The Catalyst interview: Midge Ure, OBE

In the United Kingdom, Midge Ure, OBE is pop music royalty, a living legend. In America, not so much.

The Scottish singer-songwriter, who performs Tuesday (Sept. 10) at Bayboro Brewing, fronted the band Ultravox in the early-to-mid ‘80s. He turned out some of the best-loved and best-selling electronic-based rock songs of the so-called new wave era.

Ure’s “Vienna,” “Hymn,” “Dancing With Tears in My Eyes,” “All Stood Still” and others were massive sellers in Great Britain and in various European countries; Ultravox landed two platinum and four gold albums.

After his solo career began in 1985, Ure’s “If I Was” went to No. 1 in most of those countries.

And America yawned.

The OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) was bestowed upon him for his work alongside Bob Geldof in aiding starving Ethiopian refugees. Ure wrote the music for “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” the all-star 1984 charity single. He also recorded the backing track, every instrument, by himself (overdubs by John Taylor and Phil Collins were added later).

“Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was England’s top-selling single for more than a decade.

He also organized, with Geldof, the massive 1985 Live Aid concerts, and Live 8 in 2005. He was the musical director for the Prince’s Trust concerts in London for many years.

Evident in this interview is Ure’s tremendous sense of humor. His real first name is James. Say “Jim” backwards … that’s where “Midge” comes from.

St. Pete Catalyst: I’ve been listening to your Orchestrated album, from 2017. And I’m amazed at how these songs translate so well to that kind of arrangement. They’re very melodic. And I always thought of them as electronic dance/pop songs.

Midge Ure: The songs take on a different meaning when you perform them that way. I can say this because I didn’t do it – I know nothing about orchestration! But I found in Ty Unwin, the guy who did it, not only a guy who knew more about my background than I did, but a brilliant orchestrator. So he was really sensitive to the songs.

My big worry was, you do an orchestrated version of something everyone has heard all their life, and it ruins the memory for people. That’s what music does, it takes you back to who you were hanging out with, who you fancied and what you were wearing … and I didn’t want to ruin that. So he very carefully sculpted this stuff, and did it beautifully. So when you hear “Dancing With Tears,” it’s not a straight out rock song, it becomes a much more poignant thing.

Having said that, we’re not doing anything like that on this tour! [Laughing] We’re not dragging an orchestra around. We have got a Band in a Box, though, and that is something. That makes it feasible to do this stuff.

OK, Band in a Box, you’ve got to explain that one.

Two years ago, my old friend Howard Jones asked me to come on tour in America with him. I had to put on my Scottish hat and explain to him the fiscal side of touring. Because he was much more commercially successful than I was, in any form, here in America. He gets paid a much higher rate, so he can afford to take a whole band, and a whole crew, and the lights and the PA and the Nightliners [touring buses] and all of that stuff. Whereas I couldn’t.

He says “If it helps, why don’t you use one of my keyboard players? And you figure out how you do the rest.” So I designed this Band in a Box thing, which is basically tracks – it’s sounds, it’s drum loops, it’s whatever – which enables me to play alongside a proper keyboard player. I can do keyboards, I can do guitar, and I do vocals. And it gives me the opportunity to let people hear kind of what Ultravox would have sounded like. It’s very powerful, it’s got real oompf to it, a real strength, and it allows me to play songs that I wouldn’t necessarily be able to do without a full band.

And I have to say, even though I was reticent about doing that at first ‘cause it kind of felt like upgraded karaoke to me, the response you get from the audience is phenomenal. They don’t care that there’s no drummer there. They get to hear the stuff with the power and the performance side of things that they wouldn’t normally get.

To my original point, listening to “Hymn,” and certainly “Vienna,” with the orchestra, knocked me out. I don’t think I’d ever grasped how melodic some of your songs were.

Well, melody was my big thing. I think it comes from my Scottish roots. I didn’t own up to it until, maybe, I was about to hit 30. There’s a couple of tracks – “Lament” was written in Scotland. And I got invigorated, and started writing all the stuff that I tried to avoid being taught at school when I was a kid. Because they tried to teach you traditional Scottish music. And my head was full of the Beatles and the Small Faces. I wasn’t interested in laments, haunting melodies.

Eventually, when the Chieftains played one of my melodies, it was so ridiculously Celtic that obviously it sunk in all those years ago, and I just didn’t let it out.

A lot of the New Romantic music from the early ‘80s era didn’t really play in America the way it did in the U.K. Ultravox never had a massive hit in the States.

Oh God, far from it!

Why do you think that is?

Well, think about it. Jump in a time machine and go back to 1979, which is when I joined Ultravox and we started working on the Vienna album. And we came over and did a handful of dates, doing that same circuit as the Police and Squeeze, small club dates. There was a little chink in the armor of America.

America was dominated – dominated – by corporate rock, by Styx, Boston, Foreigner … you still had stations that played “Stairway to Heaven” 24/7!

So to try and get something that was deemed as radical as Ultravox, it was hard work. Only a handful of stations were brave enough to play what was coming out of the U.K. at the time. But the college stations were brave; they played it. So you managed to get across to a certain amount of the audience that way.

It was like David and Goliath, you couldn’t get your foot in the door. Then when MTV happened, it was amazing – you guys had the vehicle to show videos, but you didn’t have the videos. We did! We had the videos but no vehicle. So for the first six months of MTV, you couldn’t move for seeing all of these black and white, grainy videos of Ultravox, or Depeche Mode or whoever it happened to be. That was a way in to the general public. Although only people who had cable, in certain parts of the country, could get MTV.

I suppose the vastness of America is a slow-moving machine. It takes a long time for things to come through. I remember coming over with Ultravox the first time, and seeing kids pull up outside the so-called punk clubs with their T-shirts pinned together, but they were stepping out of Trans Ams. And you’d think “Culturally, that’s not it. You’ve got the outfit and you think this is cool, and it’s a fashion,” but actually, in the U.K., it came out of poverty. It was real when it came out of the U.K., and had turned into High Street fashion.

So it took a long time for America to change. As it does. It’s a vast, vast machine. And we shot ourselves in the foot by not doing a Band in a Box, by insisting we played everything live. Which meant five-hour soundchecks for Ultravox.

So when we hit getting to the level of playing Avery Fisher Hall in New York, or whatever, 2,000-capacity venues, the next logical step for Ultravox would be to open up for someone much bigger, in front of a larger audience. You can’t do that if you do a five-hour soundcheck. So we stalemated at that point and watched Depeche Mode and the Cure and everyone else come storming in and steal our crown [Laughing].

You’re an OBE. What does that actually do for you?

It doesn’t get you a decent seat in a restaurant. It’s a pat on the back from the Establishment. It’s a lovely pat on the back, don’t get me wrong. My mother was incredibly proud when it happened.

I mean, you can put it on your credit card, but why?

I asked Richard Curtis the film director – he’s got a knighthood or something – I said “What do you do with it?” And he said “You show it to your mum and then you forget about it.”  

Find tickets to the Sept. 10 performance here.