Ultravox
Ha! Ha! Ha!

THE REVIEW

Obviously it's not Ultravox, but Ultravox!…The exclamation point is very important and it seems to be a tribute to Neu!

...

Loving this record was a matter of pride, and pride is always a thing for losers, a form of defense, you know, a bit like saying I'm here too. After all, only losers listen to the right music, and only ugly ducklings turn into swans.

Poetically, pathetically, structurally poor with girls we were at zero. Some of us were almost handsome, others had the eloquence of Socrates, but none of that mattered. The fact is, women were for us such magical creatures that who ever had the courage to speak a word? So we just stood there, dazed and bemused, a thing that, at just the thought, makes me sad today.

Then there were all those cookie-cutter guys, lacoste clark's and tube jeans, and damn, the best girls would flock to them. In a few years' time, we would show those bastards. Meanwhile, while the kind Onan compassionately aided us, we had at least the satisfaction of music. Those dummies were stuck on "oh baby it's a wild world," while we, hell, we were ahead!

...

The day John Foxx left the group was declared a national day of mourning, although I'm not sure which nation it was, maybe just the one from my house to that of my best friend.

My first memory comes from an old black-and-white photo where he seemed like a cold and decadent wave hero or a kind of almost Bowie which meant more or less almost god. He also had something of Helmut Berger, Visconti's Ludwig, of whom he seemed a more ethereal and melancholic version, almost as if he were the most perfect paradigm of the idea of beauty according to Saint Baudelaire. All this contrasted greatly with the exclamation points that electrified the faces on the cover of “Ha!- Ha!- Ha!”, but, on reflection, it was precisely that contrast that made the whole affair unique. It meant there was aesthetics and there was also substance, and if we weren't yet ready for aesthetics, the substance we liked a lot.

But it's also true that, despite not understanding a damn thing, in that photo we sensed the relationship between a certain type of beauty and being somehow misfits. Foxx, a bit like Bowie at the end of “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” seemed to us a divine being, but also somehow out of place. But, as they say, these were unthought thoughts and, moreover, how could we ever have thought them? However, they would prove useful at the first click.

And anyway, we were only fifteen years old, like reading Alan Ford, having a snack with Girella, drinking a liter of coke in one gulp, but, above all, listening to this record. Because here you have all the best music in the world: the Velvet, Roxy, Bowie, the krauts from Germany, and even Brian the professor. But the thing is put in a way like when you make an omelet with leftovers, and it turns out to be something delicious, after all, even when the leftovers get pissed off the result is always surprising. And that's how revolutions come about, and there was indeed a revolution in which the bad guys were, at times, "rotten, dirty and imbecile" or refined situationist strategists. It was punk and in London, it was even on your doorstep, and even if you didn't want it, it stuck to you. John Foxx, to say, was punk like I am Maria Giovanna Elmi, yet without that four-letter word, a record like this cannot be explained.

Here, all together and all in one go, you have ice, heat, chaos, and intelligence, which, in one word, means a bomb, but a bomb always needs an igniter and in this sense, punk was really the best of the best. Never mind if later the lovers would go in opposite directions, punk to the right, futuristic coolness to the left, all okay, no doubt, but that feeling of a brain exploding with art while your butt jumps from the chair, gosh how much we still miss it today.

Even though the real hit, in this record, comes at the end, when after racing at breakneck speed all along, comes the ballad that, beyond knocking you down, carries the warmest melancholy into the cold of the future, indeed into the cold tout court. There, punk is no longer needed and all that energy sublimates into the no man's land of aesthetics and ghosts. "I cannot conceive, said Baudelaire, a type of beauty in which there is no unhappiness." Between life and the fact that life is not, uselessly wanders all the art we like best.

Then okay, Baudelaire is my delirium and I don't know what the good Foxx might think of it. His references seem to me to be others: futurism, Ballard, Duchamp, and other things we really knew nothing about at the time. For me, however, he will always remain the beautiful decadent prince seen in a pale black and white photo lost in the night of time. You don't mess with myths.