Bring questions to Midge Ure’s City Winery show
Midge Ure has created some musical history in his time: He practically invented synth-pop with Ultravox and Visage, and co-wrote the iconic Band Aid single “Do They Know It’s Christmas.” But when he comes to town on Monday, he’ll be up close and personal.
The City Winery show, billed as “Songs, Questions and Answers,” will indeed be built around questions and song requests that he’ll take from audience members.
“I see this an an extension of social media,” he said this week. “That invisible wall came down when people could start tweeting you and sending you emails. Today people think that they know you — and in fact they do, they know you through your music. I walk onstage with a bottle of water, a guitar and the first song — after that it’s in their hands. So it’s either very brave or very stupid. That whole idea of ‘You’re a star, you’re someone I looked up to’ — that all disappears, and you become someone they can like.”
He’s already gotten requests for some of the most obscure songs in his catalog. “I’ve tried a few, but there’s also that magical word ‘no.’ I think people find it quite funny that I don’t know all of my songs, but I can always tell you what key they’re in.”
He also has to translate synthesized epics into acoustic format. “Someone requested ‘Sleepwalk’ the other night, the first song I did with Ultravox, and we just couldn’t do it — that’s like synthesized heavy metal. But a song like (the 1984 hit) ‘Dancing with Tears in MyEyes’cangetevenmore emotional.”
Sometimes people even ask about Ure’s first band Slik — a pure pop, boy band that had UK success in the mid ’70s. “That was a double-edged sword. Once you’re tarred with that particular brush, it can be hard to get taken seriously. But I strived from that moment on to do more interesting stuff. And that included buying a synthesizer and bringing it into the Rich Kids (his next band, with two former Sex Pistols) — which broke the band up, because half of them hated it.”
Though “Do They Know It’s Christmas” (which he wrote with Boomtown Rat and Live Aid mastermind Bob Geldof) is his bestknown song, he’s not claiming it’s his best. “I didn’t think it was a particularly good song, and I still don’t. It has no structure, it has no chorus, the lyrics are dubious to say the least. I’m just glad we couldn’t send mp3s to the artists back then, for them to decide if they wanted to do it or not. They only heard it when they got to the studio and it was too late to back out. So we hopefully made a good record out of it, and nowadays it’s something people see through rose-colored glasses. It was a small moment in time when this notoriously vicious and selfish industry managed to do something for someone else.”
Ure’s last original album, “Fragile,” dealt with a dark time in his life. “My father died, my career was on the skids, and I’d gotten myself into a bit of trouble with alcohol. But there’s a lot of joy in that record too. The first song I wrote was called ‘I Survived,’ and that was when I realized I could write without my friend Jack Daniels sitting by my side.”