Songfacts®:

• "Underpass" was the first solo single by former Ultravox frontman John Foxx, released January 4, 1980, and later included on his debut album, Metamatic. Written and produced by Foxx, it helped define the stark, urban electronic sound that became his solo trademark.
• "Underpass" plays like a series of disconnected images - phones, bridges, glass and a vague reference to "World War something" – that build a mood of memory loss and alienation in a modern city. The underpass itself - that concrete nowhere beneath roaring motorways – is a metaphor for existing in transit, cut off from the brightly lit world above.
• The inspiration was less theoretical than you might expect. The song originated when the car Foxx was traveling in broke down in an underpass in Brussels.
  
  "I used to think they were wonderful urban design, and we walked until we found a rusty old exit and managed to open it," Foxx told Uncut magazine. "I hate cars. I use them all the time to take cabs and things, but I never wanted to drive."
• Recording at Pathway Studios in Islington, Foxx imposed strict rules on himself: drum machines and synthesizers only; arrangements pared back to their most functional form. The result set the template for Metamatic, whose glacial rhythms and clipped synth basslines owe as much to novelist J. G. Ballard as to the dancefloor.
• Ballard's fascination with motorways and modern alienation runs through the album: six of its 10 tracks reference cars or roads, including "Underpass" and the tellingly titled "No-One Driving." Even the album title nods to machinery, borrowed from a painting machine created in 1959 by kinetic artist Jean Tinguely. The record reached #18 on the UK Albums Chart, embedding itself in the concrete of early-'80s electro-pop.
• The promotional video doubles down on the mood. Foxx, suited and overcoated, moves through a neon-lit basement. He's flanked by two keyboard players and two silent children, while black-and-white projections flash images of highways, bridges and a lonely, off-the-hook telephone.
• Foxx' Ultravox-era work hinted at the future, but "Underpass" stepped fully into it. a blueprint for synth-pop and minimal wave that would echo through the decade. In three chilly minutes, Foxx proved that pop music didn't need guitars, choruses you could hum in the bath, or even much warmth. Sometimes all you need is a broken car, a Brussels underpass and the nagging suspicion that the world above is carrying on perfectly well without you.