The Fox (Elton John album)
| The Fox | ||||
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| Studio album by Elton John | ||||
| Released | 20 May 1981 | |||
| Recorded | August, December 1979 January–June 1980 |
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| Studio | Super Bear Studios (Nice, France); Sunset Sound Recorders, The Village Recorder and Devlon Studios (Los Angeles); Abbey Road Studios (London). | |||
| Genre | Rock, soft rock, pop rock, new wave | |||
| Length | 45:39 | |||
| Label |
Geffen (US) Rocket (UK) |
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| Producer | Chris Thomas, Elton John, Clive Franks | |||
| Elton John chronology | ||||
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| Singles from The Fox | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |    |
| Rolling Stone | |
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, 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.
(*): Recorded in August and December 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" frequently, making it the only song off the album that is still occasionally being performed as of 2015.
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.
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