In 1977, Midge Ure left the Scottish pop group PVC2 to form the Rich Kids with former Sex Pistol Glen Matlock. The band only released one album Ghosts of Princes in Towers, before parting ways in 1979, but presenting a turning point for Ure, who penned “Marching Men,” for the band before segueing into the synth-pop of Visage and co-writing the band’s biggest his “Fade to Grey.”
There was also a brief stint playing in Thin Lizzy, which led to Ure co-writing “Get Out of Here” from the band’s 1979 album Black Rose and continuing to work with late Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott, co-writing Lynott’s 1980 solo hit “Yellow Pearl” and producing “Together” on The Philip Lynott Album.
By the mid-‘80s, Ure segued into his solo career with the release of his debut The Gift in 1985 and the formation of Live Aid with Bob Geldof, and its launch pad, the iconic all-star pop charity song “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” Before then, the revival of Ultravox with Billy Currie also expanded Ure’s scope as a songwriter and throughout the band’s 11 albums together.
Still connected to his Visage and Ultravox classics, along with his extensive solo catalog of songs, the enigma of Ure’s socio and political songwriting is in its “lovely” delivery. “Music should be palatable,” Ure tells American Songwriter. “It shouldn’t be a barrage of conflicted ideas. It should be a question, wrapped up in loveliness. Music is lovely, but it’s down to the listener, whether they delve into it.”
Continuing to host his Backstage Lockdown Club, a monthly subscription offering fans exclusive access to intimate performances, Ure is also working on three albums, including a follow-up to his 2014 release Fragile, an instrumental project, and a sequel to his 2017 release, Orchestrated, a collection of reimagined Ultravox and solo tracks as orchestral arrangements with composer Ty Unwin.
Ure spoke to American Songwriter, about his earlier days writing and how all the puzzle pieces typically come together in a song for him.
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American Songwriter: Thinking back on your career, even like Rich Kids, Visage, Ultravox. Were there any key points when you noticed your songwriting shifting?
MU: Well, it didn’t. I didn’t feel as though I wrote anything. I was wearing my influences on my sleeve. Before joining the Rich Kids [in 1977], everything I’d done at that point was…you could tell I’d been listening to David Bowie, or I’d be listening to Roxy Music, or whatever it was coming. They were like carbon copies. They were like karaoke versions. And it wasn’t until I moved to London and joined the Rich Kids when all of a sudden I was thrust into a completely different environment.
We played Rock Against Racism concerts. I’d never encountered any form of racism at all in Scotland, so all of a sudden I was in this very volatile, bizarre environment. And your eyes open, and you become much more aware of the world around you, whereas Glasgow just felt like a little bubble that I was in. So when I joined the Rich Kids—and I think “Marching Men” was the first song that I wrote—I thought, “Okay, this is some this is saying something. It’s got something. There’s a message to it. There’s a reason for writing the song.”
Prior to that, I just thought a song was a hook, a nice melody, and not a lot of substance. So that was a major turning point, and I suppose, the start of Visage. But it really came together when I joined Ultravox, because I was with like-minded people, people who had been doing experimental music for quite a while, and all of a sudden the shackles were off. I wasn’t trying to write a formula. We were writing something that we thought was interesting music, and that just takes you to a completely different tangent.”
AS: How do songs tend to come together for you these days?
Midge Ure: Most writers I know sit down and write. They can write a song a day and then they compile a bunch of material, and then they sift through it and choose the ones that are going to be the latest album, or whatever. I don’t. It’s like putting a jigsaw together for me. I write and produce, and do the music, the lyrics, and the arrangements all at the same time. I do it section by section, piece by piece, and I’m never finished until I instinctively know it’s done. Sometimes it can take years. And because it takes years, you get tired of working on it. You need to throw it to one side and never complete it.
It’s a wound-inflicting process. It does take a long time to get something you’re satisfied with. Not that your standards are ridiculously high, but what you’re competing with is stuff that you’ve written before, and you don’t want to do something substandard. You’re trying to find a more interesting way of saying things each time you write something new and that becomes more and more difficult the longer you’ve been doing it, so it just takes its own time.
I liken it to baking a cake. You put it in the oven for the right amount of time, and when it’s done, it’s done. When it’s ready, it’s ready.
AS: Everything up until that point seemed like the perfect segue for The Gift [1985 solo debut] and doing your own thing. Was there an on-and-off collaborative switch, or did your solo material come together naturally?
MU: It’s different. There’s a process. What I do is log basic ideas. I log a line or a word or a situation, and I think, ‘There’s a great line. I’ll jot that down.’ I know what it’s got to be about, but to actually sit down and write the lyrics and make it work, and make it tell the story, and make it rhyme, and all of this stuff that usually comes at the very end.
I’ll start with the seed of an idea. There’s an idea about writing a song about a painting. Say, I’m just looking at the painting above the computer here. If you’re going to write a song about that, there are some shells and whatever, and you log that in your memory, or you stick it on your phone. Maybe you have a line, a lyric line, or a melody, and you sing it into your phone, and then leave it. Then when you sit down, you get to your computer—your tools, your toys—that’s when you start to construct the atmosphere that this idea, this seed of an idea, is going to set in. The final thing for me is sitting down, and finishing the lyrics. That’s the icing on the cake for me.
AS: Maybe it’s more like filmmaking in a way. You have your beginning and you have your end, and you’re just filling the inside?
MU: That’s exactly what it is, except that I think with the wonders of technology, you can have that ever-malleable arrangement, like a word processing thing. You can start with the ending. You can start with something that happened five years prior, and then you change your mind at the last minute and think, “Well, I don’t want to give the story away, so I’m going to swap it around. I’ll move that, put it here, and move this and put it there.’ So for music arrangement, unlike recording onto tape when you had to absolutely commit to how the arrangement is going to be and stick with that before you put a note on tape, now we can sit and ponder forever and go “Well, should we start with that intro section, or should we move that into the midsection?” It’s constantly moving things around. Sometimes it’s a joy and sometimes it’s an absolute hindrance.
AS: Even if nothing requires tape anymore, that overthinking over a song, can often hinder the process as well, or leave songs in lingo for years.
MU: Oh, very much. Talking to Kate Bush back in the ‘80s, when everyone was starting to use computers for music, she was using a Fairlight, which was a very complex recording machine at the time, and she said, “I’m going to stop using this. I’m just going to sit down and write at the piano, and whatever comes out, comes out. And if I can’t remember it from the day before, I’ll use what I think I remember instead of recording it and thinking.” So you do it and then the next day you can’t quite remember it 100 percent so it changes, and sometimes it’ll change for the better, and sometimes it’ll change for the worse. The idea of throwing away the safety net is exciting, but I would be petrified to think I’ve got something really interesting, and it’s gone the next day. It’s disappeared.
AS: What was one song that took longer to complete?
MU: I sat with “I See Hope in the Morning Light” (from Ure’s 1991 solo album Pure). The concept was initially about freedom and escape and I was writing it mainly about Nelson Mandela. I was so slow completing the song that the reason for writing it was gone. But then it kind of transcends what you actually started, the seed of the idea becomes a genetic thing. In “I See Hope in the Morning Light” you talk about your sad story, your life, and about moving on, so it can be seen as a genetic thing. It’s always a gray area when you start telling people what you’ve written songs about because it ruins their interpretation of what they get from the song.
In a way, it’s like music videos. Before then, we all had images in our heads of the songs by reading liner notes. Then, everyone has their own video in their head, an image of what the song’s about, and their own interpretation of what the song’s about. Sometimes it’s better just to leave it to their interpretation. Now so much is killed.
AS: Were there any songs—Visage, Ultravox, solo—that changed in meaning for you over the years?
MU: Sadly, because a lot of what I write about is the state of the planet, the state of the world, without sounding too hippieish about it, “Dear God” was really a simplistic child’s prayer, but in a scathing way. People take that song and think it’s a religious song. It’s a questioning song. It’s questioning what we see around us, but in the most simplistic way, like a child’s prayer: Dear God, is there somebody out there? Is there somebody watching? Because of the mess that we seem to be, sadly, that still stands up. It’s still there. It’s still a question that we have to ask, so the majority of the songs, sadly, still hold, that serious questioning thing.
I think it probably has something to do with my background, my childhood growing up in Glasgow, Scotland, where there is a religious bigotry, and there always has been—Catholic, Protestant … and it still goes on today. But you have to question why. And I suppose the majority of it is that we see a series of conflicts around the planet, bigotry passed down from father to son, mother to daughter, and it just goes on and on and on. People are born into this belief that they are right and everyone else is wrong, and it’s the wrong thing. So that fuels me, and I write about it a lot. Sadly, those things are still relevant.
AS: Are some of these subjects still slipping into songs you’re writing now?
MU: Oh, God yes. I wish they didn’t, but they do. It’s in its most simplistic form. Even going back to Answers to Nothing (1988), that’s just it. I don’t have an answer to it, but I can ask the question. I haven’t got the wherewithal to change the world, but you do have to ask questions. You do have to point it out without getting on a soapbox and ramming it down people’s throats as a way of questioning and still making it palatable. Music should be palatable. It shouldn’t be a barrage of conflicted ideas. It should be a question, wrapped up in loveliness. Music is lovely, but it’s down to the listener, whether they delve into it.
I remember hearing music as a kid, and I could sing the choruses of most of the things, but I had no idea what the songs were about because the melody and the structure and the atmosphere that the music created seemed to dominate. It’s not until later, when you start to analyze the lyrics, you think, Ah, now, I know what that song was actually about. So sometimes it’s not relevant to everyone.
Photo: Midge Ure, London, September 1981 by Andre Csillag/Shutterstock
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