The moment I realised I was an alcoholic
Band Aid saved lives, thanks to Midge Ure – but then his life began to unravel. He tells Julia Llewellyn Smith why he has no regrets
It’s Christmastime, so the airwaves are alive with the chimes of the evergreen Do They Know It’s Christmas?, with every penny of royalties still going to the Band Aid Trust. You might expect the man who made it all happen to be reflecting proudly on the tens of millions of pounds he’s raised to relieve famine and poverty in Africa since that first 1984 recording. But instead, Midge Ure – the-then Ultravox frontman who produced and co-wrote the single and then organised much of the follow-up Live Aid concert, a tireless elf to Sir Bob Geldof ’s Father Christmas – is, to say the least, ambivalent about his ongoing role as “saviour” of a continent.
“It’s an oddity,” says Ure, in his strong Glaswegian tones. “It’s not something I ever dreamed about growing up in a Glasgow tenement, and I’m still very surprised I got involved. But once I had, I couldn’t get away from it. I had to see it through.” He chuckles. “I’m still seeing it through.”
Ure was dragged into the cause by total fluke. “It was my Sliding Doors moment, when life could have taken one of two paths: I was standing next to Paula [Yates, Geldof ’s late, ex-wife] when Bob called saying they had to do something about the famine in Ethiopia, and she put him on to me. I was too embarrassed to say ‘No’.
“It could have so easily been someone else, but luckily it was me, because I had skills Bob lacked and he has skills I lack. I have musicality, Bob writes songs, but he’d be the first to say he’s not a great musician.” Indeed, in Ure’s autobiography, he recalls uncharacteristically snapping at Geldof for commanding the 40 confused megastars who recorded Band Aid to imitate his out-of-tune rendition.
“Yes, he was terrible, and I had to say so. But there was no way I could stand up and shout like Bob about ‘Give us your f------ money’. So it was a match made in heaven. Berating world leaders is not who I am at all,” Ure adds, grinning. “Bob is a bigmouth, again he’d be the first person to say it, but he’s a loudmouth of the right kind. Whether you agree with what he says or not, he does it for the right reasons.”
In my imagination, Ure’s still striding around “mystic and soulful” in monochrome dry-iced streets, black-tied and ’tached, warbling “Oh… Vienna”, often voted the greatest song never to reach number one (it stuck at number two for four weeks below the recently murdered John Lennon’s Woman, then, more gallingly, Joe Dolce’s Shaddap You Face).
In person, however, sitting in a Soho member’s club, Ure’s a bald 64-yearold in a denim shirt. He’s far more vocal describing the empty nest syndrome he’s suffering now three of his four daughters, aged between 30 and 18, have left the Bath family home (“My wife’s taking it much better, she’s much tougher than me”), than boasting about his undoubted musical behemoth status – besides Ultravox and Band Aid, he co-wrote the Visage classic Fade to Grey and the Top of The Pops theme Yellow Pearl. Yet at the peak of his fame, he was diverted by the Band Aid juggernaut, obliged to visit Ethiopia when Geldof couldn’t make it, despite his squeamishness (“If I didn’t go the cameras didn’t go, if the cameras didn’t go more people died”), then sitting on endless committees, discussing how to direct the money.
By the time he returned to Ultravox two years later, their new-wave tunes had been eclipsed by dance music. His marriage to model Annabel Giles collapsed, then his fortune – which he’d splashed on a villa in Montserrat that was destroyed by the volcano, a mansion overlooking the Thames and a collection of classic cars – ran out.
With a £170,000 tax bill to pay and Breathe, the solo album he considered his masterpiece, a critical and commercial flop, Ure turned to booze in his Forties.
“My ego had had a bruising, there were dark moments at night when I’d sit thinking ‘Oh God, why did I get it so wrong?’ It was a great excuse to get maudlin and cry into my drink, but then alcoholics always find an excuse. ‘I drank because it was raining, I drank because it was the weekend…’,” he says. His second wife, actress Sheridan Forbes, begged him to stop boozing, but he continued swallowing a bottle of Jack Daniels a day, doing the school-run drunk. “I thought I was so much smarter than everyone else, that what I was doing was nobody else’s business and wasn’t harming anyone. But it was everyone else’s business and the ripples created were huge and went on a long time.” The turning point came 12 years ago on a Cornish holiday, when Ure returned to the car, pretending to have forgotten something, to find his vodka bottle.
“I turned and saw my 11-year-old daughter watching me. Until then, all the rehab in the world couldn’t help, but the look of disappointment in her eyes was devastating. That sorted me out.”
He’s been sober for 12 years, but still fears succumbing to booze, saying if he’d suffered Geldof ’s travails – both Yates and his 25-yearold daughter Peaches had drugrelated deaths – he’s not sure he would have found the resilience to cope. “If what happened to Bob happened to a different person, like the drinker I used to be, it could be fatal. I can’t even begin to imagine what he’s been through, and it has made me hug my daughters closer than ever as you don’t know what is around the corner.”
Reconciled to the fact he would never recapture his mega-star Eighties status, he joined the nowbooming nostalgia circuit. There’s also been a non-stop stream of greatest hits albums, the latest being Orchestrated, a really rather beautiful, orchestral rearrangement of Ure’s top tracks (If I Was, Dancing with Tears in My Eyes and, naturally, Vienna), which – devoid of plinky electronic accompaniment – reveal Ure to be not so much a New Romantic but a bona fide, old school crooner.
Today, he sees far more of his Eighties peers than he ever did back in the glory days. “I saw Nik Kershaw last week and [ABC’S] Martin Fry and Steve [Norman] from Spandau Ballet. Then we were so self-important, if you passed someone in the TOTP corridors, you were too busy sucking in your cheeks and trying to be a hottie to say ‘hello’. Now, of course, all of that stuff ’s gone.”
He’s impressively gracious about the way he was sidelined at Live Aid, though at the time he was deeply hurt (Ultravox were pushed down the bill so Geldof ’s Boomtown Rats could perform to Prince Charles and Princess Diana): “I was there. That is good enough for me.”
He’s far less certain there’ll ever be another Band Aid single or live event. “I’m not sure music’s the central point of young people’s lives any more, because they get it free they don’t value it. If you put out a concert like that today, I doubt it would resonate.
“I’ve no regrets – no, no, no, no. The bottom line is there are people alive today who wouldn’t have been otherwise – I’ve seen cards from kids who’ve graduated from school whose parents died during the famine. There’s no doubt it made a big difference. Our song saved lives. How many songwriters can say that?”
‘I turned and saw my 11year-old daughter watching. Until then all the rehab in the world couldn’t help’