John Foxx born in Chorley, Lancashire, England. His father was a coal miner and pugilist, his mother a millworker. He attended St Mary's Primary and St Augustine's Secondary schools.[4] During his youth in the 1960s he embraced the lifestyle of a mod and a hippy.[5] He experimented with tape recorders and synthesisers while on a scholarship at the Royal College of Art in London.

HHis first band called Woolly Fish formed circa 1967 whilst at art college in Preston.

Prior to 1973 he was singing and playing a 12-string guitar and occasionally supported Stack Waddy in Manchester, from which he later moved to London in order to escape what he saw as a lack of musical stimulus