Interview with Midge Ure.

FOR MOST MUSICIANS, the tour bus is the dead zone, a moving void where time is slowly worn away watching TV, playing Nintendo, listening to music, and shredding frayed nerves. But not for Midge Ure. Sitting in the back of the bus, he looks into the monitor of his Atari computer, and he's not playing video games. "I bought one over here (in the US) and I've put it in the back of the bus. I'm going to be writing on the bus," he exudes. "Great, great tool!" Technology and Midge Ure have been traveling companions for well over a decade, powering the Kraftwerk-inspired disco of Visage and the hi-tech art-rock of Ultravox. Even before that, playing in the Rich Kids with ex-Sex Pistols Glen Matlock, Midge Ure was tweaking synthesizer knobs at a time when punks viewed guitar tone-control knobs as unduly hi-tech.
As the frontman with Ultravox, though, he rode the first wave of techno-pop along with Gary Numan, Depeche Mode, The Human League and Heaven 17.

But now that the fashionable flush of techno-pop has faded with last night's makeup, Ure is left having to make music without trendy labels like "New Romantics" to lean on, and he does it on his second solo album 'Answers to Nothing'.
Offstage, Midge Ure has always been more down-to-earth, eschewing the haute couture, gigolo look of Ultravox publicity stills. When I interviewed Warren Cann and Billy Currie of Ultravox in 1982, I thought Midge Ure was a roadie when he offered to make us tea, wearing bib-overalls and a plaid shirt. Interestingly enough, that's exactly what he's wearing as he arrives at his Philadelphia hotel room, before his concert. Gone is the thin, pencil mustache he sported, out Midge Ure's distinctive, impassioned vocals and his melodic hooks are enough to place his new music in the lineage of Ultravox.
'Answers To Nothing' has an airiness in the percussive arrangements that Iets some light and breath come through. "Yeah, l suppose in my way it was a backlash against Ultravox - the massiveness, the orchestrations that Ultravox did", admits Midge Ure, with a clipped Scottish lilt. "lf there was a space, we filled it. l wanted to get away from that particular sound initially. So I concentrated on the rhythmic side of things, and therefore left a lot of holes. I didn't want to use big pad chords everywhere. All of the songs are built up of small melodies and counter melodies all played very rhythmically. It gives a totally different feel from what I've done before."

Many of the songs on 'Answers To Nothing' are based around percussion instruments and rhythms. "Most of them originated from the drum patterns actually", says Midge Ure. "It was my ground base, my starting area. I had a melody in mind and whatever, out the feel that I was trying to get was in the drums. I was trying to get the rhythm happening first, and then it was easy enough to slot in all the percussive melodies."
He generated these melodies using an Atari computer with Steinberg software. "When the Atari came out and this German Steinberg software thing (Pro24) came out, people just went bananas and fell in love with it," gushes Midge Ure, almost embarrassed by his own exuberance. "It's quite a cheap package. An entire system - the computer, the monitor and the software - will cost around $1200, or $1000. Not a vast outlay for what's basically a 24-track recording studio. I love it."
The title track 'Answers To Nothing', 'Remembrance Day' and 'Take Me Home' bristle with polyrhythmic percussion grooves that sound African influenced, especially with the sampled percussion. "Well, I used a lot of sampled percussion instruments which gave it that feel," he agrees. "And when I started, I also programmed the drum machines with the intention of taking them off and replacing them with acoustic drums. When Mark Brzezicki came in to replace those things, he freaked and thought that the drum patterns I had written were exactly what he would have done, so we didn't take them off. We kept them on and he played with them. I used a lot of samples and I suppose I sort of stole the feel of Phil Collins or Mark Brzezicki."

In the past, Midge Ure has shown a fondness for Asian tonalities on 'Edo', from his first album 'The Gift'. The last Ultravox album featured his Celtic derived 'All Fall Down', complete with Irish frame drums called bodhráns. On the new album, 'The Leaving' manages to sound both Celtic and Asian at the same time, although Midge Ure initially denies the Asian characterization. "I don't think it's particularly Asian," he differs. it's quite Celtic in a way, 'The Leaving.'
"I know what you are saying," he reconsiders. "I can see the plunky synth things. I thought the basic feel of that was like Fleetwood Mac's Albatross from a long time ago (1968). It had a really nice, slow, lazy, you know dum, dum, ca dunka, dum. A sort of slow three, almost. And when I was messing about the machine, that's the feel that started. I started messing with my computer and I really liked the feel of it so I tried to enhance that a bit. I think of it as Celtic, probably because it was written about Glasgow life, northern life in Britain. There are definite Celtic melodies and Celtic influences on the record."
His computers also led to the snakey Arabic bassline of 'Hell to Heaven' that sounds suspiciously like Mick Karn. "Well, I'm a big Mick Karn fan," he confesses, laughing. "I think it was perfectly justified because I know Mick and I admire his work very much. At the beginning of this album I discovered the computer and had great fun playing with the thing. And I realized that, not being a good keyboard player, I could write things in very small sections, give them a certain feel and mess about with bends on the keyboard. When I started doing bass parts, I had a lovely bass sound on the Roland D50. I started messing around with it and doing bends and slides that are very Mick Karn-like, and it was fantastic. I really enjoyed doing it. So I started doing all the bends and slides that he normally does. It sounds Mick Karn-ish until you hear Mick play again. And then it doesn't sound anything like Mick Karn, 'cause Mick does strange harmonies on the guitar, which I couldn't possibly do. It's great fun 'cause a lot of people actually think it's a bass guitar."

'Answers To Nothing' is a personal album, with the simple love song 'Just for You', childhood memories on 'Take Me Home', and childhood hopes on 'The Leaving (So Long)'. Although the music originates in percussion, the songs originate in his subjects. "I start with the subject matter I want to write about" he says. "Then I make a musical base for that and create an atmosphere with the music. Once I've done that, the lyrics come last."
While these songs are rendered with heartfelt, haunting melodies, the album is also rife with Midge Ure's socioreligious polemic on 'Answers To Nothing, 'Remembrance Day' and 'Dear God.' He often works within the contradictions of religious symbolism. "There is a slight cynicism there, a slight cynicism on a lot of levels", he admits. "I'm slightly cynical about religion, which has cropped up a few times in the past".
"Several times", I offer. "Several times", he confesses.
The single, 'Dear God,' might be taken as a prayer with its acoustic guitar strumming urgently behind Ure's plaintive voice. His seemingly naive call for 'love for the lonely', 'food for the hungry', and 'peace in our restless world' might be interpreted as a 'We Are The World' song of facile hope. And remember that Midge Ure co-composed 'Do They Know It's Christmas' and was one of the architects, along with Bob Geldof, of Band Aid.
"I think people interpret it in different ways", says Midge Ure. "I mean some people see that it's slightly cynical, but still hopeful at the same time. Other people see it as an out and out religious song, which it's not. It's not a prayer, you know. It's a plea, really. It's me questioning what I was taught about religion when I was a kid, that you pray every night and you go to church or chapel or synagogue, whatever. You do it and say everything will be all right. You think that religion is a thing that is there to help you and to see you through life, and then you wake up one morning and find the entire Irish situation, the civil war that's based on religion. You know, most wars are based on religion. Religions fight each other because they are trying to out-do each other. Everyone's got it right, but they can't all have it right because they are all so radically different. You know, one religion can't be any better than the other religion. I'm just disappointed that we were taught these things as kids, but you haven't reallyggot a choice about it, no one chooses the religion they are born in".
Midge Ure reinforces his sometimes acrimonious lyrics with subtle production techniques. On the fatalistic 'Answers to Nothing', he speak-sings the lyrics of empty panaceas with his voice mixed almost completely dry. "I wanted that effect", he explains. "I wanted that sort of incredibly closeness so that when you listen, it's almost like someone singing inside your head. I wanted to try and get that closeness that's really intense. The only way to do that is to make it incredibly dry and very wispy and very, very closely miked. Very compressed as well. And it worked very well. That was originally a guide vocal. I did it in the studio when I was trying out the lyrics and the engineer had miked it and compressed it for the really quiet part. After the drum break, I decided to go for the whole thing an octave higher. So I just rocketed it and of course the compressors screeched into the red. I mean it was a good performance so we didn't change it. Technically it could have been recorded a million times better, but I could have lost the feel. It was one of those magic moments".

Another magic moment was the duet with Kate Bush, 'Sister and Brother'. Midge Ure paints this song of sexual equality with overly broad rhetorical strokes, but Kate Bush's impassioned pleas almost pull it off. "In the music industry, you meet some not very nice people, some very strange characters", says Midge Ure disgustedly. "They seem to be these sexist assholes. They will listen to a girl's tape and think it's fantastic and really love it and say 'What's she look like?' Who cares what she looks like! You know, 'Is the tape good, are the songs good, is there talent there?'"
The fact that they never sang together, or for that matter, were never in the studio together except to hear a rough mix, strikes Midge Ure as another metaphor for the equality message of the song. "Well, l don't think you have to be together", he says defensively. "I mean it also shows that you can be incredibly equal. She's sitting in her little technical world and I'm sitting in my little technical world. And I have the utmost respect for everything she does. I think she is brilliant on all levels and she's touching genius, absolutely brilliant. I consider her to be equal to any musician, any producer, any writer that I've admired. So that strengthens the idea of the song to me."

Midge Ure credits Bob Clearmountain, who mixed the album, with much of the sonic landscaping of Answers to Nothing. "He sort of paints the pictures, the atmospherec pictures with his echoes and his panning," he says admiringly. "He listens to depth as well as left and right. I found it quite interesting because he'd spend hours working on stuff. I didn't sit over his shoulder. I said, "Once you've got it down to something you think is close, well sit and refine it and change bits acid pieces and whatever." I'd be sitting about around the studio working on something and I'd say, "I really like the way the tuned echo in the voice moves and then gets slightly below the bend and then sort of disappears off." He would say, "Can you hear that? Nobody ever hears these things. I've spent hours doing them and nobody hears these things. But when you listen to it on headphones, it's got real depth and you can hear all the movement and things that are happening in there."

Midge Ure tuned his ears working with some influential and innovative producers in the past, especially George Martin and, perhaps lesser known but no less influential, the late German producer, Conny Plank, who died early last year. Ultravox recorded their comeback triumph, Vienna, as well as Rage In Eden and U-Vox in Plank's Cologne studios.
"Conny Plank was probably not known at all over here. In fact, he was not very well known in Europe for someone who contributed so much to music," Midge Ure fondly recalls. " Conny Plank was a real radical producer. He was more an engineer than a producer. He never got involved in musical arrangements on any level. He created atmospheres that were brilliant."
He learned how brilliant after working with George Martin, who produced the lush and soft-edged album, Quartet. "George Martin is obviously a brilliant man," says Midge Ure. "He was great to work with as well but in a very different way. He made a much more polished record, at times maybe too polished. Ultravox had a bit of an edge to it and I think that the Quartet album was a very sort of chic record, designer music, you know. I don't know if it was quite the right thing to do."
The next Ultravox album, Lament, was recorded mostly in Midge Ure's own home studio and marked a retrenching and simplification of the recording process in reaction to the over-production of Quartet. "Yes, it was a fairly rough record," agrees Midge Ure. "It was almost getting back to the basics again. We didn't get overly complicated on that record, I don't think, whereas in the Quartet album, we just went bananas. You know we were even slaving up multitracks. On one song there was something like seven multitracks. And it was just hideous. I mean it was like four multitracks of keyboards alone. It just got so out of hand."

MIDGE URE SPEAKS FONDLY, although not nostalgically of Ultravox days, the band he helped revitalize in 1980 after lead singer John Foxx left. With Midge Ure, Ultravox forged a sweeping orchestral sound driven by powerhouse dance rhythms and topped by Midge Ure's soaring, emotional vocals. Ultravox brought an emotional maturity and complexity to their music that makes Vienna, Rage in Eden and Lament stand as the cutting edge of synth-pop.

A decade later, their records still retain a sense of urgency and conviction, despite recent PR attempts to paint Answers To Nothing as the "new Midge Ure," for whom "The days of Ultravox pomp with little circumstance are over."
"I think it's a terrible statement, actually," he sighs indignantly when I read back his press release quote. "Ultravox had a lot of pomp and that's what Ultravox was, we were vast and we were big and we were grandiose, grandiose more than pomp. But there was a reason for it, there was a quality there. There was an ideal. You know we were doing something that not a lot of people were doing. Ultravox was one of the very few bands on the radio that you would know who it was." Of course, part of the problem was that Ultravox was rarely heard on American radio, despite such driving anthems as 'Sleepwalk', 'Desire' and 'Hymn.' The end of the band was as much a result of public inertia as artistic temperament. "I'm very proud of what Ultravox did and I'm just as proud of the fact that we pulled the plug on it, we stopped the band. It wasn't forced upon us," he claims. "And we did it amicably, we decided that it was time to finish it and did. We didn't have a big song and dance about it, we didn't do a farewell tour or try and cash in as much as we possibly could. We just decided that it wasn't working musically and left it to that." Except for drummer Warren Cann, who was booted from the band before the last album. "Except for Warren," echoes Midge Ure sadly. "Well, that was just one of those unfortunate things. On the last album, the U-Vox album, when it came to recording that album, we all wanted to get together as a band and really get back to the original idea of Ultravox. Forget the drum machines. They were a small part of it and had taken over. You know, forget the 22 keyboards of the last two tours, get the guitar on, get into a room and start playing. Hit your drums, hit your guitar, hit your keyboard, hit your bass. That's how we started, and we wanted to see what we could do with that again.
"I guess Warren Cann didn't want to hit his drums," he laments. "He was not interested. He hadn't played his kit for like a year when we went to rehearsals. Warren Cann turned up with his drum machines and his Simmons pads and there just was an attitude thing, that's all. I still really like Warren Cann, but I haven't seen him since then."

The no frills attitude goes a long way towards explaining Midge Ure's touring setup, which is considerably stripped down from his Ultravox days. Midge Ure fronts the group, playing only electric and acoustic guitars and the bodhrán, wearing a plain shirt and suspenders, in a performance refreshingly devoid of rock histrionics and posturing. While Answers to Nothing is computer programmed, in concert the Blow of the CRT is conspicuous in its absence. All the synthesizer parts are handled by Rupert Black and Carol Issacs, playing identical setups with the Korg M1 and the ubiquitous Roland D50, and Kate Stephenson triggering an Akai S900 with Octapads. Steve Williams and Jeremy Black trigger nothing but their drums and bass, respectively. There's not a drum machine or sequencer to be heard.
"I didn't want to limit myself again," says Midge Ure. "I didn't want to be stuck to rigid tempos. I mean, a band should speed up and slow down. They shouldn't do it too much, but they do. You know the natural] adrenaline during a song can speed it up just with the excitement element. You can't do that witti a drum machine. That used to drive me mad at times with Ultravox. I would walk on stage and for whatever reason that night, you know, my adrenaline was pumping and I felt like going a bit faster and I couldn't. Wed have already gone to the next song and the rhythm would start and it felt a bit on the draggy side. But there's nothing like that up there, now. There is still technical stuff up there. You know there's a few keyboards and there's a rack full of bits and pieces or whatever, but it's all played manually."

Which doesn't t mean that Midge Ure is pulling the plug on electronics. He composes and records in his own Music Fest Studio where he works with an Emulator lI+, Technics Digital Piano, Roland D50, Korg Ml, a few Yamaha TXS1Zs and a Roland D110. He still has his old PPG around, but he doesn't use it much anymore. "They were very much Ultravox sounds," he laughs fondly, recalling his PPG sounds. "But they are old flames and 1 can't part with them, you know."

Although technology is a major part of Midge Ure's music, and in many ways has defined and shaped it aesthetically and philosophically, he still considers himself to be primarily a guitarist. "Well, this instrument is what I play," he confirms. "I got my first keyboard only 10 years ago or so, and I'm still far from being able to understand what I'm doing on it. I'm still very, very basic with synthesizers and things. l can make them do what I want them to do, but a guitar is how I express myself I suppose. I like thrash chords, I like power chords, I like the sound that it makes. I like the grittiness that it makes. You can express yourself on the E-stringed instrument, something that you are touching with your fingers, much more than a keyboard. There's no matter of touch sensitivity, especially when you've got big clumpy, non-feeling fingers like I have on a keyboard. You are talking to a man who can only play a plastic keyboard. Give me anything weighted and I've had it. I haven't got the strength in my fingers to push them down. So I don't get a lot of expression on the keyboard. On this album it's not too bad because I've discovered music computers and things that give me a chance to sort of express the drum patterns a little bit more than I would with just a normal drum machine.
But the guitar is my favorite, first and foremost instrument."

Interview by John Diliberto, Music Technology August 1989