Playlouder - Music is the Network

From the outside you’d be forgiven for thinking Cargo, Shoreditch, is dead tonight, and for a moment I can’t help but wonder how much John Foxx’s supposed influence and gravitas have carried into the beginning of a new century.

His music – at least that for which he is most famous – is very much concerned with the fin de siècle atmosphere of technology, decay and living in the future.

Fortunately, numbers are numbers, and the hopes and fears of musical visionaries (and fans alike) of the punk and new wave eras are very much alive today, and have – if anything – snowballed over the last few decades as further advances in technology have shrunk the world even as it continues to wreak its revenge against us who would readily hold it in the palm of our hand, and crush it, if we could.

So Cargo is quiet out front and empty inside because (for once) everyone in the venue – everyone – is packed into the mid-sized back room, staring in awe at the imposing figure of John Foxx and his band as they lay down some of the rawest, biggest, and baddest electronica you’ll hear this side of the sun, while behind them a massive screen loops VJ video-collages of urban decay, toxic sunsets and shattered fragments of love.

Predictably, the sweaty crowds go wild for new wave staples ‘Underpass’ and ‘Burning Car’, but in the more melodic, atmospheric tracks that lead up to the former, and in the nihilistic stomp of Ultravox’s ‘The Man Who Dies Every Day’, it becomes really clear why John Foxx remains an enduring musical force – because nobody does it better. Still.