The Fox (Elton John album)

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The Fox
File:The fox (Elton John album) coverart.jpg
Studio album by Elton John
Released 20 May 1981
Recorded August 1979; January–June 1980, at Super Bear Studios, Nice, France and Sunset Sound, Los Angeles
Genre Rock, soft rock, pop rock, new wave
Length 45:39
Label Geffen (US)
Rocket (UK)
Producer Chris Thomas, Elton John, Clive Franks
Elton John chronology
21 at 33
(1980)21 at 331980
The Fox
(1981)
Jump Up!
(1982)Jump Up!1982
Singles from The Fox
  1. "Nobody Wins"
    Released: 1981
  2. "Just Like Belgium"
    Released: 1981
  3. "Chloe"
    Released: 1981
Professional ratings
Review scores
Source Rating
Allmusic 2.5/5 stars[1]
Rolling Stone 3/5 stars[2]

The Fox, released in 1981, is the fifteenth official album release for Elton John. With sales of approx. 300,000 US copies, it was one of Elton's poorest-selling albums in the United States.

The track, "Elton's Song", was banned from radio play in some countries due to its content,[citation needed] which included references to homosexuality. The album was produced by John, Clive Franks and for the first time, Chris Thomas, who would produce many more albums with John through most of the 1980s and '90s.

Five of the songs (noted below) were recorded during the sessions for his previous album 21 at 33. All B-sides released around this time were also from those sessions.

Track listing

Side one
  1. "Breaking Down Barriers" (John, Gary Osborne) – 4:41
  2. "Heart in the Right Place" (John, Osborne) – 5:11*
  3. "Just Like Belgium" (John, Bernie Taupin)– 4:08
  4. "Nobody Wins" (Jean-Paul Dreau, Osborne) – 3:37
  5. "Fascist Faces" (John, Taupin) – 5:10
Side two
  1. "Carla/Etude" (John) – 4:46*
  2. "Fanfare" (John, James Newton Howard) – 1:26*
  3. "Chloe" (John, Osborne) – 4:40*
  4. "Heels of the Wind" (John, Taupin) – 3:32
  5. "Elton's Song" (John, Tom Robinson) – 3:01*
  6. "The Fox" (John, Taupin) – 5:11

(*): Recorded in August 1979 and produced by John and Clive Franks. Chris Thomas produced the other tracks.

In 2003, Mercury/Universal and The Rocket Record Company reissued the album on CD, remastered by Gary Moore. The line-up contained no bonus tracks. On the 2003 reissue and remaster (and European) CD, "Carla/Etude", "Fanfare" and "Chloe" are combined into one track, making it a nine-track album.

French and Quebec releases of the album included "J'Veux de la Tendresse" in place of "Nobody Wins". "Tendresse" was the original French version of the song which Osborne wrote English lyrics for, thus transforming the song into "Nobody Wins".

After 1981, only "Chloe", "Just Like Belgium", "Nobody Wins" and "Elton's Song" would be included in Elton's Jump Up tour in 1982. While "Chloe", "Just Like Belgium" and "Nobody Wins" have never been performed again since that tour, "Elton's Song" was performed a few times on a solo tour in 1999. Since then however, Elton has also stopped performing that song.

However since the album's release, Elton would perform "Carla/Etude", many times up to now, making it the only song off the album that is still occasionally being performed as of 2015.

B-sides

Song Format
"Fools in Fashion" "Nobody Wins" 7" (US/UK)
"Nobody Wins" (extended version) "Nobody Wins" 12" (US)
"Je Veux De La Tendresse" (French version of "Nobody Wins") "Nobody Wins" 12" (US)
"Can't Get Over Getting Over Losing You" "Just Like Belgium" 7" (UK)
"Tortured" "Chloe" 7" (US)

Visions: The videos from The Fox

Visions, released on VHS in 1982, is a video of all ten songs recorded for The Fox album. It is notable as one of the first long-form video releases of an album. The collection was also released on RCA's CED digital video disc, a precursor to the Laserdisc and DVD, but has not been released since. One of the videos, for the song "Elton's Song", dealt with a teenager's admiration of another teenage boy he yearns for, but is too shy to confront—it was excluded from the UK video release, because the public school it was filmed at objected to the theme of the song. All the videos were directed by Russell Mulcahy.[citation needed]

Personnel

Charts

References

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  2. [1] Archived 16 May 2007 at the Wayback Machine
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  5. Library and Archives Canada. Retrieved 29 January 2012
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