Marble Arch Studios

In the third programme in the series ‘Key Moments’, composer and performer John Foxx takes us to the moment in his life when Ultravox, the band he formed at Art College, was recording its first album at Marble Arch Studios. It was 1975, and they were recording at weekends in the studios in so called ‘dead time’, when it wasn’t being used. As lead singer and song-writer of Ultravox, John worked with the legendary music producer Steve Lilywhite to create the band’s first hits. Steve and John meet up again now to remember how their collaboration worked then and how the grand piano in the recording studio allowed John to amplify and play with the resonance and reverberation of the music he’d been composing as an art student. This combination of piano, microphones and reverb units has been the basis of all John’s piano music and experimentation for the last 50 years, since that moment in Marble Arch. He says all three are essential to produce the piano sound he’s obsessed with – the magical string resonance and vibration stretched to its limits by technology.

Presented by John Foxx
Produced by Anna Horsbrugh Porter
A Just Radio production for BBC Radio 3