A Catalogue of Midge Ure Hits

Just months after his big 70^th birthday show at London’s Royal Albert Hall, former Ultravox front man Midge Ure is back on the road again for ‘Catalogue – The Hits Tour’.

The theme of the tour is to showcase Midge Ure’s broad catalogue of music from the past five decades or so and he mostly achieves that with of course a heavy lean towards Ultravox and his own solo material from 1985’s ‘If I Was’ onwards. There are nods to his time with Thin Lizzy, Visage and The Rich Kids with only Slik missing, not that most people would notice. Ure also co-wrote Band Aid’s seemingly immortal song ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ together with Bob Geldof. All in all, then, quite a varied career which seems rooted in the early electropop new wave 1980s.

The Birmingham stop on the tour was hosted by the Symphony Hall, a flagship music venue that first hosted Ure on the tour for his album release of ‘Pure’ just months after it first opened. That performance showed some teething problems with the venue’s sound and a rather strained voice from Ure as he found his way through the transition from the minimalist Ultravox sound and the more experimental nature of his first album ‘The Gift’ onto a more individualised presentation. Over the intervening years, Ure has settled into a writing style which better suits the voice he has now rather than the one he had in his 20s – a challenge ultimately faced by all musicians and which does add an extra layer of complexity to a tour such as this which spans more than 30 years of releases.

For many years, Ure has toured with the India Electric Company who double as both his support act and his band. For such a rich, complex soundscape you might think that four musicians are not enough but then that’s the same headcount as for Ultravox. Their sound has also matured over the years that they have been touring with Ure, from a stylish, precise folk-pop trio into something deeper, more complex and with perhaps a broader appeal.

Getting underway with The Rich Kids’ ‘Marching Men’, Ure whizzed through a selection of originals and covers starting with ‘Passing Strangers’ from Ultravox, ‘No Regrets’ from Tom Rush, ‘Supernatural’ from Peter Green, ‘Fade to Grey’ from Visage and ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’. This came as a tribute to Thin Lizzy front man Phil Lynott who sadly passed away in 1986 aged just 36 and who was also remembered through the song ‘The Leaving (So Long)’ from Ure’s second album ‘Answers to Nothing’.

A minimal stage and lighting setup could have seemed dwarfed on the grand stage at the Symphony Hall yet in a way it put the spotlight more on Ure’s typically focused performance. There’s no energetic strutting about the stage as with OMD, no extravagant projected light show as with The Lightning Seeds and no full orchestra as with ABC. These contemporaries have all embarked on similar retrospective tours this year and have each brought their own flavour to the genre. Ure’s rather understated show puts the spotlight on the music and echoes back to the minimalist style of early Ultravox.

Solo compositions ran from Ure’s first single release, ‘If I Was’ through to ‘Fragile’ the title track from his sixth album in 2014. In all, Ure has managed eight albums compared to the five released by Ultravox during Ure’s tenure yet it really is the Ultravox period which defined Ure’s career and forms the bedrock of the tour’s set list. A run of ever popular Ultravox hits brought the evening to a crescendo - ‘Love’s Great Adventure’, ‘Hymn’, ‘One Small Day’, ‘Dancing With Tears in My Eyes’ and an encore of ‘The Voice’.

In all, not a complete catalogue of Ure’s immense body of work but a worthy taster menu that inspires further, and closer, listening.

Peter Freeth

Instagram @genius.photo.pf

Web genius.photo

Images: Peter Freeth

If you enjoyed reading this article please consider buying us a coffee. The money from this pot goes towards the ever increasing yearly costs of running and hosting the site, as well as our monthly "Writer Of The Month" article prize.