We Catch Up With Midge Ure Ahead of His Rock City Show

Hey Midge, you played your first live show of 2023 last week in Denmark. How did it go?
It was great. It was right up in Jutland where they all have holiday huts. You get to Copenhagen and drive up on the bus for four hours into the wilderness. It reminded me of Scotland – it was lovely. 

Then you've got a bit of a break before the UK tour starts in the Spring. You arrive in Nottingham at our great Rock City on May 30 – any memories of playing here before?
Yeah loads – but for all the wrong reasons! When you were a young, free and single guy in a band, Nottingham was always the place to go. There was this story there were five girls to every man, whether it was true or not I don’t know, but it was something the music community always looked forward to. So for totally the wrong reasons, I’ve played Nottingham many, many times! 

Have you any memories of playing Rock City?
You know what, I think I’ve only ever played the acoustic room there, I could be totally wrong because I know it’s been open for over forty years. I don’t remember playing it with Rich Kids or Ultravox – I might be shot down in flames for that though! 

Growing up in Cambuslang in the 1950s, was there a song or an artist who first lit the spark musically for you?
Radio was my connector. I had a radio in my little tenement flat before we had a television. My mum listened to the radio all the time. I could sing, so I sang along with all these tunes from the 1950s and 1960s and weirdly, I still can, but I can’t remember my own songs! I remember going to the Saturday morning cinema and seeing all the pictures, and seeing Tommy Steele with a guitar.I thought it was just heaven – I just fell in love with it. 

What sort of age were you when you thought you might make a career from it?
None of it was real – I was a complete fantasist. It was a dream to do, a bit like kicking a football around the streets and thinking you could play for whatever team. The odds are so against it, but I had this mad passion for it. So even though I wasn’t thinking of it as a career, I was playing in bands at weekends in church halls. When I was 18, I was given the opportunity to leave my engineering degree and join a well-known band in Scotland, so that’s was I did. 

Was that Slik?
It was the same band, and I joined as a guitarist and then the singer left a few years later. Two of us went the cinema and saw Dirty Harry and we got these slick haircuts and decided to change our name to Slik. 

It was with Slik that you scored a number one hit with Forever and Ever in 1976. Did it feel like a dream come true at the time?
Well, you’d think so, wouldn’t you? But the problem was, when we turned up to make that record, we could hear music in the background as we arrived, and we realised they’d already had the session guys in that morning.

All I had to do was sing on it, that was all that was required. So, when they told me it was number one, I felt nothing. I was so removed from it. I got the fame and the adulation but none of the achievement, because I didn’t feel like I did anything apart from appear on television. 

Is it true you turned down the chance to front the Sex Pistols?
I was asked to join a band. I was stopped coming out of a music shop in Glasgow by an English guy called Bernie Rhodes, who went on to manage The Clash, and his mate in the car with him was Malcolm McLaren. In 1975 or ’76 or whatever it was, no one knew who he was.

He talked about the New York Dolls and putting a new band together and asked if I was interested in joining. He didn’t ask me what I did and assumed I was a musician, so I turned it down. He sold me a hooky amplifier out the boot of his car and I was quite happy with the deal. He went off and found Johnny Rotten! 

It quite strange then, that in 1977, you ended up joining Rich Kids with Glen Matlock from the Sex Pistols...
How ironic and bizarre is that! It was great. I knew of Glen, but I didn’t know him. I was licking my wounds at the end of Slik and a journalist from the Melody Maker said to Glen, who was looking for his mysterious fourth member, ‘get that guy from Slik’.

So I ended up moving to London and being at the centre of that whole scene, which was beyond exciting. It was so vibrant, until a year later when I bought a synthesiser, which killed the band because half of them hated it.

How did the purchase of that Yamaha CS50 synthesiser change the trajectory of your career?
Well, it led me to putting together Visage. I was interested in learning more about production. It was an idea Rusty Egan [Rich Kids drummer] and I had walking down the streets of London, skint. We thought, wouldn’t it be great having a band with all of our favourite musicians, with the guys from Magazine and Billy Currie from Ultravox. We’d found a new quest.

Did you need much convincing to join Ultravox when the call came?
I think I was just stupid! I didn’t really think things through. Most people would be petrified stepping into John Foxx’s shoes as he was the guy everybody knew – all the fans. That didn’t cross my mind at all.

When we got into the rehearsal studio and played a couple of songs, I got this feeling that this was it and I’d come home. It never crossed my mind that people wouldn’t want me in the band. It didn’t take long for people to either move on, or follow John, or find something else, or latch on to what was there. 

It’s the band you’re most associated with. What are you most proud of during those incredible times in the 1980s?
I think all of it. Joining a band that owed a lot of money to the record label, had no management and had just been dropped... but I joined them because I loved the music and had the determination and naivety. Plus, they had the technology I wanted to work with, and had worked with, people like Brian Eno. So, these guys were well-versed with what I wanted to do. We made music we thought was interesting, we didn’t make singles, they became them. 

Were you getting pressure to record hit singles at the time?
I think everyone does. The first thing that happens when you hand an album to anyone is ‘so where are the singles?’ and they want to shorten them or remix them. They refused to put Vienna out at its full length and we refused to release it or edit it. We wore them down eventually. We said we’d get the same person who edited Hey Jude and they said ‘nobody edited that’ and we said ‘that’s what we mean!’. Luckily, it went everywhere! 

Over the years, you have worked with so many brilliant musicians. How was working with Kate Bush on Sister and Brother during the recording of the Answers to Nothing album?
With any collaboration I’ve done, it’s been organic. I did my first Prince’s Trust concert, George Martin asked me to come along and play, and one of the artists was Kate. Everybody loves Kate, she’s a genius, and I got to know her quite well.

We met up over the years and I said I’d written this song I see as a duet, would you be interested and she loved it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t there when she recorded the vocal, I sent her the master. She called me up a few days later and asked if I wanted to come and hear it and it was glorious. 

I read you had a classic car collection and an ill-fated house in Monserrat that was blighted by natural disasters back in the day. You seem to live a much simpler life in Bath now…
Oh God, yeah! Stuff is wonderful and it was great having all that – the big house on the river and the place in Monserrat. Someone once said a house you don’t live in is just a money pit. You only go there for a month or so a year, and the rest of the year someone has to maintain the house and cut the grass. And nobody mentioned hurricane season and the volcano! It was God’s way of saying what the hell are you doing with a house in the Caribbean when you’re a working-class boy from a tenement in Glasgow? 

You turn seventy later this year – any big plans to mark it?
I do. Waking up that day I hope! Nothing I know of. I’ve got four daughters and a wife, so goodness knows what they’ve got planned. It’s just another birthday as far as I’m concerned.  

Do your daughters try to turn you on to new music?
I think it’s the other way around – I try to poison them! They’ve had a very wide taste in music. When they were kids they used to sit with the old iPod when I took them to school and they’d take turns spinning the wheel and choosing tracks. It was always a very proud parenting moment when they chose Wuthering Heights or Kooks by David Bowie or whatever. They chose their own thing – from Judy Garland to Taylor Swift.

You’re about to go back on the road the celebrate forty years of the Rage In Eden and Quartet albums – do you think they blend quite well for a live set?
I’ve cherry-picked. I intended to do both albums but I went back and listened and I didn’t resonate with some of them, they wouldn’t work live. So, I’ve left out a handful and we’re peppering them with a handful that people will already know. The tour’s been moved twice so I’m looking forward to it a lot. 

Midge Ure plays Rock City on 30 May

@midge_ure