MIDGEURE
THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING
AS HIS DEBUT SOLO ALBUM IS REISSUED AS A LAVISH BOXSET, MIDGE URE RECALLS HIS ANNUS MIRABILIS – WHEN NOT EVEN JOE DOLCE COULD STOP HIM HITTING THE UK TOP SPOT...
PAUL KIRKLEY
Singer, songwriter, producer, Band Aid lynchpin, Ultravox frontman and gun for hire – musical polymath, Midge Ure
© George Hurrell
If rock stars have, to borrow Neil Tennant’s famous phrase, an ‘imperial phase’, then 1985 found Midge Ure scaling the dizzy peak of his.
It was a year that began with Band Aid’s box-fresh Do They Know It’s Christmas? at No.1 in the charts, and closed out with a triumphant show at Wembley Arena. Between those festive bookends, the 31-year-old singer, songwriter, musician and producer had also released his debut solo album, landed a No.1 single and helped pull off “the greatest show on Earth” as one of the architects of Live Aid, at which he also performed as part of his day job fronting Ultravox.
“They were heady times,” says Ure, with no small understatement, when Classic Pop catches up with him over Zoom at his home studio in Portugal, some 38 years later. “Sometimes these things just come together. Band Aid would never have happened if I hadn’t built a recording studio in my garden in Chiswick. That’s where the song was conceived, and without it, I’m not sure it would ever have seen the light of day. So that was quite something, and that kind of put everything else on ice. We did Live Aid, then I went on my solo tour. It was staggered and broken up. There was no timeline for any of this.”
Midge’s solo album, The Gift – which is being reissued as a deluxe boxset next month – was equally unplanned and spontaneous, and equally in debt to that garden studio. “It was never meant to be an album,” Ure explains. “It had been my lifelong ambition to build my own studio, and I was in the middle of trying to figure out how it all worked. Basically, I bought a load of manuals, and some equipment came with it,” he laughs. “So I started dabbling – doing some instrumental bits, and whatever. And when the record company heard it, they said, ‘that’s an album’.
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