Music legend Midge Ure plays Rothes Halls in Fife on December 15. The 1980s pop icon promises an energetic show that will appeal to all music lovers
Ultravox frontman Midge Ure is one of the UK’s most prolific and well-respected singer-songwriters.
Best known for the classic anthem Vienna, Midge promises a show that will appeal to both the hit-conscious listener and long-term fan looking for something unusual.
Midge, 63, has moved on since the heady days of Ultravox, and the rollercoaster of highs and lows that came with finding fame and bringing in the big bucks.
But he’s still very much a working musician – he’s just back from a solo tour of America with European dates planned later in the year. Then he’ll head back to the States, and on to Australia in 2017.
His career spans more than 40 years – from his pop band beginnings, almost joining the Sex Pistols, the electronic ground-breaking work with Visage, the mainstream success of Ultravox to the twists and turns of his solo releases.
In 2015, Midge and semi acoustic duo, India Electric Company, presented the Breathe Again show which sold out at Kirkcaldy’s Adam Smith Theatre.
Returning to Fife on December 15 with his Something From Everything Tour show, at least one song from every album he has released will be featured.
Utilising a three piece format, Joseph O’Keefe will be adding keyboards to the mixture, providing a more electronic nature to some of the songs.
After ditching an engineering apprenticeship aged 18, Midge was set to be the next teenybop sensation in a band called Slik whose 1976 single Forever and Ever reached number one.
But the arrival of punk changed his musical direction and he joined ex-Sex Pistol Glen Matlock in Rich Kids.
He rapidly became a big name in the London music scene and in 1979 he played guitar for Thin Lizzy and co-wrote Yellow Pearl with Phil Lynott, which became the Top Of The Pops theme tune. But it was the soaring, atmospheric electronics of Ultravox that brought stardom.
“Maybe there was something in the water; the 80s was a fantastic decade musically,” he says.
“It was also a decade of technological revolution. Computers started to raise heads, so that changed how music was made, and what you made music with.”
Then came the 1984 Band Aid single that Midge co-wrote with Bob Geldof, Do They Know It’s Christmas.
He’s spent the last decade writing fresh material and funds this by doing festivals like Rewind, where he wheels out all the old favourites.
In 2005, Midge organised Live 8 concerts with Geldof with the aim of pressing G8 leaders into taking action to end world poverty. That same year he was given an OBE for services to music and charity. He has also received five honorary degrees, included an Honorary Doctor of Arts in 2005 by the University of Abertay.
But these are not the things he is most proud of. He says: “The highlights, for me, are the moments people don’t see, like playing guitar one-on-one with Eric Clapton, or collaborating with Kate Bush on a track, and then hearing what she’d done.”
Midge, who lives in Bath, says he feels “lucky to have good health” despite decades of rock ’n’ roll excesses. But years spent playing at deafening volumes have taken their toll and he is suffering from tinnitus and gradually losing his hearing.
Ever the trooper, Midge won’t let this get in the way of his musical ambitions. “As long as good health prevails, I won’t retire,” he says.
“I still have a passion for music but if I woke up tomorrow and thought ‘this has become a bit of a grind’, then I would stop doing it. But not until then.”
