7. John FoxxMetamatic

I think it was the non-album single ‘Burning Car’ that drew me in and I then started joining the dots. I met John Foxx years and years later – I think I’d written a piece for Time Out about him and his management had got in touch and we went out and had a pint. It was the most extraordinary, weird thing to properly connect again with your teenage self 25 years later. And I’ve still got the list of questions that I had for him like, why did you never print the lyrics to ‘My Sex’? You know how you hear a lyric that you can’t properly understand? It was like that! But he was such a charming man and very self-effacing. 

It was always odd to me that Gary Numan – having cited him as an influence – became the public face of synth music and John immediately moved on to The Garden, but because ‘Underpass’ and ‘Burning Car’ were his biggest hits, he was never able to put that aside in the public imagination. But a lot of his lyrical stuff later on is very, very beautiful and very underrated. And then he went back in a loop to do more Metamatic-type stuff, which is also great, and he’s still going.