“It was too long, too slow, too boring and it had a viola solo... It was the antithesis of a single”: Midge Ure talks us through the making of Ultravox’s iconic Vienna

If you ventured outside right now and asked a random person on the street to name you an Ultravox song, you can bet your bottom dollar that (if they're not too startled) they’ll say Vienna.

Ultravox's 1981 single is not just the group’s most recognisable cut, but has become one of the most beloved tracks of the 1980s. It was also the proof that Ultravox had much more to give after the departure of its foundational mega-mind, John Foxx.

Oddly enough though, the imperious, classically-influenced song's appeal wasn’t immediately apparent to its writers when they first came up with it.

They knew they had something special, sure. But a single? No chance.

“It was the antithesis of a single at the time,” Ultravox’s then-new frontman Midge Ure tells us, recently speaking to MusicRadar for an interview around the launch of his new record A Man of Two Worlds. “It was too long, too slow, too boring and it had a viola solo. You’d have to be crazy to sit down and say, I'm going to write this as a single.”

The title track for Ultravox’s make-or-break fourth album, Vienna would be the ultimate validation that the Midge Ure-led second coming of Ultravox was here to stay.

First formed in London back in 1974, Ultravox had been the exploratory, genre-flitting muscial vehicle of its Krautrock-influenced leader, John Foxx.

"I figured that new instruments had always radically altered music in the past - for instance the electric guitar," Foxx told The Quietus in 2008. "Here was the next major shift - the synthesizer. It could make violent extremes of sound, from subsonics to bat calls. At that time we wanted a total experience."

Although major success eluded them, Ultravox's army of devotees were as enthralled by Foxx's exploits into new frontiers of sound as he was.

"We were the first to get out there, so everyone naturally checked us out," said Foxx.

But, after three records of compelling, but commercially-maligned, music, the Foxx-fronted outfit were dropped by their label, Island.

Although greater success would follow in the group's next incarnation, the Foxx-fronted-era of the group left a profound legacy, and is regarded by many as the blueprint for the synth-pop dominated chart landscape of the ensuing decade. In particular Ultravox's third album, Systems of Romance, which one Gary Numan described as his ‘single biggest inspiration’.

Despite their label dropping them, Foxx, drummer Warren Cann, bassist Chris Cross, guitarist Robin Simon and keyboardist Billy Currie undertook a self-financed tour of the US.

But, it was during this tour that Ultravox’s creative linchpin decided to call it quits.

“After all the touring I’d realised I didn’t want to be part of a band,” Foxx told Vice. “Even one I’d created. I had to wait out all the commitments for that album, then when the last gig was over I told everyone that was it. I gave them the Ultravox name and caught a plane back to London and my wee store of synthesizers.”

Despite the departure of their leader, Ultravox weren’t out for the count yet.

Having met Scottish singer and multi-instrumentalist Midge Ure during a part-time stint in the Steve Strange-helmed Visage, Billy Currie was keen to bring the exceedingly talented young creative into the Ultravox fold, particularly after the pair co-constructed Visage’s iconic and big-selling single Fade to Grey with ease.

Ure had already experienced a taste of pop stardom, with early success as part of teen-pop outfit Slik. Their single, Forever and Ever, had reached the top of the British charts in February 1976, penned by Bay City Rollers’ songsmiths Bill Martin and Phil Coulter.

But, tiring of the disposable nature of pop, Ure hungered to be taken seriously as an authentic musician in the fiery crucible of the punk era.

He joined former Sex Pistol Glen Matlock and future Visage star Rusty Egan in The Rich Kids. Enmeshing classic songwriting techniques with the drive of punk, Ure's talents were growing exponentially.

Up for a new challenge, Midge was intrigued by Currie's offer, and - a fan of the Foxx-era - was keen to see what he could bring to the Ultravox table.

“I had no intention of going in and saying, that's broken, let me fix it,” Midge tells us. “The balance changed from five people to four [guitarist Robin Simon left shortly after Foxx] and I was playing guitar and a bit of secondary keyboards. You know, I loved Systems of Romance and thought it was a great record. Ultravox were like an art school band and I'd found a group that was the antithesis of Slik and hadn’t been tarred with the teen boy band thing.”

Midge was enjoying being able to delve deeper into sonics than ever before, and worked with the group to create a new set of songs.

“I wanted to experiment so I was in my element working with these guys who understood the technology more than I did and had been using it for quite a while.”

Midge also immersed himself in mastering the back catalogue of Foxx-driven cuts.

“All three albums had used technology introduced by Brian Eno and made a ridiculously powerful sound,” Midge explains. “[It was] a hybrid of launching guitars and synthesised bass with Warren Cann either on drums or programming drum machines and Billy Currie playing the ARP like he was Jimi Hendrix. It was just bizarre and the whole combination was interesting because there was nothing else like that at the time.”

In the midst of the writing sessions for what would ultimately become the Vienna album, this new incarnation of Ultravox road-tested some of their fresh material on a self-financed tour of the US, before returning to RAK Studios to cut their comeback record in February of 1980.

As with Systems of Romance, the group summoned legendary Kraftwerk producer Conny Plank to helm the record, which would also sport more obvious singles Sleepwalk and Passing Strangers.

“The equipment came first and we wrote everything together in rehearsal where we had access to it. Somebody would start a drum pattern or play bass, Billy would play a piano part or I'd play a guitar thing and everyone just jammed,” Midge tells us of the Vienna sessions. “Then we just jumped on it and said, ‘Okay, what if we do this?’ In a couple of hours we’d forgotten whatever we did two hours prior. There was no going back to an original idea and no reference point, so we had to recreate everything once we got to the studio."

It was near the very end of the sessions when the seminal title track was birthed, with Warren Cann starting the ball rolling. He concocted the now instantly recognisable drum pattern on a Roland CR-78 drum machine (he’d later use the Synare III to build the ‘thunder’ sound effect heard throughout the track).

“If I had to pick just one [moment I’m proud of] then I’d say when I played the Vienna rhythm to the band and said: ‘How about this?’” Cann told Electricity Club.

Inspired by Cann’s rhythm, Ure, Curry, Cross and Plank set to work layering up a classical-leaning arrangement that eschewed a conventional verse/chorus structure. Instead, it grew outwards from a minimalistic and moody introduction to its vocally towering chorus, before launching into a texture-rich mid-section and a bizzare, time-signature-shuffling outro.

Within the mix came a Minimoog bass part, an Elka string synth and a grand piano, virtuosically played by Billy Currie. The new song also sported that rarest of things on an ‘80s pop hit, a viola solo.

“The song had the feel of a haunting mid-European classic, thanks to our keyboard player Billy Currie’s classical training.” Midge recalled in an interview with The Guardian. “The cinematic aspect was high on our agenda: every track [on the album] was for a movie that didn’t exist. I remember going into the studio with just a line in my head: ‘The feeling is gone, this means nothing to me - oh Vienna!’ That was all I had.”

“As the soaring vocal goes up, the chords drop down, which is the opposite of what you’d normally do with a chorus, so there was something about it that was odd, but we knew it was special,” Ure explains to us.

As a classically-trained musician, Billy Currie felt the track could be musically audacious. “I said to the guys I was keen to do something that sounded like the late-19th-century romantics, like Grieg and Elgar,” Currie told The Guardian. “We were extremely arrogant back then and probably too prog-rocky.”

As for the title, and its dramatic chorus, Ure was inspired by the sense of faded beauty implied by the atmospheric, reverb-laden arrangement. He doubled-down on it by evoking the decaying opulence of Europe.

“Vienna was a love song to an imaginary girl,” Ure told The Guardian. “You’ve gone to this beautiful place, met someone and vowed it is going to continue - and, of course, it doesn’t. Why Vienna? There was a decaying elegance about it. In such a crumbling environment, you could easily fall in love. Then you go back to your cold, grey, miserable life in Chiswick.”

The group, and Plank, loved what they had created. But it certainly didn’t smell like a hit single.

“It's only a single because we know it was a single, and it's only successful because we know it was successful,” Midge tells us, “But it was never going to be successful in the beginning - it was absolute luck.”

Keen on what they heard, Ultravox’s new label Chrysalis Records were excited to take the Midge Ure-fronted outfit on, but when they were presented with Vienna as a potential single, they were more than a little cynical. They insisted that it be trimmed.

“We had many a wrangle with the record label who wanted to edit it, but which bit they were going to cut off was like asking which limb would you like to lose - it didn't make sense, so we stuck to our guns and said, no, we want it to go out as it is,” Midge tells us.

The band’s instincts were correct, with Vienna becoming an incredibly successful hit when released on January 9th 1981.

Backed by its film noir-inspired, Russell Mulcahy-directed video, Vienna's cold romance was a sonic riposte to the nihilism of punk and new wave.

Its audacity helped set the stage for a decade where more of the chart's most successful pop groups would imbue their work with a self-conscious sense of importance and intellectualism, but also bewitch the record-buying public in the process.

Famously, Vienna was frustratingly denied the top spot of the UK singles chart initially by John Lennon’s Woman (this was just weeks after his horrific assassination in December of 1980) and then a further three weeks by the perennially annoying Shaddap You Face by Joe Dolce. It topped the Irish charts and many others in Europe.

"Midge Ure, the lead singer for Ultravox, had a bee in his bonnet about my song keeping their song off the No. 1 position in several countries,” Dolce said in an interview with The Sunday Morning Herald. ”In later years he was quoted as saying that he wished he had written it.”

"I've had 40 years of people talking about Joe 'Bloody' Dolce and I don't want to spend what I've got left talking about when I met him,” Ure said when asked why he passed up the opportunity of meeting his chart rival in the Daily Record in 2022.

Years on, and it's Ultravox that have had the last laugh, with Vienna being the song that the British public remember most fondly, In fact, in 2013 it was voted the country's favourite hit single to not reach the top of the chart.

Read our full recent interview with Midge Ure here