EARLY SEVENTIES - Scottish group Salvation , plays cover versions at youth club dances all over'the country.
MID SEVENTIES - Chart ..topping group Slik sharing a place in te hearts of teenage Britain with the Bay City Rollers, Girls go ga ga.
LATE SEVENTIES - PVC2, one excellent' single on Zoom Records, 'Put You In The Picture ', really Slik in disguise.
Rich Kids, the shape of things to come (it said here), a prediction which bombed, likewise the group.
Visage, a group made up from musicians from three other bands. Only one single emerged.
Thin Lizzy, augmenting line-up on their Japanese tour.
Ultravox, new line-up, successful tour of America.
NOW -
Ultravox album, 'Vienna', forthcoming British, American and possibly Japanese
tours.
'Visage' album shortly to be released...
…Midge Ure has good reason to be pleased. After such a chequered career,.he is doing what he really wants, though if you'd told him five years ago he'd be a part of such a group he'd probably have told you to pull the other one.
We're sitting in his living room in West London; Midge, fellow Ultravox member Billy Currie and myself. An easy loquacious atmosphere exists - you get the feeling Midge and Billy are very close, that this version of Ultravox is going to stick together for years, and had other members Chris Cross and Warren Cann been present, the same atmosphere would prevail.
A new band therefore, new optimism , a new lease of life. Yet if they were starting afresh, why did they decide to stick with the name Ultravox instead of opting for something new?
Billy: "Because Ultravox means something, not in the sense you could look it up in the dictionary, but because we MADE it mean what it is."
Midge: " The guys had worked for it, building up a strong reputation so why shouldn't they retain the name? They did want to change it at first but to me it was like cutting off your own nose to spite your own face, so I pushed to keep it."
Billy interrupts "because things were so depressing for us at the time. We just didn't realize our desolation had filtered through to that extent, but we just wanted to forget Ultravox. We'd been kicked off our record label, we were down to three members, we just didn't want to know."
BUT joining Ultravox was something Midge had been pushing for for a considerable time, and he wasn't going to let the oppertunity slip through his fingers. The Rich Kids were on their last legs at the time, and Midge, along , with fellow Rich Kid Rusty Egan,decided to form a band with musicians they really respected . So Dave, John and Barrie from Magazine were duly recruited as well as Billy Currie. Hence 'Visage'.
"All the time we were writing and planning for 'Visage' I kept asking Billy what was happening with Ultravox ," Midge explains. "I was continually dropping really heavy hints, asking if they had found a new singer almost every day but Billy, being thick, didn't pick up the hint."
"That's because I was still too depressed·to think about it," the man interrupts.
Until then I hadn't realised that Billy was involved with Visage as well. So when did all this happen in relation to Midge's Lizzy tour and Billy's stint with Gary Numan?
"Just before," Billy explains. "Once we get into Visage Midge and I began to talk about Ultravox more and more.”
"It just seemed' so obvious that I should join." Midge adds.
Billy again: "We rehearsed for a week and knew it would work, so once we'd both finished our respective tours the whole band got together, wrote some material and went off to America to break the new Ultravox in. We chose America because it was available. We had no financial backing behind us and you can actually tour America on a budget because all the clubs have their own PA systems so you don't have to lug that around."
"It was funny for me to be travelling about in a hire transit and help carry the equipment after Lizzy, because they flew from gig to gig, and turned up in limos, but it was good for me to get back to roots," Midge says.
But how did Ultravox go down in America? I wouldn't have thought the Yanks were that keen on their brand of music.
"We actually made money!" Midge retorts. "America's had disco music rammed down its throat for so long that they 're ready for modern style dance music, which is what we are. In Chicago for instance they have clubs which play music by Kraftwerk, Ultravox, Elvis Costello, rock discos, they're called.
''Up till two years ago there was nowhere for British groups to play unless you were Led Zeppelin and you could fill out the stadiums used by Fleetwood Mac and the like. But now there're clubs opening all the time, and the kids over there are really getting into dressing up, leaving the loon pants and T-shirts behind at last. Of course they're still behind us but at least they've been given a taste of something new and they're starving for more."
"We'd had quite a lot of press before hand.” Billy tells me. "When I was over there touring with Numan he always said his main influence was UItravox -"
" - and Phil did the same in as much as he made sure I did a lot of interviews with him for US papers where I could mention what I was going to be doing next," Midge adds.
How did Billy become involved with Numan anyway?
"He simply got in touch and asked if I'd do the Old Grey Whistle Test with him." he replies. "I liked his stuff and it was good for me at the time to work with other people. And after that I went on to do the American tour. which helped pay for my instruments for the new Ultravox. I kind of see what John (Foxx) is doing now as the same thing that Gary's doing."
ONCE Ultravox returned from their tour of America they concentrated on getting a good record company and strong management behind them. Hence Chrysalis.
"Chrysalis is far more oerganised than Island ever was," Billy explains. "We disagreed with Island a lot. It's run by one guy – Chris Blackwell - who'd come in from his home in Nassau and change everything at the last minute. He left all these directors in charge in his absence, giving them the power to make decisions, yet when he came in to Britain he's say 'what have you done it like that for?’ and change everything round at the last minute. So the directors were scared to do anything and with the result everything was half hearted."
Management came in the form of Morrison O'Donnel... did that come about because of the Lizzy connection?
"Well obviously it opened up the acquaintance once more," Midge states, "but they'd always been interested in Ultravox from whenJohn was still a member."
And what about 'Visage'... is that a thing of the past or will it be resurrected?
"There's an album which has been finished for three months,” I am told. "Politics have held it back more than anything else, but it's quite unique of what we want to do," Midge says. "We started it with Martin Rushent producing… we recorded it down at his place in Reading and it was really relaxed . It was great because Martin really liked it on a musical level as opposed to business and he helped with as much studio time as we needed. But halfway through Genetic Radar - his company - went into liquidation so Morrison O'Donnel helped carry the album through to its conclusion. It should be out quite soon now."
"We went across to America to do the deal which is quite unusual," Billy says, "and it's a worldwide one. We're going to do one studio album a year - it's a side line, a way of getting rid of excess energy; something which'll develop because of the musicians involved."
Next comes a British tour. "We're hoping to start on August 1, and we're trying to get in some Scottish dates as well," Midge tells me. " We want the tour to be as extensive as possible, dance halls, ballrooms, so that people get an idea what we're like. We want to get across to Ireland as well if we can. Then en to America in mid September to coincide with the release of 'Vienna' over there and maybe Japan in January.
"It takes about six months to build up a tour ever there. They don't have any rock radio so everything is built up through the media - that's why they're so many music papers as thick as bibles there. That's what sells the records, which is why Japan is so popular there. They were sold on their looks, not their music!"
Meanwhile Midge was filling in a couple of spare days by going across to Ireland to produce a band called the Atrix; " I get really bored and fidgety if I have spare time," he concluded "I'm a workaholic!"
And a
successful one at that. Here's
to August when you can see for yourself.
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