The Quiet Man
Having written fiction since the 1970s, John Foxx is publishing his work for the first time with a new collection called ‘The Quiet Man’. Here he explains why short stories are a vital part of his process and shows off ‘Shifting City’, which inspired the 1997 album of the same name, or is it the other way round? Read on…
Words: John Foxx
The Quiet Man’ stories began in 1977, and were originally intended as a means of realising characters and situations to use in songs. When the mood hit, I’d scribble things down in notebooks and those accumulated over the years, until it all became a world in itself.
I eventually came to understand that songs and stories operate in different ways, yet both have to leave enough room for the listener – or reader – to inhabit themselves. Songs have several advantages – the rhythm, the mood of the music, the sensual power of sound. They also have their own engine that transports you in real time. Stories, on the other hand, can be read at your own pace.
The songwriter’s job is to supply a scaffolding of a few minimal trigger words and sounds. But the real work is done by each individual member of the audience, who endows this scaffolding with their own rich emotional experience. They are the ones who really own songs, and yet the writer takes all the credit.
‘Systems Of Romance’ is a good example of the process, but in reverse. We were recording the album and I was fretting because it needed a really good title. Conny Plank and I had been discussing, in mangled German and English, new and old sorts of music. He was explaining how systems music – which evolves gradually over very long periods – interested him, but lacked the element of romance that he enjoyed, while conversely, he hated romantic music without some backbone.
Light bulb moment! That’s exactly what Ultravox were about – creating something with just the right tension between the two ends of the spectrum. The title ‘Systems Of Romance’ flashed into my head. Spot on! I wrote it down in my notebook and when I got home, I had the song too. It was too late to go on the album, of course, and it also needed a theme melody, which I finished a little later. The story, which isn’t featured in this first collection, arrived shortly after that.
So that conversation generated an album title, a song, and a story. Marvellous how these things can breed.
‘When You Walk Through Me’, ‘Just For A Moment’, ‘Cathedral Oceans’, ‘The Garden’, ‘Dislocation’, ‘Quiet Men’, ‘No-One Driving’, ‘Invisible Women’, ‘Infinite In All Directions’, ‘Sunlit Silhouette’, ‘City As Memory’ and many others, wouldn’t have arrived without the story having been written first.
‘Shifting City’, which is reproduced here, is one of my favourite examples.
I have just returned. Sometimes it seems as if only part of me is still here. A feeling of dispersal.
Glimpses from other angles. Other locations. The city is always shifting, realigning itself. It is memory.
I feel a distant kind of longing. The longest song, the song of longing.
I walk the same streets like a fading ghost. Flickering grey suit.
The same avenues, squares, parks, colonnades, like a ghost.
Over the years I find places I can go through, some process of recognition.
Remnants of other almost forgotten places. Always returning.
I can detect tiny edges of time leaking through. I feel nothing is completely separate.
At some point everything leaks into everything else. The trick is in finding the places. They are slowly moving. Drifting.
You can only do this accidentally. If you set out to do it deliberately you will always fail.
It is only later when you remember – only then will you realise that you caught a glimpse.
While you were talking to someone or thinking of something else. When your attention was diverted.
Just a hint, a glimmer, a shade.
Much later, you will remember. Without really knowing why. Vague peripheral sensations gather.
Some fraction of a long rhythm is beginning to be recognised. The hidden frequencies and tides of the city. Geometry of coincidence. You will certainly find yourself passing that way again. Perhaps not for a long,
long time.
I have just returned. Sometimes it seems as if only part of me is still here. A feeling of dispersal.
Glimpses from other angles. Other locations.
The city is always shifting, realigning itself. It is memory.
I feel a distant kind of longing. The longest song, the song of longing.
I walk the same streets like a fading ghost. Flickering grey suit.
The same avenues, squares, parks, colonnades, like a ghost.
Over the years I find places I can go through, some process of recognition. Remnants of other almost forgotten places. Always returning.
I can detect tiny edges of time leaking through. I feel nothing is completely separate. At some point everything leaks into everything else. The trick is in finding the places. They are slowly moving. Drifting.
You can only do this accidentally. If you set out to do it deliberately you will always fail.
It is only later when you remember – only then will you realise that you caught a glimpse.
While you were talking to someone or thinking of something else. When your attention was diverted.
Just a hint, a glimmer, a shade.
Much later, you will remember. Without really knowing why. Vague peripheral sensations gather.
Some fraction of a long rhythm is beginning to be recognised. The hidden frequencies and tides of the city. Geometry of coincidence. You will certainly find yourself passing that way again. Perhaps not for a long, long time.
Over the years you gradually become aware of some differences in the light, the temperature,
the way things feel, like a subtle change in the texture of a film… faintly aware that time moves in a
slightly different way there.
The city is a place of tides. Tides move down every street. Time does not move at a uniform rate here.
The relative speeds of various time pockets throughout the city, all moving and forming subtle currents around each other, resembling an ocean, which looks uniform but is really composed of great currents, contraflows, minor eddies, undercurrents, warm and cool streams of different densities and temperatures, swirling slowly or quickly, affecting each other at every boundary.
The shifting city, the drifting city… you will be changed by walking down this street… the angle of coincidence, of memory, will alter other memories, make other connections… this street will become other streets in time. It will lead to other streets in time. Some streets lead to other times… you almost expect to see your father and mother aged twenty-one walking arm-in-arm towards you. Some are streets from your own life which you have not yet walked.
They will seem different. When the time comes, you will not remember. Endless. Revolving… you cannot return. You will never walk down that street again. Another time is another place. Turn and wave.
Someone almost there.
Walking away now.
The streets lead into other streets where a glimpse of someone who is young will remind you that they must be many years older now… how did you miss them… how did you pass them by for so long…
where did all the time go…
Some places seem still, quiet. Islands. A few leaves fallen on the stone pavement.
A trace of sunlit moss in a stone corner, an eroded line of memory, a bench, evergreen leaves.
You can place your hand softly on the stone wall, feel the humming beneath.
This is simply the surface of things, it is shifting slowly all the time, its molecules are moving, it is a liquid.
You can push your hand through the surface. You can flow into it, dispersing out. You can breathe the ocean. It is composed of music, echoes that take many years to return, to reflect, to reverberate.
They never disappear. They fade, mingle, make a finer and finer web of refractions. The movement gently, imperceptibly spins your skin away like candyfloss. Spinning skeins of you combine with the ocean over years, over miles, over tides and times. Until you become part of the hidden frequency of the rooms, the streets.
It is a long slow waltz we are dancing down the cathedral. Turning into reverberation and roses and shimmering light. Just wait here for a little while. I will be back soon.
Soft winds across the lake, rain falling on leaves a thousand miles away, years and years away, slow cascade of those empty places.
The lakes move in time to the sea.
Spirals of dust on the street corner, glittering in the afternoon sun.
The cathedral nave leads off into streets, canals, restaurants, corridors, avenues, parks and arcades.
A part of it is underwater now, a city beneath the ocean. He was looking at a picture in a travel guide
from 1954. The picture had the quality of an old Technicolor film still. As he examined it, the picture began
to change. Its surface slowly fragmented, dissolved until he could see through it.
Swift transition of time and place…
My hands are open… I am only eyes travelling over the overgrown streets… through the buildings…
down stairways, arcades, squares, alleys, waterways… foggy, sunlit…
Rainy stars reflected in the speckled mirrors down the hallways, under the ivy leaves.
The taste of rust and rain and there is a cinema I can always step inside and see you moving, turning slowly in old sunlight and I can melt through on the Saturday morning tides of light and I know that time is a great, shambling, many-roomed, ramshackle structure. Tall, flaking, endlessly fragmenting. Myriad avenues. Waterways deeper than I can swim. Warm, revolving and lost.
The stairway leads on to bridges soaring across the river.
Smoke on the horizon, blue and gold among the fog of trees.
Everything is quiet, and the dust on the streets and the stars are slowly flowing through each other.
‘The Quiet Man’ is out now, published by Rocket 88
