Interview with MIDGE URE

August 2024

Soft-spoken when you speak to him and fierce when he’s facing the audience, Midge Ure may seem to embody contradiction – and such a core of this artist’s personality is also, perhaps, the very root of his creative vim, or élan if you prefer to focus on Ure’s elegance – something that he took to the fore with VISAGE, which he helped form, with ULTRAVOX, which he transformed, and of course, with his solo career, even though the fruits of Midge’s individual path have been rather varied and at the same time consistent. There’s no paradox in this musician’s wish to remain faithful to himself no matter what ensemble he’s in – when he does share the stage with fellow players – and especially when he’s left to his own devices.

Ure last issued fresh music under his own name a decade prior to our tête-à-tête prefacing Midge’s Toronto show, but, as his performance proved in style, the seventy-year-old still feels relevant. It’s an unfinished piece of dialogue, because our allocated time was short while questions were plenty; however, the veteran offered quite a few insights, starting with a reply to the opening gambit prompted by his onscreen signature, his real name: James.

– How would you prefer to be addressed: James, Jim or Midge?

Oh, everyone calls me Midge. Only the taxman calls me James.

– Your usual concert is a mix of your solo material and your bands material..

It is, although – as someone pointed out, after two shows that we’ve done on this tour – there seems to be more ULTRAVOX than solo material. And I hadn’t noticed that, because it doesn’t matter what the name above it is – they’re all my songs. I just put together what I think is an interesting set. So yes, it will be ULTRAVOX material, some VISAGE stuff. and some solo stuff.

– Would you ever go for a tour or concert of only solo material?

I think it might be a nice thing to do, but again, you’ve got to understand, and it’s something that I only realized a few years ago, that no matter where you play, possibly fifty per cent of the audience don’t know your stuff. They don’t know all the albums – or if they do, they’re there with their partners, their husband, wife, girlfriends, whatever – they only know the hits. They might only know “Vienna” and “If I Was” or “Dancing With Tears In My Eyes” and nothing else. So they’re the ones that you’ve got to think of as well, not just the ones who know everything. You know, the hardcore fans know every album track and they would sit quite happily, I’m sure, through an entire night of just my material, but I think but the fifty per cent might get a little bit restless, because they’re just waiting to hear the next song that they know. So you have to try and balance it up a little bit. But it’d be an interesting thing to do.

– But still, they go to a Midge Ure concert, not to an ULTRAVOX one, which means that they know your name outside of the band anyway.

They do, but they probably don’t know the material quite as well. As I said, the one thing that runs through all the songs, whether it’s ULTRAVOX, If It’s VISAGE, THE RICH KIDS or whatever, is me. So if you go to a Midge Ure concert, you’re going to get something Midge Ure had something to do with.

– Speaking of identity… Twenty years ago I asked Pete Agnew what did it mean for him to be Scottish, and he said, “It means not being English, and that’s enough for us.” So what does it mean for you to be Scottish?

Yes, being Scottish has nothing to do with being in Scotland. Being Scottish is your roots, it’s your heritage, it’s your history. There’s a pride to being Scottish because history dictates that we were always seen as the underdog. We were always the poorer relation to England, so history has created this population, this bunch of people who are strong, who are fighters, who are proud of who they are and what they are. And if you look all around the world, anywhere in the world… I remember going to Ethiopia, where I was being driven through the jungle, and we came to a bridge, and the bridge was built by Scottish people. The bridge was a hundred and fifty years old, but it was built in Glasgow, in Scotland, and then shipped out there and built in Ethiopia. And you think, “Well, that’s what it’s all about.” Then you go to Australia, and it was the Scots who inhabited Australia, and New Zealand, and Canada. The Scottish heritage, it’s much, much bigger than just the country of Scotland.

– Does your being Scottish affect your music?

I think it does. And it’s not just the melodies. I think in a lot of the songs, the subject matter that I write about stems from, maybe, the darker side of being born in Glasgow. We have huge religious rivalry, just like in Northern Ireland, you know, Catholics and Protestants, and I was brought up in the middle of all of this. But I could never see the point of hitting somebody because they worship a slightly different God from you. So a lot of the songs that I write are about that. But again, it’s part of the rich culture that we all have. We all have these tensions, these things that happen to you when you’re young. When I moved from Scotland to London back – in 1977, I think it was, or ’78 – and I’d been in London for a while and then went back to Glasgow to see some friends, and they said, “Are your new friends good? Your English friends?” I said, “Yeah, they’re great.” And my friends asked, “What religion are they?” I said, “I’ve got no idea!” It never crossed my mind to ask, but that kind of thing leaves a questioning, and a lot of it appears in my songwriting. Even the bad bits that countries have can be turned into a force for good, so I point out the ridiculousness of a lot of that stuff. And it comes out in a melodic form.

– I enjoyed reading your autobiography where you mentioned that you had moved away from religion. But then there are such cuts as “Dear God” and “May Your Good Lord” which deal with faith in a peculiar way. Their subject matter aside, you made these dance tracks sound very intimate. How did you manage that?

Well, things like “Dear God” and “May Your Good Lord” – it’s religious imagery. Again, if you listen to the lyrics, it’s questioning. “Dear God” can be taken two ways: “Dear God” as in a prayer, like a child would say, and “Dear God, is this what we’ve got, is this what we’ve come to?” It’s an exclamation. And again, it questions what people, or certain people, do in the name of fixed religion. And it seems to cause more trouble than good. A lot of the conflicts around the world are based on religions, they’re all based on different cultures, all based on different skin colors. And songwriting can be about anything. Ninety per cent of songs – I’m making this figure up – are about relationships, about love, but songs can be about every subject you can think of. It’s how you present the song in a production. And you can turn a questioning song like that into a dance track. So it’s used for good, but it still has this core questioning.

– Yeah, but dance tracks usually are there to move your feet, not your soul. How many people you think actually listen to lyrics while shuffling their feet on the floor?

Not many at all, of course! (Laughs.) Of course they don’t! So it can be a double-edged sword. There’s an art, I suppose, to making something that make people move. What music does, it makes you move. But the lyrical content… I don’t think people listen to what the lyrics are saying. You know, in a situation like that, sitting at home with your headphones on, you might listen to the lyrics a bit more because you’re concentrating on the music or you’re getting lost in the music, but on a dance floor, you’re probably more interested in pulling a new partner than thinking about what’s actually being sung.

– From what I read in your book, you work from a synthesizer sound before composing a song. But when I listen to your music, it sounds like you’re coming from acoustic structure or melody, rather than sonic texture. What is your actual approach?

I think the thing about using electronics, or synthesizers, is that you can create an atmosphere, and the atmosphere is a sonic image. I don’t sit down and write songs at a piano, I don’t sit down and write them on a guitar. I have the idea of what I’d like to try and say, but I don’t know how I’m going to say it yet. And then I sit with a keyboard and I create sounds. I’m playing the same three chords on a guitar, on a keyboard, on a synthesizer – and all of a sudden, it’s like going from black and white into Technicolor, all of a sudden it opens up, and there’s an image in your head. It gives you this environment to start creating the song. And that’s what I tend to do. I sit down in front of a computer with a keyboard, and I work out melodies and textures, and sounds. When I produce a piece of music, I’m producing and writing it, and working on the lyrics all at the same time. I don’t write the song first, and then record it. I’ve always – since maybe the early Eighties – had my own recording facilities. So the idea that you have to write twenty songs, then choose ten with a producer, then go in and record them all and start arranging them in the studio is completely alien to me. I wouldn’t know how to do that. I sit in the studio and I create the song and the melodies, and the structure, and the chords, and all of it comes together over a long period of time. Eventually you finish up with a song. So it’s not lyric-led, it’s idea-led. If you want to write a song about this car sitting next to me, how do you write this? You don’t just go, “I love this car!” You have to think about what you want to say about that. But I don’t write it all out on a piece of paper and then think, “All right, now I’ll figure out some chords” – it all comes together at the same time. It’s a very strange way of writing, but it’s my way of doing it.

– So you’re saying there’s never been a single occasion. where a melody and a lyric popped into your head, and only afterwards you started looking for a sonic colorization of it all?

– In most of the cases, yes. It’s the way it’s worked. “Dear God” was the exception. I had a dream and I heard the song. The song was in my head, and when I woke up it was still there, which is very unusual. You know, you have a dream and it’s very vivid, and the moment you try and remember the dream, it gets further away and just disappears. You can never, never remember dreams. But I woke up, and this song was in my head. And all I had to do was go to the studio at home and start working out what I remembered about the song. And it was that. That was the concept of it, the questioning of it, the simplicity of it, the naivety of it – it was all there. All I had to do was just kind of slightly push it and mold it into the final song. But most of it comes from something that I’ve read or I’ve seen or I’ve felt. You have a phrase, you have a saying… When we did “Vienna,” I walked into the rehearsal studio with the rest of the guys and said, “I’ve got this thing: this means nothing to me, oh Vienna.” That was it. That’s all we had. And then the band put together all the parts to create what you know now. But that doesn’t happen very often. I have the seed of the idea, and I log the seeds until I can get to the computer or to the synthesizer and start working them out.

– Still you have such tracks as “Oboe” and “Piano” which, for all their beauty, seem to be more like essays on sound. Was that what you intended to do when you wrote them?

They were tracks that we did back when we had B-sides, when it was vinyl. And ULTRAVOX used to do these weird things where we would all take turns at writing, creating a piece of music for a B-side. Very rarely we all did it together. So Warren [Cann] would do one, and then Chris [Cross] would do one on the next single or whatever, and it was experimental tracks. I have a love of instrumental music. I always have. I find it more haunting, in a way, than a song, because lyrics in a song put a stamp on it – they say exactly what the song’s about, although people can interpret however they feel fit. But an instrumental piece, it’s like a movie soundtrack. It’s something that you can just get lost in and you can create your own story within that piece of music. So things like “Oboe” and “Piano” were experimenting with what was still then very basic electronics and basic home recording stuff, which is a key to it. It was the fact that you didn’t have to book a studio, you didn’t have to pay a thousand pounds a day or whatever it was to go into a studio to try and experiment – all of a sudden, you could start recording at home, which is exactly where those things came from. They came from messing around in the studio, learning how the equipment worked. You experiment and you find yourself with a piece of music. You think, “Okay, well, maybe people would be interested in this.” And that becomes an extra track on an album, a spare track or an elongated track, a bonus thing.

– Were your recordings with Mick Karn a continuation of this sonic exploration?

No, Mick and I, we’d started talking about trying to do an album together. I had a house in Montserrat, in the Caribbean, Mick came out there, and we started throwing ideas around and recording because he was a very different type of creative musician. Mick was wonderful, fabulous, a lovely, lovely man. But his way of playing his fretless bass… he didn’t know what he was playing. You couldn’t say to him, “Well, could you play a B-flat?” because he didn’t want to know the rudiments of music. He played what he felt, and that meant that a lot of things that he would play would clash with chords that we were working on. So I would just change the chords to suit his playing because it was so unique. And it was so him, it was an extension of who he was. That in itself was experimental – it took me out of the way I would normally structure things and think, “Okay, I normally would put that chord in there, but as you’re playing those notes, this chord works better with that.” And “After A Fashion” – which is the track that we ended up doing together – has such a bizarre structure! The changes in it are very odd, but I love it because just being with Mick made it… It made me do something that I stepped outside my comfort zone to do. And that’s the joy of collaborations, of working with other musicians, because they do insist that they like what you do, but you have to adapt what you do to work with them. So we threw some ideas around, but we never finished the album, sadly. A real pity.

– To my ears, even the “After A Fashion” riff has a certain Celtic angle, and that leads me back to this Scottish heritage and a couple of Scottish musicians you worked with. First of all, how was it – having Zal Cleminson in your band

Zal was great. When I was still living in Scotland and playing in my first bands, Zal was part of a band called TEAR GAS, who did the Scottish circuit, and we used to play the same venues. In fact, some of the shows we’d play together – they would be headlining and we’d be the support band. So I knew him roughly, vaguely, I’d maybe met him a few times. And what happened was: when I was doing my tour to support the gift album, I’d asked Mick Ronson to play guitar, because I just wanted to stand and sing, and he was my hero. I loved everything Mick Ronson did, but it became very apparent during rehearsals that he wasn’t quite with us. He wouldn’t play the same part twice: one minute he’d be playing a solo with a slide, the next minute he’d play it on a really clean, twangy sound, and the next minute it was all distorted – it was too random. So I had to ask Mick not to do the tour, and one of my musicians said, “I’ve just worked with Zal Cleminson.” Zal was driving a taxi at the time – he wasn’t working as a musician, he was filling in – so he came in and learned the entire set in two days. And it was an absolute joy! He was a great guy to hang out with. We should have been in a band together back when we were kids. We should have been playing and abandoned Glasgow together, because that would have been quite a powerhouse.

– How did his heavy metal clownishness work within the context of your music?

It was great! It was great, because a lot of what you do live sounds a lot rockier than the actual recordings. There’s a lot more power to stuff live. So he actually brought a lot to the table: his aggressive sound, just really digging in on his guitar. And when we did dual guitar things, it was just a joy to do. So it fitted in incredibly well, even though he had come from THE ALEX HARVEY BAND kind of rock. He was a rock guitar god, and I was perceived as a kind of new wave, synthesizer guy. When we both got on guitars, it was great. It was very powerful!

– Another Scottish guy I’d like to ask you about – whom I assume you met when working on “The Philip Lynott Album” – is Jimmy Bain.

I didn’t. I don’t think I’ve ever met Jimmy Bain, which is bizarre. He may have been on the album but I don’t think he was on “Yellow Pearl”; it was Rusty Egan from THE RICH KIDS and Billy Currie from ULTRAVOX doing the sequenced stuff, and myself.

– Would it be right to say that you influenced Phil’s move in this synthesizer-based direction from his usual hard rock?

I probably did, but that was his insistence. When I did my stint with THIN LIZZY, I was on guitar to start with, but they were looking for a permanent replacement because I was already part of ULTRAVOX at this point. I didn’t want to join LIZZY, as my heart was with ULTRAVOX, but I did, because Philip was, in the nicest way, a bit of a magpie. He wanted to hang out with SEX PISTOLS when the PISTOLS were really cool, and he wanted to involve the synthesizer when the synthesizer thing started being cool. He liked to be associated because he was one of these guys who fitted with everything. Everyone loved him and everyone knew him. It didn’t matter what genre of music you were part of. He wanted me to come out on tour in Japan with him while they tried out a new guitar player, but he said, “I’d like you to bring the synth things and then, at the end of the set, come up on guitar and play the last five or six songs, while we try this guy out.” And that was it. So when I went off to go back to ULTRAVOX to do the “Vienna” album, he brought in Darren Wharton in to play keyboards with LIZZY. Only LIZZY didn’t really need a keyboard player – they didn’t have to have a synth in there. It was crazy, you could never hear it. They should have stayed a guitar band.

– Did you and Phil ever discuss your love for Celtic melodicism?

We did. Him coming from Ireland and me coming from Scotland, because of our histories, the music we were brought up with was obviously traditional Celtic music. That sense of melody and the sense of drama that Celtic history has, and those beautiful laments, those beautiful tunes that both Ireland and Scottish people have, they’re slightly different, but they still have this power – it’s angst-ridden, it’s soulful, it’s honest, it’s crying for something better than you have, or crying for what you had, and that element has always been there. I saw THIN LIZZY as a three-piece band in Glasgow the first time they came to Scotland, and what they wrote in those days was incredibly Celtic. “Dublin” and “Things Ain’t Working Out Down At The Farm” were very powerful melodic rock that was steeped in Celtic history.

– There were SLIK, RICH KIDS, VISAGE and, further on, ULTRAVOX. What did you learn from each of those bands? What did they add to your understanding of music?

Well, it’s a journey, isn’t it? I didn’t really do anything in SLIK, and I learned never to do that again. But I was very fortunate that I didn’t really start writing or creating until I moved to London. And when I moved to London to join THE RICH KIDS, it was vibrant and exciting. But I bought a synthesizer in 1978 and I brought it into THE RICH KIDS in the middle of the height of punk, when synthesizers were so uncool. But I brought one in there because I could see this combination of traditional rock instruments and this electronic thing. And it immediately killed the band. So I learned that sometimes you have to follow your heart, although everyone thought it was crazy. I took the drummer from THE RICH KIDS, Rusty Egan, and we formed VISAGE with our favorite musicians, one of whom happened to be Billy Currie from ULTRAVOX. And I saw ULTRAVOX come back from a tour a broken band, their singer and guitarist gone. They’d been dropped by the record label. And that was the band I wanted to join.
Those guys taught me more about structure and being free, being loose about ideas and not being scared of trying things. So the moment I joined ULTRAVOX was the moment that the creative lid was lifted off and I could do anything. And I didn’t have to be responsible for it, I didn’t have to think about what other people would think about it. I just did it, and the proof is in the pudding, as they say. We made the “Vienna” album, and it’s still cited as one of the groundbreaking albums at the time, because no one expected to see it being commercially successful. No one expected to see it in the charts. “Certainly not ‘Vienna’! It’s too long and it’s too slow, and it speeds up and it’s got viola thing, it’s synthesizers and piano!” But it was, and it changed everything. So they were the guys that I owe everything to because they taught me to not be scared and follow your heart.