How an ancient stone circle on Lewis inspired Midge Ure’s new album and tour, A Man of Two Worlds
From Slik to Ultravox, to Band-Aid, a solo career and numerous awards, the musician has always kept his feet on the ground by returning home to Glasgow.
Musician, producer and songwriter Midge Ure is back on the road, heading home to Scotland on his A Man of Two Worlds tour and celebrating the release of his first new material in 12 years, a double album of the same name, featuring a collection of songs and instrumentals.
When he speaks from his studio at the home in Portugal he shares with his actress and yoga teacher wife, Sheridan Forbes the 72-year-old father of four explains that he is trying to do something new, playing some of the instrumental pieces he has written along with classic tracks and fan favourites.
Constant evolution is the hallmark of the Ivor Novello, Grammy, and BASCAP awards winning musician who sold-out London’s Royal Albert Hall for a 70th birthday celebration in 2023 and played an extensive UK tour in 2024, from his glam rock days with Slik, through the punk years with The Rich Kids alongside Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock to creating the synth soundtrack of the 1980s with Ultravox and Visage.
It was always as much about the message as the music for Ure, who co-wrote “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” with Bob Geldof to raise funds for victims of the Ethiopian famine, spawning the 1985 Live Aid concerts and campaign, which as The Band Aid Charitable Trust has raised over £145 million to fight hunger and poverty in Ethiopia and surrounding regions and proved that rock music can drive humanitarian and political action.
With new dates being added to the tour due to popular demand, will the gigs see him play the new albums all the way through?
“Oh good god no,” says Ure. “I've completely confused everyone by calling the tour and the album the same thing. The tour idea came first and I wanted to incorporate some of the instrumental stuff I’d already recorded into the set. So it’s side by side, an instrumental will morph into a hit record, or a Visage track or whatever it is, and take people on a journey.
“The title, A Man of Two Worlds, is actually from a song we wrote with Ultravox way back in the 80s but it described what I wanted to do on the tour perfectly, show these two worlds, the songs and the instrumental pieces.
“Then I decided to put the albums out, and it describes that as well, but I'm not planning on playing all the new stuff. I might play a couple of bits, but the majority will be stuff people recognise.
“I've always done instrumental music, but never a complete body of work. When I’m working I write a song, then spend time away touring or doing instrumental stuff, then go back to the songs, and I found myself ping-ponging between these two musical worlds.
“I thought I had two separate albums then some musician friends pointed out the obvious that these are twins, created at the same time in the same environment. So I thought it's interesting to put out the two sides to my two worlds, the instrumental and the songwriting as one complete unit.
Ure’s interest in instrumentals was also rejuvenated by his curation of a late night classical radio show on Scala radio after lockdown leading him to deep-dive into artists he had always loved and discovering new neoclassical ones.
“I've never sat down and thought ‘what can I do now? Things just grow as you grow and your tastes expand - music and books and movies and who you want to hang out with.
“And you care less about what the critics think. You care what your fans think because they've been with you a long time and you don't want to alienate them, but they're more forgiving if you come up with something that's not expected. Surely the whole point of doing anything is it takes something slightly unexpected to make music or art move on that little bit? Otherwise it's just stagnant.”
With gold and platinum records such as the Ultravox singles If I Was, Vienna, and Visage’s Fade to Grey, and the seven top 10 Ultravox albums in the early 1980s, in retrospect his career success seems a foregone conclusion.
“A lot of people look back and it's like, ‘oh they were obviously going to be hit singles’. No, they weren’t. You only think that because they were hit records. But they were too long for radio, they were radically different from what had come before.
“It was a lot of people experimenting with new technology and home recording. What happened in the late 70s, early 80s, was an accessibility to technology, but with a punk ethos. Punk bands came together because they didn't know how to play. They picked up a guitar, learned three chords and before they knew it they were a punk band.
“It was the same ethos with synthesisers. We weren’t buying them to try and be Rick Wakeman, we were buying them because with two or three fingers you could create an entire track in your bedroom with a tape recorder. It was revolutionary, exciting and moved things on. What was seen as a novelty instrument is now de rigueur and they're used everywhere, but in a different way.”
The Ultravox song itself, A Man of Two Worlds, released on the album Lament in 1984, was inspired by a road trip Ure and bass player Chris Cross took in Scotland.
“We took a camper van to Harris and Lewis and sitting by the standing stones at Callanish I wrote this song about a feeling of déjà vu. I mean, I was born in a tenement slum in Glasgow so feeling that sensation that you've been there before, belonged there, was the antithesis of where I came from, but there was something. So I wrote this song about being a man of two worlds, about experiencing that feeling. But the title just suited both the tour and releasing the albums as one.”
Ure’s life trajectory, from a childhood as one of three children living with his parents in a one-bedroom flat in Cambuslang to where he is now, also marks him out as a man of two worlds. His dad was a van driver and his mother worked part-time jobs in an off-licence and the Hoover factory in Cambuslang and when Ure landed an engineering apprenticeship his father in particular was delighted. Not so much when he gave it up to chase his musical dreams, encouraged by his mother.
“Yeah. It was my dad's dream for my brother and me because in the early 1970s, the apprenticeship was a massive step up from what he did as a van driver for a bakery, and it ticked all of his boxes to see his two sons being apprentice engineers because that meant a job for life back then. It was a four year apprenticeship but all the way through I was playing in bands and ended up leaving at 18, halfway through. “
His first band changed his name from Jim to Midge, phonetically Jim backwards, because they already had a Jim and the name stuck.
Given the way things turned out Ure can have no career regrets, but what about in other areas of his life. To quote the title of his debut solo single in 1982, has he ‘No Regrets’?
“Um, yeah, if I dig deep enough and go back and delve into history. When I did the autobiography I thought it would be quite a nice thing to do, and I hated it. It takes you back to the bits you really hated and the excesses, when you let the fame go to your head. I hated going back there and looking at it again. What a dick.
“If I had a Tardis I could go back and fix it. But you're left with what you've got. And those sliding doors moments that lead into something you didn't foresee so I wouldn't change any of it. No, I can't say I've got any regrets. You can't change any of it. Even the bad bits were good.”
What was Ure aiming for with the new albums?
“It sounds poncy saying this but as a writer you write about what affects you and that could be anything, a book you've read, or TV show, and music is a wonderful way of venting your angst. Just get it out there. Not everyone will understand and they'll interpret it their own way, but get it out there without having to stand on a soapbox and preach at people.
“We're all very aware that over the umpteen decades we've been through some really weird and wonderful times globally. We’ve seen the semi-destruction of the planet and we’ve got people in power who you're meant to look up to and we're all standing there thinking, what credentials do they have to be in that position? And the answer is none.
“We've seen this new tendency to blatantly lie in public even though everyone can see it. And it seems to be getting worse. We go to bed at night thinking the world can't be any worse tomorrow morning, surely. Usually it is. So music's a wonderful way of getting that out of your system, of saying it, but not ramming it down people's throats
“Someone said if the songs in this album had come out in the 1960s, you would have done it on an acoustic guitar with a harmonica round your neck because they're protest songs. You see something that isn't right and you call it out. I've done that since Dancing With Tears In My Eyes, or when Ultravox got together with The Chieftains and we did All Fall Down, anti-war songs.
“It's fairly blatant what it's all about but it achieves its goal without alienating people. Then again, I haven't seen any Americans yet. There's a love letter on there to America, The Man Who Stole Your Soul, saying to America, we know you're still there and we're waiting. Just come back to us the way you were. It’s blatantly obvious who it’s about.”
Ure has a long history of protest songs, being the co-writer of Do They Know It’s Christmas? the Band Aid song. What does he think now when he hears it now?
“The record still stands up, does its job incredibly well. It's a difficult task to make a Christmas record because they are usually happy and jingly so to write a song about that subject was difficult.
“We've had 40-odd years of praise or disdain about it and it's got to a point now where people are analysing the lyrics and saying of course there's snow in Africa. Well, it's a pop song. It was thrown together. It did an incredible job. And all the critics and naysayers wondering ‘where the money went’ and ‘why isn't it fixed’ think about the name. BandAid, an elastoplast to cover a cut. That's all it was meant to be. It was meant to raise £100,000 and we could only do that if we had a Christmas number one and that meant pulling in all your mates to get their fanbase to go and buy the thing. It vastly exceeded that. It changed a huge amount, changed political opinion. It moved things way beyond what we thought it ever would, growing into Live Aid and bouncing around the world and every territory had their own version of a Band Aid type song.
“And all the money went into the same situation. Forty-odd years down the line, the Band Aid Trust, the body of people we put together to oversee the collection and distribution of the funds, is still there. Once you've committed, you have to see it through to its ultimate conclusion.
“We have the problem of how do we hand this over because we're all getting on a bit. You know, I'm younger than Bob,” he laughs and repeats it because he keeps reading Geldof is younger than him. “Who’s going to commit to the amount of time we committed to for 40 years. Who's going to make sure this money goes where it's meant to go? So we have a massive dilemma.”
And they’re still friends, he and Geldof?
“Yeah, of course, we always have been! The media likes to try to mix it up a bit. He is a pain in the arse, but he's Bob. And he's smart and clever and absolutely driven by this. And it really gets my goat when I see people accuse him of having taken the money. ‘Where’s the money?’ You know, ‘multimillionaire Geldof’, what? For god’s sake grow up! You can be thick-skinned about it, but it must really hurt, you know? It's hard. I don't get the same kind of abuse that he gets.
“The bottom line is, there are people who are still here because somebody went out and bought that record. Because somebody paid a pound for that piece of plastic. There are people out there who can talk for themselves and say I was saved because I received goods from Band Aid. I received food, whatever it was. That makes things a lot easier for us, you know. We don't have to justify it.”
With his Scottish dates approaching, Ure is looking forward to being back on home turf. Does he get back much?
“I get back to Scotland a lot, and there's a major reason. When I'm back in Cambuslang, I wander round the same streets I walked when I was 10, dreaming of owning a guitar. It's not nostalgia. I go back and remind myself that I was one of the lucky ones and got what I wished for. And it's kept my feet firmly… [he hesitates and laughs], fairly firmly, on the ground. I've had my moments where my head got way too big,” he says. “Where the ego took over, but I've kept my feet reasonably firmly on the ground because of that. It could have…
“I had it all snatched away straight after Slik, 1977, 1978. I'd had my 15 minutes of fame - not 15 minutes of doing what I wanted with fame, but fame. And it could easily, easily have disappeared then and I could have ended up driving a bus like my dad. But I was incredibly lucky and I have to remind myself of that. So yeah, I get back to Scotland a lot.”
Midge Ure is live at Aberdeen Music Hall, 20 May; Glasgow SEC Armadillo, 22 May; Edinburgh Usher Hall, 24 May. Tickets available from midgeure.seetickets.com/www.midgeure.co.uk
His new album, A Man of Two Worlds is out now.
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