out the past to understand our times, we must get lost in the darkness to really start a change. Exactly like Foxx who isolates himself from his time like a ghost and image the future by singing about the darkness already in its society. Interconnected but anesthetized by the media, where the cult of identity replaces the cult of God. A world where the human race naively believes that it has control over nature, and starts a new war to control technology.
John Foxx, real name Dennis Leigh, is an Art School student with wide interests in literature, cinema, and sociology. And he is in his own battle to control technology. What he wants is to get completely lost in this still pretty new instrument, the synthesizer. Fascinated by the pioneering works by Hawkwind and Silver Apples, the German school of Kraftwerk and Neu!, and surely Eno and Roxy Music, he wants to create a new form of a pop song. A new way of thinking similar to Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer’s I Feel Love. Something that will be more clear years later in his solo career. By now we are in 1977 and history is repeating.
That’s always been that way in music history: new technologies, new instruments, new music. Electricity invented rock’n’roll. When guitarists decide to become the wild musicians and imitate the sax screech, they experiment with their new electric instruments. Muddy Waters overdrives the amplifiers, Link Wray puts a pencil in them to create distortion and new sounds.
Ultravox!, especially Foxx and his talented partner Billie Currie, can take their experimentations a little further with their second record. They can pay for bigger and better electronic devices with the solid engineer Steve Lillywhite on their backs. Thanks to home recordings it’s possible to work in the studio and at home, so they can explore both, as a band and as individuals.
Taking McLuhan’s the medium is the message, they perceive synths as new media that can disturbingly convey Foxx’s poetry. The use of punk music gives a sense of urgency to the sound and amplifies the claustrophobic feeling. They wanna make you feel uncomfortable while John Foxx’s singing paints cinematic dark cardboards. Ha!Ha!Ha! starts with a bang: ‘ROckwrok’ is the ultimate danceable punk anthem with its dirty lyrics “fuck like a dog, bite like a shark”. A wild sex-ritual over a pounding and fast rhythm, a society trapped in its primal instincts.
“Austerity makes you want to ROckwrock”
In Foxx’s holistic view of the world, sensuality is the main plug, the necessary way in which people can reconnect to their true self and face the constraints. Let’s not forget that we are in Britain in the 70s, a decade where the country faced an industrial crisis that led to a recession, poverty, unemployment, and poor housing. The themes of austerity and social crisis are repeated among the songs, like in ‘Fear In The Western World’. Foxx sings about a post-colonial frightened western society with its distant and close wars anesthetized by the media to keep the population in a state of perpetual tension. The sound is obscure, opened by an aggressive drum machine and Foxx’s memorable sharp words that quickly mobilize you.
“Your picture of yourself is a media myth/Underneath this floor we’re on the edge of a cliff/Someone told me Jesus was the Devil’s lover/While we masturbated on a magazine cover”.
Foxx’s imaginary is defined by architecture: suburbias, elevators, trains, arcades. A city environment where humans are desperately seeking an identity and a social scene to be happy. Take ‘Artificial Life’, a tale of strangers who escape in the night to lose each other in drug-fueled and predefined rituals. Friendship became interchangeable social connections, people try every new fetish to look perfect.
“She turned to perfection once/ but realized she’d only turned to pain/She ran through divine light, chemicals, Warhol, Scientology, her own sex/Before she turned away”.
Such a strong and tempting world, impossible to leave as Foxx screams that he learned to be a stranger to survive to it.
To understand the changing sound that Ultravox! were pursuing to reach, we have to wait until ‘Distant Smile’ comes on with its beautiful 2-minute ambient introduction, and the final song, the masterpiece ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’. Cradled by CC Mundi’s acid sweet sax and Foxx’ cold and heart-wrenching singing, it’s a song about the difficulties of lost love and man being finally reconnected to his human core. In the lyrics, we still see glimpses of grey city environments, but also nature: lake, beach, roses, and finally sunlit. The sun that slowly fades and turns the lovers’ bodies in a distant gold silhouette, waiting for another night to begin.
Ha!Ha!Ha! starts with a wild orgy and ends with the atom-bomb. A life conceived in chaos led to the most destructive death: that’s the technology that has already exceeded us and can put the human race in a perpetual night time. Ultravox! shape the sound to come and are not giving us a warning about what is to come but a reminder: face your darkness is the only way to survive and change the future.
