IT would be fair to describe Midge Ure as a music legend. Born in Cambuslang, he joined the Glasgow band Stumble in 1969.
He then went on to have hits with Slik, Rich Kids, Visage, Ultravox and as a solo artist, as well as a stint with Thin Lizzy.
He also co-wrote the huge hit Band Aid single Do They Know It’s Christmas, put together the Live Aid concert with Bob Geldof and more recently toured with a reformed Ultravox.
He looked back at some of the key moments of his career ahead of a gig at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Bandstand on Friday, June 6.
You’ve been doing this for some time now. How do you feel to still be making music and still be touring?
Lucky. If we jumped in a time machine and went back 30 years, it would be perceived as obscene. You know, a 71-year-old is still here playing pop/rock music? It just wasn’t allowed, was it?
It was something that wasn’t on the radar. Unless you were playing blues or jazz or classical, then it was OK. I’m very lucky to be allowed to still come in here and twiddle knobs and make noises and go out there and play them for people.
What parts of your career do you look back on with particular affection?
I’ve got to say the moment I joined Ultravox because it could have been scripted in Hollywood. Boy with synthesiser joins band with synthesisers after they’ve been dropped by the record label.
The singer and guitarist had left. They were in debt. They had no future to speak of. But I loved them.
We pulled the money we had in our pockets together to go into a rehearsal space for two or three hours. That’s all we could afford.
We had nothing and the noise we made was just utterly phenomenal. It was the most exciting thing that I’d ever come across.
In your earlier bands you played fairly straight-ahead rock music. When did that change?
I played guitar in a Glasgow band, Salvation, and when the singer left I eventually took over vocals as well. We changed the name to Slik, then we were signed [to a record company].
You have to remember that in Scotland at the time we had the talent, but we had no vehicle for the talent, so you had to move south. Everything was London-centric, so you had to move, and we weren’t ready to do that.
When Slik were signed all of a sudden we were a teenybop band, having played rock music for years. Once you’re tarred with that brush, it’s very difficult to shake that off. We had big success for six months then new wave came along and killed everything other than new wave.
I was called up by former Sex Pistol Glen Matlock and asked to move to London to come and join his band, the Rich Kids. Later I bought a synthesiser, brought it into the band, and it instantly killed the Rich Kids. Half the band hated it, half the band loved it.
Rusty Egan [the drummer] and I took the synthesiser and put together Visage, using all our favourite musicians at the time, the guys from Ultravox and from Magazine.
Visage was a big band with a great hit – Fade To Grey – as well. We thought we’d just make music for the kids who went to a club in London run by Rusty and his mate, Steve Strange, which played this strange European dance music.
It was purely driven by passion and the idea of incorporating this new instrument – the synthesiser – which had only just become affordable. Until a Japanese manufacturer started bringing them out, a mini-Moog cost the same price as a house.
So when you joined Ultravox you obviously brought with you an ability to write songs that would be hits. Was that a surprise to them?
It was a surprise to me. Up to that point, I hadn’t really written a lot. I’d only written a couple of songs on the Rich Kids album.
When I joined Ultravox I was surrounded by these amazing, adventurous musicians, and these guys had been using electronics and drum machines and whatever for a few years prior to me joining, so it was a very creative environment.
All of a sudden, I was creating Vienna. When you have the right people around you, you bounce off each other, and this thing just appears, this monster.
Did you know Vienna was a monster when you wrote it?
We knew it was good, yeah, but it went against every rule in the “making a single” rule book. It was slow. It was meandering. It speeds up. It’s got a viola solo in the middle of a synthesised thing. It’s four minutes long.
What were the chances of getting that on the radio? None. I mean, none. It was a fluke. It was luck. That was nothing to do with us. We made it. Someone else got it on the radio for us.
They ended up putting it out in its entirety. It was just one of those Wuthering Heights, Bohemian Rhapsody moments, where it didn’t matter how long it was, because once people heard that, it did something to them.
Is Ultravox over for you now?
It is. Chris [Cross] the bass player and my big mate in the band died over a year ago now. Warren [Cann], the drummer, is retired out in California. And Billy [Currie, keyboards and strings], I haven’t seen or heard from for quite a few years. Men are just weird, aren’t they? We just walk away from things, and then it’s like, oh, that was then, you know.
Do you spend much time looking back or is making new music still a driving force?
I don’t want to be just a karaoke machine. Though that’s ridiculous saying that, because the tour that I’m currently doing is the Catalogue: The Hits tour, which is kind of karaoke, going back to various points in your career.
At the Bandstand I’ll be playing the hits over the years but also some tunes that might have been skimmed over which still resonate with me.
I think making new music is always important to me. I’m constantly doing it. I’m just slow at it. I’m more pedantic than I used to be.
I don’t have someone knocking on the door going, “Hey, what we really need right now is a new album.” People don’t come to see you for a new album. Live is where it is right now, and people expect to hear key songs from your career. You can still play new music there, but they’re what I call the tumbleweed moments. It’s all going so well, then you say, “Here’s something from my new album.”
Do you think it would be more difficult to become a success in music now than it was when you were starting out?
I think you have to be more multifaceted these days. If you were putting a band together now, you wouldn’t just go for a great keyboard player. You’d go for a good keyboard player and somebody who’s brilliant at social media.
You’d go for a good drummer, but somebody who’s really good at home recording ... for a good bass player but somebody who’s really good at doing graphics. You have to be able to do all of those things now.
These days you can make music at home and put it on the internet but it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack because there’s no filtration system. There’s no A&R guys going “that’s not good.”
We have to do this. Let’s fix this. There’s nobody there controlling it, so it’s just a free-for-all. For anyone putting music out, it’s an absolute bun fight to try and get your music heard.
You have to be skilled at all these other things, which means that the core thing you should be doing is being whittled away a little bit because you’re spending so much time on social media telling people what you’ve just made.
You don’t live in Scotland now, but you mentioned a time when acts had to move to London to succeed. Do you think that’s the same now?
No, I don’t think so. When I joined the Rich Kids I was invited to go down to London and I moved there back in ’77.
Simple Minds stayed in Glasgow and did it from Scotland. They built a studio. Zoom Records came along and signed them.
When I left, Glasgow had one four-track recording studio, and it was used by accordion bands and stuff. There were no facilities. We had all the talent, but we had nothing to nurture it, nothing to exploit this talent, to let it grow.
The moment I got on a bloody plane to go to London, that all changed.
When you got the call from Bob Geldof about starting Band Aid did you agree to help straight away?
I was standing next to Paula Yates about to go on the Tube. Bob called Paula, and she handed the phone to me, that was it.
So, Bob was on the phone saying, “I’ve just seen this footage [of the famine in Ethiopia]. It’s disgusting. I want to do something. Will you help?”
I hadn’t seen the footage at the time. You kind of half-heartedly go, okay ... until you see the footage. And then you go, “now I get it. I see what that is.” So you make time. You couldn’t be too busy to do it.
I spent four days in my studio taking Bob’s half-baked ideas and my half-baked ideas and recording all the instruments. I played all the instruments on the record, except Phil Collins’s drums. And I spent four days doing that while Bob bludgeoned all the artists to come on board.
We set up the Band Aid trust because George Harrison had said, “Don’t do what I did. I did the concert for Bangladesh and all the money got eaten up in overheads.” So we found ourselves responsible for all this money, and that was petrifying. So we set up a board of trustees, a bunch of us sitting around a table.
We thought it was going to be a six-month project while we oversaw the spending of this money. We didn’t know anything about high-protein biscuits, or medication or shipping or anything like that, but we knew enough people who did.
That six-month project has turned into 40 years plus. All the people who joined the board then who are still alive are still on that board.
We get emails every day from projects asking for funding, and we have to analyse and assess them and all of that. So, it’s ongoing, even when there’s no anniversary, when there’s nobody particularly interested in it.
The Live Aid event was bigger than I ever anticipated. It felt like a step too far and it was never going to happen. It was too big. But Harvey Goldsmith [the promoter] had put on big concerts before.
Bob and I couldn’t tell you how to plug in an amp. But you surround yourself with people who can and we pulled in some of the best.
For an industry that’s shark-infested and all about me, me, me, me, me, to turn around and do something for people that you’d never meet, in a continent you might never visit was just incredible.
Do you think the world’s a better place now than it was then?
It’s like a Hollywood horror movie. I’ve just come back from America, and I wasn’t even sure I would get in. People have been stopped by immigration and had their phones taken from them and flipped through.
And if you’ve said anything about the big orange thing, you’re not allowed in. You’re turned around and sent back. And that’s just bizarre. Maybe it’s 24-hour news, maybe it’s the internet and all the false information that’s put out there. But the world just seems to be a very, very, very scary place.
In America, the haves and the have-nots are much further apart. Politically, it’s scary. It’s like the Pandora’s box has been opened and the vibrations of racism that could have been there for a long time have been let loose.
You were an outspoken opponent of Brexit. Has the reality of that been less bad or worse than you envisaged?
For the music industry, it’s been horrendous. In the music industry, trucking doesn’t work.
You know, a lot of companies have had to go and set up their trucking companies in Belgium or Holland or whatever, because Brexit made it almost impossible to take all your equipment from the UK and go to Paris or Denmark or wherever. The paperwork involved in it is ludicrous. We’ve gone back to how it was in the 1970s. You have to list every piece of equipment you’ve got, and you have to show that crossing every single border in Europe now.
I have travelled around Europe quite a bit since Brexit happened, the first thing that border guards say is “We’re sorry you’ve done this.” They didn’t want us to leave. If you tell someone a lie often enough, it will become their truth.
And we were sold this whole thing about how we had no control over our country, and all the decisions were being made in Europe and that wasn’t the case. We were part of something that could negotiate with the rest of the world.
And now we can’t. I think Obama said about Brexit that we would not be front of the queue when it came to strike [trade] deals, we’d be at the back of the queue because we had chosen to be at the back of the queue, and that’s what’s happened.
