What happens when New Romantics grow old? Just ask Midge Ure
Undeterred, Ure and Rich Kids bandmate (and influential club DJ) Rusty Egan co-founded Visage, the New Romantic frontrunners who had a hit in 1980 with the song Fade To Grey.
In the decades since, Ure has become one of music's most reliable practitioners, successfully proving there is a world in which guitars and synthesisers can co-exist, first with his post-Visage band Ultravox, and then as a solo artist.
And though the days of releasing hit singles may be behind him, his catalogue is blessed with enough fan-friendly deep cuts – solo chart toppers such as If I Was and mainstream hits like Ultravox's Vienna – to sustain a healthy touring schedule.
In October, it will bring Ure to Australia for the aptly named Catalogue tour, in which he will perform music from throughout his career, including tracks from the ill-fated Rich Kids. (There may also be a few Thin Lizzy songs, given Ure was drafted in by frontman Phil Lynott to replace guitarist Gary Moore on a US tour supporting Journey in 1979.)
'I wanted to avoid 'the hits' tour, so I called it 'Catalogue', but 'the hits' managed to squeeze its way onto the tour poster,' he says. 'You're expected to play a lot of those anyway. But I dug deep and started looking at songs that should have been singles in retrospect, and other key tracks for me.
'They're not all three-minute pop songs. I do things like [Ultravox's] Your Name (Has Slipped My Mind Again), which is a long, atmospheric, filmic thing.'
The idea for the Catalogue tour stemmed from a similarly themed 2023 concert at London's Royal Albert Hall to mark Ure's 70th birthday.
Given Ure has now joined the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Robert Plant in the ranks of septuagenarian musicians still going strong, it raises the question: is rock'n'roll no longer just a young person's game?
'It's totally changing!' says Ure. 'I'm reading a book called Hope I Get Old Before I Die [by David Hepworth], and it's all about the fact that at Live Aid, something changed. There were no youngsters on Live Aid, the youngsters were in their mid-to-late thirties. Ultravox and Spandau Ballet were the youngsters.
'McCartney was 48 when he did Live Aid, and we all thought of him as an old guy! So it all changed at that point and became more about whether you were good or not as opposed to whether you were new or not.'
No matter the magnitude of Ure's achievements, the spectre of Live Aid – which this month marked its 40th anniversary – and 1984's Band Aid charity single Do They Know It's Christmas? will forever loom large.
Ure co-wrote the song with Bob Geldof, who spearheaded the project to fight famine in Ethiopia.
'Bob came to mine with a song he didn't tell me at the time that he'd kind of half written and played to The Boomtown Rats, who thought it was shit,' laughs Ure. 'It wasn't a great song. It felt like we were trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. It had no chorus, there were no repeating bits, there was nothing that people could latch on to.'
Ure recorded the music and arranged Do They Know It's Christmas? over a four-day session in his home studio. Geldof, meanwhile, set about enlisting some of Britain's biggest pop stars to sing on it, including Bono, Boy George, George Michael, Simon Le Bon and Sting.
'Maybe tenacity and desperation of trying to get [the song] done and out there was what drove it through in the long run,' says Ure. 'As a record it worked incredibly well, and that was due to the fact we had some of the best artists that the UK had to offer lending their name and their fan base.'
Though well into his sixth decade as a performer, Ure says he will get the same buzz walking onstage at his Australian dates that he felt as a teen watching artists such as Led Zeppelin and The Carpenters at The Apollo in Glasgow.
'If you don't, you're dead,' he says. 'There's something not right. I'm still enthusiastic about it. You know why? Because it's too much like hard work if you don't feel it.'
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