Midge Ure
Chuff Media
Midge Ure discusses his new tour
I’ve admired Midge Ure’s work ever since he fronted Ultravox in the early eighties, so it was with some trepidation that I met him for a chat. In short, I was a bit in awe. I’m pleased to report that he proved grounded, personable and charming, and not least the model of patience when my Mum rang up half way through the interview.
Patience is something we’ve needed in spades over the last few years, not least given the three year gap between his last visit to Norwich, when he performed the seminal album Vienna at the Theatre Royal. He is back now, returning at the end of September, playing one of only four UK dates before heading off to Germany. This seems unusually brief, something he was keen to explain.
“It’s only four to start with,” he emphasised. “Our UK tour really starts in April of next year. These shows were programmed in, but then cancelled twice, as part of the last tour. So ironically our first four shows in the UK are actually the last four shows of the last tour we never finished.”
Covid fallout, it would appear, still has a very long tail and has clearly left its mark.
“It’s been pretty horrific for everyone concerned,” he agreed. “After the last UK tour we went down to Australia and New Zealand and that’s when we heard about this virus no one knew much about. We managed to get round the whole of Australia but things were closing down as we were playing. Although we were selling out, half the people weren’t turning up. They then reduced the numbers to public events to a figure so low the last one was cancelled. We then had trouble getting back, we had no idea what was going on, and no one anticipated things going on this long. Suffice to say I’m desperately looking forward to playing in Norwich. It was just great fun playing the Visage and Vienna material back in 2019. I hadn’t done so for years and the audience reaction was fantastic. These were people who never saw Ultravox back in the day - folk that thought they would never get to hear some of the tracks played live. I know it’s a bit retro, but I realised that people do want to hear this stuff.”
The success of that tour was a reminder of just how big Ultravox were after the release of that record, and how sudden that success was.
“The whole thing was bizarre. I remember being in a rehearsal studio with the band, gearing up for the Vienna tour, and our manager turned up with a couple of magnums of champagne with the news that both Visage and Ultravox have charted. It seemed almost ludicrous to me that I had two successful projects on the go at the same time. The album came out and did well but the single was a phenomenon. No one saw this long, haunting, song with a violin solo being a commercial success but it bounced around the world and changed everything.”
If it was strange for Ure, it must have been stranger for his fellow band members to be overnight sensations with their fifth album.
“It’s that old adage of taking a long time for overnight success. It may sound weird, but I never asked the other guys how they felt about it. We were all too busy looking at new synthesisers, gearing up for the next onslaught. I started watching what they were doing with technology – they actually knew what they were doing with it, after all – while they let me be the prog rock guitarist I’d always aspired to. I suppose it was just a case of getting the right people together. I came into a band that had already been established and had lost key members - it might have precipitated a horrible death but instead we just sparked.”
Nonetheless, it seems hard to imagine that John Foxx didn’t cast a long shadow over those early days.
“It honestly didn’t feel that way and certainly didn’t last very long. I think it’s more the fans that divide into two, and many of them will never change which side of the fence they sit on. That’s absolutely fine with me – I think we’re simply two bands that share a name.”
It’s a name that he appears to be custodian of, given the fragmentation of the band, presumably with his fellow band members blessing.
“I couldn’t say for certain. We are such a weird bunch. I haven’t seen or spoken to Billy since the last show we did together. Warren has retired and living in North Carolina somewhere, and Chris, despite living in Bath, is someone I never see. But men are like that – we never talk, we never see each other, yet when we do meet up the intervening years disappear.”
On those rare occasions, they must have a lot to talk about, given the success of Ure’s Ultravox that stretches way beyond his first record with them. It would be natural to assume that this current tour, which promises to feature music from the Rage In Eden and Quartet albums, was always intended to continue where the 2019 concert left off. Ure, however, is quick to disabuse the notion of a celebratory master plan.
“On the contrary, it was only after the success of the first tour that I started to wonder about what else to do. Tackling the back catalogue chronologically made most sense to me, and that means cherry picking from Rage in Eden and Quartet. After all, apart from possibly the Brilliant album – the last that Ultravox did together – Rage in Eden is my favourite. Without the boost of Vienna’s success, we would never have attempted something so ambitious. I think there is a sense that when you get commercial success – not that we expected it – a cockiness follows. Maybe it’s a self-belief thing. You simply have more faith in your abilities. Perhaps we were stupidly self-assured. Whatever the reason, we went to Connie Plank’s studio in Germany with no songs – maybe a couple of riffs and ideas – and made the entire album in the studio using it as an instrument. Vienna was written, rehearsed and recorded in a matter of weeks. Rage in Eden was the antithesis of that – we were in that studio for three months and came out with a body of work. It’s not the sort of thing a record company would want you to do, but for us as musicians it felt right. Frankly, we were given the time and the money to experiment. Bear in mind we were living on a farmyard, thirty kilometres outside Cologne, so after months of that you felt like you were imprisoned, with our heads in a weird, albeit good, mental state. If you listen to something like Your Name, for example, the way we worked on that was to come up with a sound, a pattern, an echoing bass drum, all of which painted a picture that informed the content of the song. We could never have written that material on a piano and then popped into a studio in London to record it.”
He’s keen to make clear that while we got the whole of Vienna last we should be wary of expecting that to be the template for the new shows.
“There is a massive chunk of Rage in Eden ready to go, but don’t expect to hear the whole thing. There are elements – don’t ask me to point them out – that I’m not sure about now. When you go back forty years you think very differently. And I don’t want to spend the whole of my life doing retro concerts. I realise that sometimes you have to do the old stuff to reel people in for the next tour, reminding them that there is more than the hits in the back catalogue, but you have to find a happy balance, otherwise it’s just karaoke.”
All of which sounds as if there is some original material in the pipeline.
“What I have completed is an entirely instrumental album, heavily influenced by the Icelandic, textural neo classical composers. I have always tried to include some instrument tracks on albums, and I get that an entire album might seem self-indulgent, but I loved the process of creating this new work – it’s one of the most favourite things I’ve ever done. As for a new album, I have been working on it, but it has been five years now, and no album deserves five years of your time. I think I’m getting slow in my old age, or maybe just pedantic. Whether it ever gets finished I don’t know. It’s taken me so long, I’ve now started pulling it apart, questioning what I’ve already done – I’m basically like a hamster in a wheel.”
It’s a typically self-depreciating closing remark from a man that has been a delight to chat to. Someone once said you should never meet your heroes - I can only think that whoever said it simple mixed with the wrong heroes.
See Midge Ure at Theatre Royal Norwich on 26th September
