Ure the man

Midge Ure almost shudders at the mere mention of the name of one of the most recognisable and ground-breaking songs ever recorded. It shifted more than 11 million copies worldwide, reaching number one in more than a dozen countries, and importantly raised millions of dollars for famine relief in Ethiopia. Yet it is unlikely that the British pop star, who co-wrote Do they Know It’s Christmas?, for Band Aid in 1984 with Bob Geldof, will perform the song at his show at Dubai’s Irish Village on Thursday, September 24.

The 61-year-old former popband Ultravox frontman has a love-hate relationship with the song on which he played all the instruments, apart from the drums, as well as produced.

This year marked the 30th anniversary of Live Aid, a massive spin-off from the Band Aid record that saw the pop and rock aristocracy of the time strut their stuff on stage in London and Philadelphia in one of the biggest global TV broadcasts ever. The song that triggered the event has been recorded three times over the years with a different line-up of vocalists. ‘I think the original version is still the best,’ Midge says. ‘We worked hard to create the atmosphere on that song. It’s a very difficult record to pull off, starting with these ominous clangs, this haunting drone and then finishing with this pub singalong!’

If Do they Know… is off-limits, three songs you can bet on Midge performing are If I Was from his solo career, Dancing With Tears in my Eyes and the anthemic synthpop megahit Vienna from his Ultravox days. The latter spawned a movie-like video that became a template for subsequent artists’ videos in the 1980s to satisfy the voracious appetite of the new 24-hour music TV channels.

‘Videos were not really a necessity at the time,’ Midge recalls. ‘The record company said “what’s the point, the record is already at number 2 in the UK.” So I sat down with the head of the company to explain to him that with a video we could be on every major TV show in Europe. He didn’t seem sure so in the end we had to go and get a bank loan of £17,000 (Dh96,045) to make the video ourselves. When the record company saw it they just freaked. It was quite ground-breaking stuff – we insisted on having this visual element to the music.’

The extravagant, glitzy life of a pop idol in Eighties Britain would have been unthinkable to the young Midge (his name derives from his real name Jim spelt backwards), living in a shabby one-bedroom flat with his brother, sister and parents in a poor, run-down area of Glasgow, Scotland. ‘It sounds hideous when you think about it. This bombed out tenement site, a stagnant, infested, muddy mess. There was no electricity and a lot of the communal areas were lit by gas mantles, so it really was Victorian-esque, something Dickens would have written about.

‘But when you are living there, everybody else is living the same way so it’s no hardship. It’s what gets you through the horror – everyone else was in the same situation. The hardship was for my parents trying to bring us all up there.’

‘So halfway through the first song it sounded like someone had wrapped me in cling film because the guitar sounded so dead,’ he laughs. ‘This time though it’s a band with fully electric guitars. If you’d landed from Mars and never heard a Midge Ure record, you’d get a good representation of what I’ve done. It is stuff that people will recognise or if they haven’t heard it before, they’ll get.’

He’s never had a grand plan and has no intention of making one now. ‘I still get offers to do things that I think would be quite nice. Maybe I could have dominated the world if I’d had a grand plan. Maybe I could have been standing side by side with Bono [from U2] but it has never been that way. For me it’s always been about shooting from the hip and following your heart.’