ULTRAVOX

WILDLY INVENTIVE, FEARLESSLY EXPERIMENTAL AND AHEAD OF THEIR TIME, THE FIRST THREE ULTRAVOX ALBUMS CLEARED A TRAIL THAT MANY OTHERS WOULD FOLLOW. FOUR OF THOSE WHO WERE THERE – JOHN FOXX, CHRIS CROSS, WARREN CANN AND ROBIN SIMON – LOOK BACK TO THE LATE 1970S. CLASSIC POP LISTENS IN…

JONATHAN WRIGHT

We often think of the musical culture of the 1980s as having been invented in the late 1970s, that time when post-punk experimentation collided with the moment New Romanticism escaped from London’s clubland, and synth-pop went on to conquer the world. But you could just as easily begin the narrative on, say, 29 April 1967 at London’s Alexandra Palace. This was the night Pink Floyd headlined The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, a benefit concert-cum-happening for the counterculture newspaper International Times, which at that point was receiving unwanted police attention. Among those in attendance, marvelling at this “distillation of magical things, all together in one place”, was Dennis Leigh, a teenager raised in Chorley, Lancashire.

“You met a new generation, impatient to change the world and expand all horizons – imagination, intellect, artistic ambitions, sex, romance, poetry, noise as music,” he remembers. “No limits. Seeing [John] Lennon and others wandering about in the crowd, you realised that they were people, too, just as real as yourself, equally intrigued and bewildered. Everything seemed imminent somehow.” It was… “A glimpse of possibilities. I started making plans.”

These plans would, it’s no exaggeration to say, help to shape the musical landscape of the late 1970s and 1980s. That’s because Dennis Leigh would reinvent himself as John Foxx, the frontman on the first three Ultravox albums – Ultravox!, Ha!-Ha!-Ha! (both 1977) and Systems Of Romance (1978) – and later a hugely influential solo electronic artist. All three albums sold poorly on release but would have an enduring influence on, among others, Gary Numan, Duran Duran and, you might argue, Ultravox themselves, when the Midge Ure-fronted incarnation of the band enjoyed international commercial success with Vienna, which Ure still plays live to this day.

A TUMBLE OF IDEAS

But that’s getting ahead of the story. The band that would become Ultravox! began to coalesce in 1973, when Leigh, soon to be Foxx, a student at the Royal College of Art, went looking for musical collaborators and recruited Chris Cross (bass, real name Chris Allen), Stevie Shears (guitar), Warren Cann (drums) and multi-instrumentalist Billy Currie. In March 1975, then called Tiger Lily, the band released a single for Gull Records, a cover of the Fats Waller song Ain’t Misbehavin’ plus a Leigh original, Monkey Jive.