It’s remarkable to think that the defining Ultravox track, Vienna, was written 45 years ago. Emerging in the ‘70s and ‘80s with bands such as Slik and Visage, Midge Ure stepped in to front the group following the departure of John Foxx and became a defining voice for the new wave and synth-pop era.
Beyond that success, Ure co-wrote and produced the iconic charity single Do They Know It’s Christmas? with Bob Geldof, helping to spark the global Live Aid movement, while also achieving solo acclaim with his debut album The Gift.
However, as the pop music industry constantly reminds us, the route to longevity is rarely straightforward.
Article continues belowFollowing the release of his 1996 album Breathe, Ure was sidelined from the synth-pop spotlight, yet like all survivors, the enduring appreciation for him has only grown, culminating in a sold-out 70th birthday celebration at the Royal Albert Hall in 2023 and an extensive UK tour in 2024.
Now, Ure furthers his reinvention with an ambitious and immersive live experience, coinciding with the release of his first album of new material in 12 years, A Man of Two Worlds. We talk to Midge about past and future, and a tour that promises to blend cinematic instrumentals with fan favourites to create a seamless musical journey.
MusicRadar: Back in 1977, you acquired a Yamaha CS-50 when you were in your first band, the Rich Kids. Where did you discover the instrument and what were your thoughts about its potential back then?
Midge Ure: “So, it’s 1977 and I’m still in the Rich Kids, which was very much a guitar-oriented band, and Rusty Egan, the drummer, and I used to go to a little club in London that he ran called Billy's. He would find all this electronic music from Europe, and I don't know where he got it from, but he'd bring it to Billy's, which was a forerunner to The Blitz Club, and play all these electronic songs through the sound system, which sounded amazing.
"I was getting fascinated by all this stuff, so I bought the CS-50 and tried to integrate it into the Rich Kids, which did the exact opposite because half of them hated it. There’s actually some footage of me using the synth on the TV show Rock Goes to College.
“The CS-50 did the opposite of what it was supposed to do, but the idea of incorporating this thing with other musicians grew into the concept of Visage after one night Rusty said that we should put a studio project together with Dave Formula, Barry Adamson and Billy Curry. I thought, right, brilliant - let's do it.
"They were making really interesting music at the time, with synthesisers, guitars and standard rock instrumentation, so Visage was born and the obvious conclusion was that I ended up joining Ultravox, where I upgraded my synths somewhat [laughs].”
MR: Ultravox hadn’t had a hit prior to you joining. Once John Foxx left, what needed to change in order to find that elusive success?
MU: “The balance changed from five people to four 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.
"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.
“All three albums had used technology introduced by Brian Eno and made a ridiculously powerful sound - a hybrid of launching guitars and synthesised bass with Warren Cann either on drums or programming drum machines and Billy Curry 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, so I had no intention of going in and saying, that's broken, let me fix it.”
MR: Were the early sessions based on pure experimentation?
MU: “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. 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.”
MR: Your first big hit, the iconic Vienna, seems quite similar to Tubeway Army’s Are ‘Friends’ Electric? in that it doesn't have a typical pop structure. Did you have to convince Chrysalis to release that as a single?
MU: “It was the antithesis of a single at the time - 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. 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.
“It's only a single because we know it was a single, and it's only successful because we know it was successful, but it was never going to be successful in the beginning - it was absolute luck.
"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.
MR: When you wrote your debut solo LP The Gift, it felt as though the synths weren't driving the songs in the same way they had with Ultravox. Were you foreseeing the end of the synth-pop era?
MU: “At that point a lot of bands had gone out and bought synths because they wanted to jump on the Ultravox/Gary Numan bandwagon. It seemed to be the new toy - a bit like when dance music happened and everyone had to have a rapper or a superstar DJ screwing up the music. All of a sudden, instead of experimenting there was a lot of blips and bloops - a lot of noise, and to me it wasn't necessarily how synths were supposed to be used.
“People started creating an electronic version of what an orchestra or a band was, and by the time I started working on The Gift, samplers could sample anything. So the palette was different and I veered away from absolute electronics to electronic versions of instruments you could recognise, like a sampled cello as opposed to a string machine cello, which are very different animals.”
MR: Did you embrace the sampling technology in the same way that you’d embraced analogue gear?
MU: “We kept some of the analogue stuff because Billy’s Odyssey made noises like nobody else on the planet, but a few things went digital.
"We used electric piano and went with some of the digital synths instead of the Minimoog for the bass stuff. We'd started using the PPG Wave and Yamaha synths, not because they sounded better - they didn’t, but they had memories and presets you could press to take you straight to the next sound.
“When you're playing live, which Ultravox did a lot, the absolute joy of finishing the song, hitting a button and having your keyboard set for the next song was a revelation. Up to that point, poor Chris [Cross] had to switch the oscillators on one synth and set up another ready for the next song, so it was a tall order trying to keep a set flowing with the analogue stuff, which had to be constantly tuned.”
MR: How has your relationship with technology changed? For example, do you have nostalgia for various technologies or is it more about whatever gets the job done?
MU: “At this point, I have nostalgia for the sound of some of the things that we used. Looking back, we used the Yamaha SS30 string machine an awful lot, and those pads seemed to have been quite a signature sound until we got a CS-80, which gives us a very swampy, modulated string sound.
"Some of those things you still hark back for because the soft synths don't really get there. They're close, but they don't replicate the sounds the same way and I don't miss the fact that it took four people to lift the CS-80 [laughs].”
MR: You mentioned that you really struggled with the lack of success of your ‘96 solo album Breathe. Did it take time to accept that success was linked to whether you were still fashionable?
MU: “The logical brain might tell you that, but your heart says something completely different. When you finish any piece of music, you can't take it yourself to radio, TV or reviewers - you hand it across to a team and they've got to go out and do all of that. There could be a myriad of reasons why people never get to hear it, but all you hear as the artist is nobody likes it, nobody wants it and it's not needed.
"We're all fragile little creatures - we crumble and the bad reviews hurt. You try to analyse it by saying I think this is some of the best work I've done as a songwriter, but nobody's ever going to get to hear it. Your brain says that at some point it will resonate with people, but that doesn't give you the boost you need to get on and do the next one. Hence why there was 12 years between albums because you sit down, lick your wounds and think, is there any point in going through this whole process again?”
MR: Thankfully you did continue and your latest LP, A Man of Two Worlds, is a double LP. What lay behind the decision to make one side instrumental?
MU: “It was born out of boredom, but there's something about home recording and doing everything on your own. You're engineering it, creating the sounds, sculpting the music, but you don't have a band member who's saying that's pretty cool, that’s pretty crap or let's take it in another direction. Time is your friend and you're not limited to how long you can spend doing it. I'd write what I thought was the bones of a good song, but the only way I could tell if it was any good was to walk away and leave a time gap.
“During that time - and some of that 12-year period, I’d also been writing instrumental music and found that I’d actually created two albums, both recorded along the same timeline. I planned on putting each one out separately, but it wasn't until I played both to some friends that they questioned why I’d separated them. They sounded the same, with the same sonic ambiences and textures, it’s just that one has songs and one has musical pieces rather than a bunch of backing tracks that I couldn't be bothered writing lyrics for. They’re like a brother and sister, so in the end I didn’t think I should separate them.”
MR: You mentioned boredom. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic was the catalyst for writing the tracks…
MU: “The instrumental stuff didn't really happen until lockdown when I was looking out the window every day and watching the seasons change. Normally, I'd be touring, but now I suddenly had an empty diary, which was an absolute first. Luckily, I had my studio, but sitting at home was an alien thing for all of us, so I started writing the instrumental stuff, then I was trying to figure out how to make a backing track tell a little story or set an image in people's heads so that they can tell their own story without using lyrics.
“That's a difficult thing - an odd thing, but I knew what I wanted it to sound like and found myself in a room with 10 other musicians playing mandolins and violins or whatever. It was a tall order, but I started to enjoy the process. I've always written instrumental music - every album’s got one or two tracks like that, so it's just one of those things that I wanted to explore a lot more.”
MR: So how's your studio looking these days? We read that it's at the bottom of your garden…
MU: “I’m currently in Portugal and my studio is minuscule, based around a Mac and a tiny little mixer, but it’s of reasonable quality so I could do most of the vocals for the album here. Then I ended up bringing the studio into the house back in Bath, building a soundproof control room and a recording room with space for drums and whatever, which is great because I can make as much noise as I like without driving my wife crazy.
“As technology’s changed, I found I can do the guitars sitting in the control room, that I was using drum machines and didn't really need a drum booth and that digital pianos were getting pretty good. Laziness dictated that I could just sit there, put parts down and then get someone else to come in and play them properly, so the studio became like a gentleman's club.”
MR: So rather than use soft synths and keep those sounds, you overdubbed them using session musicians?
MU: “These days, sound libraries are expensive but incredible and you can do some amazing things, but I still ended up using Joe O’Keefe to put violins on one track and if I wanted drums I'd do them in the corner with Mark Brzezicki. But it’s difficult now to tell the difference with piano sounds - you can even adjust how much clunking you can hear from the pedals, how much ambience there is and how much felt there is hitting the strings, so playing with all of that stuff was great because it helps create atmosphere. Some tracks have about five or six different piano sounds on them, but I didn't want to quantise everything, so things are slightly out of sync with each other.
“I was also fortunate to have Ty Unwin, who's a brilliant arranger and producer in his own right. He tidied my up my orchestral arrangements, because that's what he does, and his studio has every bell, whistle and old synth you could possibly imagine. We did it long distance - I’d take things up to a certain level and he’d replace my sticky piano, bass or guitar parts with a much better sound and mix them with a lovely clarity and depth.”
MR: Do you feel there's a common thread running through all of your work that definitively tells people this is a Midge Ure or Ultravox track?
MU: “The voice has changed a huge amount over the years, but I think there's more gravity to it now - it's a bit growlier. Otherwise, I think melodies are very important to me and people could tell my melodies from the moment I walked into Ultravox. Because of his classical training, Billy Currie was also very melodic and that stuff rubbed off. But, for me, this album is not one that lends itself to any real connection to anything I've done in the past.
“When I analysed the songs, I wondered whether they would be what people would expect and came to the conclusion that I didn't really care. If I'm being honest, I'm not going out there to compete with something similar and I've not been influenced by someone who's selling shiploads of records and thinking I’d better do some of that. In its own weird little form, it's kind of unique, because it's me and I don't have any tales to tell about how I've gone back and taken from the past - it's just songs.”
MR: Tell us about the forthcoming live shows, because we understand that they’re going to be a combination of classic tracks and instrumentals?
MU: “I’m not playing a lot of instrumentals from this album because I wouldn't subject the audience to a bunch of songs they don't know, or certainly a bunch of instrumentals they don't know. I had the concept for the tour prior to this album coming out and wanted to play some of the instrumental stuff that I've done in the past and try to figure out a way of doing that in front of an audience.
“I think we’ll segue into it for the first half of the show with an instrumental going into an album track, then a single and another instrumental. It’ll hopefully be seamless and take the audience on a little journey. Then, for the last 45 minutes they can get up in the aisles and dance their hearts out if they want to. The proof of the pudding will be the moment we walk into a rehearsal room and attempt it - and whether my ageing brain can remember what songs are coming next!"
MR: The last Ultravox album appeared to be quite successful in terms of how you got on as a group. Do you think it’s likely we’ll see another album?
MU: “I don't think so. When Billy released his last solo album I think he got very miffed with people asking him about Ultravox and declared that it was never going to happen. We’re certainly an odd bunch, but we don't have Chris with us anymore and I don't think it would be Ultravox without Chris.
“Warren has retired and is living somewhere up in California and I haven't heard from Billy for years, irrespective of reaching out. So I very much doubt it, but I’m glad we didn’t leave things at the U-Vox album, which was the one that broke us up because it was so diverse. Ending on the Brilliant album was a better way to do it. It wasn't everyone's cup of tea, but it was Ultravox for sure.”
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