The Garden, released in late 1981, is John Foxx's a follow-up to Systems Of Romance, the last Ultravox record he appeared on, released in late 1978. Unlike the previous Metamatic release, it has a band feel and even includes Robin Simon, who, having recently departed the band Magazine, appears on electric guitar. Foxx is on acoustic guitar and piano. Simon is to be found on the remaining two Foxx records from the eighties and it is possible that this is what Ultravox would have sounded like had it remained in its Systems Of Romance line-up.

Europe After The Rain, which also happens to be the name of a painting by Max Ernst, opens this record and was another hit single. It has a vocal break in a near-yodel style, interwoven in a train ride.

The Vocoder, or voice-operated recorder, originally created in the late 1930s by Homer Dudley for Bell Laboratories was used so well by Kraftwerk on all their records but when Trans-Europe Express was released, in 1977, black people in the U.S. took notice and what they created from that re-influenced Europe and the U.K. Music with the Vocoder as an intrinsic part can be found by many U.S. artists, including Miles Davis' former keyboardist Herbie Hancock. There was a new vocabulary for people in American Soul and Funk categories, especially Roger Troutman with and without Zapp, Boston's Michael Jonzun and the Jonzun Crew, the D.I.Y. electronic Hip Hop of Detroit's Juan Atkins and New York's Electro Funk, especially Afrika Bambaataa's Planet Rock. Throughout Black Music, from the late 1970s onward one can find Vocoder Soul.

In a very different direction, there is YMO's ground-breaking Behind The Mask, one of the most beautiful realizations of electronic Vocoder pop. Laurie Anderson's O Superman caught the attention of many and it is almost completely Vocoder, a long meditation with strange lyrics and no beats. In tracks Walk Away, Fusion/Fision and Pater Noster, the statement is a psychedelic and ecclesiastic hybrid, somewhere between the YMO and Anderson tracks mentioned plus more rock tradition than either. Sometimes, on this record and associated singles, Foxx uses the Vocoder as a texture, part of what he called the "Human Host," which seemed to be a half robot/half human choir. Sometimes it's adding ghostly trails.

Other uses:

• The Garden is also a book by Andrew Marvell.
• The Garden was also a magazine started in 1871 by William Robinson.