Midge Ure: I feared I couldn’t sing anymore after lockdown
Midge Ure is finally on tour after seeing his live dates rescheduled twice due to the pandemic.
But when it came to getting back on stage his biggest fear was that his voice would not return following more than two years away from live shows.
The former Ultravox frontman will be 70 this year and had just recovered from his second bout of Covid when he spoke to the Cambridge Independent, but fans will be relieved to know that after a little careful training the singer’s worst fears came to nothing.
“I worried about my voice after lockdown,” says Midge.
“I was on tour when all of that happened back in 2020 and I realised that because of this enforced lockdown, which meant I couldn’t do what I’d always done - singing live in front of big crowds - that I hadn’t sung properly for quite some time.
“I’d sung around the house and I did a few little acoustic shows online from my studio. But that's very different from going out and standing on stage and belting it out for two hours every night. And when I did get back into the band again, my voice was atrocious. It was awful. It’s like if you’d sat in a chair for two years and then tried to walk you would land on your face. I just thought I’ll just go and sing and of course nothing came out. It was dreadful. And it took a while for it to slowly come back. That was scary.
“I was used to going out on stage and then hitting the highest note you could possibly hit. But I suddenly realised that was not going to happen. It’s like anything, you have to work up to it. You can’t just go and run a marathon without training. So I had to start by just doing a song and then maybe two songs and then the next day do three songs, just to get it flowing. And once you psychologically got past the point of thinking it’s going to crack, or I will go hoarse, you just get on with it and do it. So it’s all back to normal now, thankfully.”
Following the overwhelming response to his Midge Ure & Band Electronica ‘The 1980 Tour’, which ended at the start of the pandemic, he is returning to the road this year with the ‘Voice & Visions’ tour, celebrating 40 years since the release of Ultravox’s Rage In Eden and Quartet albums.
At the start of 1981, Ultravox were laying their claim to be one of the defining acts of the 1980s following the global success of hit Vienna. Heading back into the studio the same year invigorated, they recorded their second album with Midge as frontman, Rage in Eden, which hit the top five in the UK album charts. Quartet, their third album with Midge, came in quick succession in 1982 with production from legendary Beatles producer George Martin. Continuing the band’s impressive chart run, it became their third top 10 album, featuring four top 20 singles, including the anthem Hymn.
The Voice & Visions tour is visiting 31 cities across the UK and promises to transport fans back to the decade of electronics, experimentation, synthesisers and great songwriting, with the albums’ highlights being showcased alongside landmark hits from Midge’s back catalogue.
He says: “The Rage In Eden album was the follow up to Vienna. And we were under immense pressure from agents and management and record labels to write Vienna part two. And depending on which territory we were in, the record label executives always had a great idea for the titles. Berlin would be a fantastic title, they said, if we were in Germany or Tokyo would be brilliant if we were in Japan.
“But we thought, no we are not doing any of this. So we set off into the German countryside to Conny Plank’s studio, the very famous German electronica producer. We had no songs prepared and proceeded to write the entire thing in the studio. It took three months and resulted in exactly what we wanted.
“And then the next album, the Quartet album, we decided to do the antithesis of that and go with Sir George Martin, who had worked with the Beatles - someone who was old school basically, telling us off for being idiots, just saying this is too long, you need to sort this out, and getting us around the piano to work on harmonies. It was old school stuff, but brilliant because Ultravox were fairly stoic, strong-headed individuals who didn’t want to listen to anybody, let alone each other. So the idea of having someone telling you what you’re doing wasn’t right was abhorent. But when George Martin suggested something, you listened - the man had more history in his pinky nail than we ever had. So yeah, it was great.”
The band were a little awestruck by George’s starry presence and celebrity stories. “There was lots of kind of forelock tugging, curtseying and bowing because he’s, you know, musical royalty,” says Midge.
“I have described him many times as a cross between your father and your favourite school teacher. He was just this lovely, knowledgeable, intelligent, musical man who had the best stories in the world. He was like a raconteur. Having him sitting in a studio for weeks and weeks and weeks on end, he never stopped coming up with stories about the Beatles.
“He told us how one time John Lennon wanted to be hung upside down in the studio by his feet, and then spun around between the two microphones to make a certain sound of his voice. We were thinking what were these guys on? Well, we know what these guys were on at times. But it was just amazing hearing those stories from George.”
Looking back on the Rage in Eden and Quartet albums, not all of the songs still resonate with Midge and have been cut from the live show. But others feel fresh.
He explains: “I honestly do not go back and listen to what I’ve done in the past, only if I have to when I need to do some research or relearn them because I’ve forgotten most of the songs.
“And sometimes it’s quite a pleasant surprise when you find a little nugget that makes you think, oh wow! I remember roughly doing this song but I don’t remember it being particularly good. And you find something and then when you translate that into live work, it just blossoms and becomes a thing that you’re completely engaged with for the first time in 40 years.
“But equally, the downside is that you find things where you think, ‘I don’t even know who wrote this, I have no idea what I was thinking when we were writing the lyrics or what we were trying to achieve’ or whatever, and that has no connection with you because we aren’t the same people that we were 35 or 40 years ago.
“You move on, hopefully progress and widen your scope and your life changes. And some of it was quite depressing. So I’ve cherry picked the songs that really resonate with me from both albums for this tour, and of course they have to make the transition to working live. A lot of what you can do in the studio is creative and it works really well in a studio environment. Sometimes it just doesn’t cut it when you take it out and try to perform it live.”
During the pandemic, Midge missed performance so much that he started his own backstage lockdown club online hosted from his garden studio. There he played live sets and Q&A sessions with fans as well as getting his celebrity friends to come on board for interviews.
Midge says: “When the lockdown started we all thought it would be over in six weeks - and we were all proved very wrong. I have seen a lot of artists doing stuff online, but irrespective of how good the artists are, the quality of what they were doing was pretty ropey.
“Usually they were just singing straight into the laptop and using the laptop camera to broadcast it and I thought there’s got to be a better way of doing that. If people are going to tune in from Australia or Japan you should show them something that’s quality.
“So I I delved into my technological world, found the best cameras and found tracking systems that make the cameras move and I bought a visual mixer that would cut between various cameras and various angles, doing close-ups of the guitar. And I invested heavily in this. The result was it sounded and looked really good.
“It looked as though I had half a dozen people in the studio operating cameras for me, but it was just me in my little studio at the bottom of the garden, and people loved it. It wasn’t just the artists who missed live performance. The audience missed going out to the cinema or the theatre or going to gigs.
“Some people need that - it’s like oxygen to them. They need to see live performance and online shows will never replace face-to-face gigs in the same room as other people. But it was a good substitute and I’m still doing sessions because it helps keep people involved.”
Midge has hugely enjoyed getting to know fans really well during these intimate sessions, which are often followed by reading out their questions and he wishes this technology had been around earlier so he could have talked to his own heroes.
He says: “Instead of just sending a random fan mail or something like we used to back in the day, that more often than not never reached you, people can actually write to you and you can respond and that’s amazing. If I had written to David Bowie and he responded, then I’d have been ecstatic. It would have been like I had just won the lottery.
“So I just think that’s a lovely thing. It breaks down that whole idea of musicians being out on a pedestal and looking down on on the poor fans from a lofty height. That doesn’t really happen. But that’s what people might have in their heads - that musicians are unattainable and untouchable. Of course, social media has changed all of that. So I think that’s a great thing.”
The lockdown also satisfied Midge’s love of gadgets, which he is now channelling into the live tour. He’s trying to create a perfect sound for audiences coming to the shows.
“Toys, toys, toys - boys just like things that light up and make noises. We are are simple creatures,” he suggests.
“I’m still waiting for new technology to make the sound even better on stage. So I’ve been working with this brand new technology to make the guitar sound better. We do a thing called a silent stage where there is no noise on stage at all. The drums are electronic, the synthesisers obviously have no noise coming out, even the guitar is silenr. But the one thing that fails when you do that is the guitar side.
“I wanted to get something that would give me the best guitar sound I could get and then what comes out of the big sound system out front is like hifi. So I’m constantly tweaking it. I find working with technology inspiring in itself, but the world inspires me for content for songs. Love, hate, jealousy, envy, you know, all of those things are wonderful subjects.”
He is looking forward to a day looking around Cambridge before his show and has some surprising habits when he visits towns on tour.
“We arrive in the early morning on the tour bus and you always find yourself wandering around looking at second-hand shops and estate agents’ windows. Don’t ask me why! It’s one of the things that you do when you travel - you’re looking at the property prices. Cambridge is one of those cities it would be lovely to live in, like Oxford, Bath or Edinburgh.”
Midge Ure, Voice and Visions tour will be at Cambridge Corn Exchange on May 26. For tickets, priced from £28.50 to £37.50, visit cambridgelive.org.uk.
