Chris Sullivan meets up with a man whose name has been synonymous with this time of year ever since the release of his 1984 charity single Do They Know it's Christmas?
Midge Ure, the man behind Slik, The Rich Kids, Ultravox and Visage, was born in Cambuslang, Scotland, in 1953. He co-wrote Band Aid's masssive hit Do They Know It’s Christmas? and helped organise the world-famous benefit concerts Live Aid and Live 8 with Bob Geldof. He's since had number one singles and top ten albums as a solo artist.
After their initial confab was postponed – Midge had to play a last-minute gig in Vienna of all places – Chris Sullivan eventually caught up with the 80s star for a trip down memory lane…
How was Vienna?
Stunningly beautiful. It was a corporate thing whereby you're a surprise for multi-gazillionaires and you turn up and have a jolly and talk shit for three days. It was the first time I’d been there in a long, long time.
What was so liberating about the 1980s?
It was a dawning of a new generation: music, technology, fashion. There were no limitations. The technology was revolutionary. People could make music in their bedrooms, which had never happened. Before, you had to have a music company put you in a studio and then advertise your record. But all of a sudden you could make it in your bedroom, which seemed terribly creative. And the Blitz [the legendary London nightclub] was a hive of activity.
Why do you think everything happened at that moment?
When things seem hard socially, that’s when people start being creative. It was incredibly tough in the early-60s, too, when you got The Beatles. So you’d spend all day in your bedroom with a synthesizer and then at night you’d go to the Blitz and Wag in what we called "dead men’s clothes".
How did you feel after making it big with Visage and Ultravox?
Our goal had been to make music to play in the clubs. Germanic Kraftwerk stuff mixed with what we’d been brought up with: Roxy Music, Bowie. I was working on Visage with Rusty [Egan] and Steve [Strange] and Billy Curry, keyboard player in Ultravox. So then I joined Ultravox and after years of no success I was in the studio when the manager came in with a bottle of champagne and said, “You’ve got two singles and two albums in the Top 40, on the same day”.
What’s it like to have written a classic like Vienna?
It’s one of those oddities: you make a track that is so radically different from anything out there at the time – a ponderous, electronic atmospheric ballad about a central European city with a viola solo in it – and everyone says you’re crazy to put it out, that it’s far too long. But for whatever reason it captured people’s imaginations. It's what you need: something so different that it changes the flow of music.
How did Band Aid and Live Aid come about?
By accident. I was doing [influential British music TV show] The Tube and the host Paula Yates, Mrs Bob Geldof, was my friend. So Bob called me and asked me to help raise money for the famine in Ethiopia. I said, “I don’t have any power”, but we came to the blindingly obvious conclusion that we could do was write a song.
How hard was it to write the single?
We weren’t trying to make an outstanding piece of music with Do They Know It's Christmas? We were trying to raise money. So we decided to do it at Christmas because you can sell more records then. Within a couple of days of talking about it, it went crazy. We all turned up to do it and the world’s press were there because so many artists were doing something that wasn’t for them. Once the media heard all the royalties were going to the cause, it grew into something it was never designed to be.
What was Live Aid like?
It was mega, above and beyond anything we thought we’d be involved in. We flew into Wembley by helicopter from Battersea and there was a sea of people outside. That's when the penny dropped. A little girl said recently that she'd read about us in history. That wasn't planned. It turned into a movement and turned peoples heads. Seeing the direct effect of it in Africa is incredible. I work for Save the Children and I've met people who would not be alive now had the concert not occurred. This is what politicians should be doing.
Do you think it’s because of songs like yours that today's kids are into the 80s?
The 80s were given a hard time but it is wrong to lump everything together. Of course there was good and bad, and anyone with a synthesizer was tarred with the same brush – dismissed as fluff because of how we looked. But we all looked different and wrote differently, so the songs of that time were incredibly vibrant and there were exceptional musicians and songwriters. It was music designed to dance to, not to be played on the radio.
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