He’s one of the most recognisable figures not just in pop culture but society generally: Midge Ure is known for co-writing the charity single Do They Know It’s Christmas? and organising the Live Aid concerts with Bob Geldof.
But for more than a decade he’s been fairly quiet. Now Midge is preparing for the release of his first new material for 12 years. So why has it taken him so long to come up with new songs?
“I’m lazy. I’ve got loads of excuses,” he jokes before revealing a number of reasons why recently he hasn’t given his fans anything to get excited about.
“Part of it is the amount of time it takes to write songs. I don’t sit down and write a bunch of songs and then go into the studio and record them. I write the songs in the studio, so I’ve got a seed of an idea and I sit here and I create the entire thing, all the musical parts and the lyrics.
“Sometimes that takes a week and sometimes it takes three years just to get it the way you want it. And because I do all this on my own – there’s no engineer, there are no other musicians near me – the only way I can tell whether what I’m working on is any good is to walk away from it. You leave it, go and do something else and come back to it. Instinctively you’ll know whether it’s worth finishing.
“That’s how I’ve always done things. If you’ve written a pile of music, you’re bound to do something similar to what you did 30 years before. And when that happens you have to scrap it and get on with something else.”
Midge points out that the songs had to take a back seat while he was touring. Then lockdown happened and he couldn’t go anywhere.
“So I figured out the best thing I could do was put on a different hat and start working on some instrumental music which is a very different process from writing a song. I’d do a month of instrumental music and then pop back to a song, finish it, get on with another song and when I’d got it to a certain level I’d go back to the instrumentals.”
Midge ended up making two albums side by side, thinking they were two separate albums, one instrumental and one vocal. But then he played the tracks to some musician friends who had a different view.
“They pointed out very obviously, which I couldn’t see, that this was brother and sister, these were twins, these were created in parallel, running along the same timeline in the same studio with the same equipment, looking out of the same window. And they belonged together.
“I hadn’t thought of that and it really struck me as something exciting to put out a double album and especially a double album of the two sides of the coin, the songwriter and the instrumental music.”
That double album, A Man Of Two Worlds, is released on May 8th and Midge will promote it on a UK tour which will stop off at both Nottingham and Derby.
He says he’s very melody-oriented and most of the music he’s done since the late 1970s has been “cinematic, very textual and ambient, big and huge”. He says there’s something quite poignant about some of the instrumentals.
“When I started doing it, it was lockdown so that made everyone reflect on their lives, wondering if it would ever go back to how it was. There was nothing in your diary and you had nothing coming up – there was no tour, no holidays in the distance. Everything was gone. And so you tend to look back. A lot of it is very reflective.”
Midge points out that songwriters write about what they’re seeing in the world and how that’s going to affect their family.
“There’s a theme running through the album about the fact that we seem to be living in a world where our chosen leaders choose to blatantly lie in front of cameras, saying or doing something and denying it the next day even though it’s there for the world to see.
“We’ve been through a lot in our lifetimes, seen a lot of close calls and conflicts – but never to the extent we have in the past five or six years. It’s been horrific.
“You think they can’t get any worse and then they surpass themselves by doing something even more stupid and you start to doubt your sanity.
“I think that’s interesting content for songwriting which is a great way of exorcising those ghosts, of getting that out of your system.
“You can do that in such a way that you’re not preaching to people. I’m not a politician but I can call things out when I think they’re wrong, which I’ve done since way back in (the Ultravox hit) Dancing With Tears In My Eyes.”
James “Midge” Ure OBE was born on October 10th 1953 in Lanarkshire, Scotland. When he was 19 he joined a band called Salvation which later became Slik who had a number one single with Forever And Ever.
Because another member of the band had the same Christian name, it was suggested Jim should be turned backwards, becoming Mij although it was spelt Midge.
Later he joined the Rich Kids which featured former Sex Pistols bass guitarist Glen Matlock; synthesiser band Visage who helped to drag electronic music from the underground into the mainstream; New Romantic trailblazers Ultravox; and he even spent a short time with rock band Thin Lizzy after the abrupt departure of guitarist Gary Moore.
But it was his involvement with Live Aid which really brought him to the public’s attention and eventually led to his being awarded an OBE in 2005 for his tireless charity and humanitarian work.
Now he’s concentrating on his new album and tour. Wearing a grey sweatshirt and trendy glasses, he explains instrumental music is one of his main loves and almost every album he’s made over the past 40-odd years has featured at least one instrumental track. He thinks the instrumental is underrated.
“I was born in a period when there were only two radio stations, the Light Programme and the Home Service on the BBC. The radio used to throw all sorts at you. You would hear pop music, classical and middle-of-the-road music side by side. A lot of it was instrumental.
“One of the first instrumentals I remember hearing was Santo and Johnny playing Sleepwalk. It was the first time I’d heard an electric guitar – this beautiful sound, this haunting atmosphere.
“The Shadows dominated the charts back in the early ‘60s. Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, Herb Alpert, the man with the golden trumpet – you would hear it all. And now we seem not to have that.
“I’m a firm believer that you put an album on at the beginning, play it all the way through and you go on the journey the writer or the musician intended you to go on. I think this new album will fall in the lap of people who would do that.”
Midge goes on to talk about the tour which he explains is separate from the album: “I’m not going to get up and play the entire new album – that’s too cruel for people.
“The whole concept of doing the album was I wanted to play more of the instrumental music that I’d written and recorded and incorporate that among the hits and the album tracks that people want to hear.
“I figured a way of doing it: musically I wanted to take the audience for the first half of the show on a seamless journey. So everything will be segued together – nothing will stop. It’ll morph from a song into an album track into an instrumental into something else. Highs and lows, ups and downs which is a different way of approaching a pop concert or a rock concert or whatever you want to call it. And that in itself is immersive.
“I want people to close their eyes and listen to the sound. We use a silent stage: there are no amplifiers. Everything we do on stage goes directly out to the mixing desk just like a studio. So what people are hearing is as close to unadulterated hi-fi as is humanly possible when it comes to playing live. Whether the audience go along with me on this I don’t know. I’ll tell you once we’ve started!”
It sounds to me as though Midge might be taking a gamble with what he’ll perform on the tour – but he says it’s time for change.
“For 50 years I’ve walked on stage and played 20 songs back to back, stopping in between every one. The idea of doing something slightly different is what makes things evolve.
“The music industry is floundering right now because it tends to sign acts that are already successful. Very rarely now do you find a label going out and finding the next Sinead O’Connor or the next Kate Bush – the next person who’s going to do it differently.
“Labels haven’t got the wherewithal to do it. They can’t take a chance which means a lot of what we’re fed is already manipulated and it’s more of the same.
“Artists need to step out of their comfort zone and go ‘I’m going to try this. It might work, it might not.’ Who knows until you try it?
“At the ripe old age of 72 I’m not trying to please everybody. I’m doing something that I think is going to be interesting. If the critics don’t like it, I’ve got much thicker skin now than I used to have.”
Ardent Midge Ure fans shouldn’t be in two minds about going to see him on tour. He’ll still be doing all his signature songs including the Ultravox hits Vienna and Dancing With Tears In My Eyes as well as his solo number one hit If I Was.
So what does Midge describe as his greatest achievement? It’s not a skill he has but longevity.
“With every other genre of music, until about 30 years ago, you were allowed to grow old and get better at what you were doing: jazz, blues, classical, folk music. People would love the fact that you were still doing it.
“But in rock and pop music you’d feel uncomfortable if you were 30 and still performing. It was a young person’s game. It’s not any more.
“I think longevity is my thing that I’ve been really lucky with. I disappeared completely during the whole dance DJ remix thing which went on for years. The industry saw that if you wanted to be successful commercially you had to do this. But if you say no, that means the death knell.
“I stuck to my guns – I didn’t want any of that stuff. You have to be prepared to think ‘okay, I’ll survive this but maybe I’ll be allowed to come back up and resurface at the other side of it.’ Which I have, which is wonderful.”
There’ll be thousands of fans who’ll agree it’s wonderful that Midge Ure is back with a new album and is also taking to the road with what promises to be a fascinating live show.
Midge Ure will take his A Man Of Two Worlds tour to the Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham on Saturday May 30th and Vaillant Live, Derby on Saturday November 21st
