15 questions with…JOHN FOXX AND BENGE (AKA JOHN FOXX AND THE MATHS)

It’s a new feature for the times as we celebrate those artists attempting to release music and tour during these unprecedented world events… by giving them some tough tech questions to answer. For this inaugural event, step forward a synth icon and iconic synth collector

John Foxx was the founder of Ultravox and has spent the last 40-odd years carving up and redistributing all sorts of musical genres including synth pop, rock, psychedelia, ambient and techno, either as a solo artist or in numerous collaborations with everyone from Harold Budd to Gary Numan, Jori Hulkkonen to Robin Guthrie. Benge is a producer extraordinaire with one of the finest synth collections known to mankind. Together they make music – along with a variety of other artists including guitarist Robin Simon and composer/producer Hannah Peel – as part of John Foxx and The Maths, whose fourth album, Howl, is out now. More importantly we got them both together to be the debutantes of the first of our 15 Questions With features…

1 Q1. Tell us a bit about your musical background…

John Foxx: “I formed Ultravox in 1974 at art school, after being a lone 12-string singer-songwriter. I used to support a rock band called Stackwaddy around Manchester – our residency was above a pub in Salford. Manchester was otherwise dead at that point, way before the brilliant Tony Wilson came along and reinvented the place – without him, it’d still be the same.