W L FEATURE
AN INTERVIEW WITH MIDGE URE By Marie Fitzsimmons
James Ure OBE is a Scottish musician , singer-songwriter and record producer . His stage name , Midge , is a phonetic reversal of Jim , the diminutive form of his actual name . Ure enjoyed particular success in the 1970s and 1980s in bands including Slik , Thin Lizzy , Rich Kids and Visage , and as the frontman of Ultravox .
In 1984 , he co-wrote and produced the charity single " Do They Know It ' s Christmas ?", which has sold 3.7 million copies in the UK . The song is the second-highest-selling single in UK chart history . Ure co-organised Band Aid , Live Aid and Live 8 with Bob Geldof . He acts as a trustee for the charity and also serves as an ambassador for Save the Children . Wirral Life caught up with him ahead of his performance at the Liverpool Philharmonic in May this year .
I was going to ask you if you were looking forward to being back out on the road with your UK tour , but it appears that you never take a break . Haha , I do ! Well , I had to take an enforced break like we all did didn ’ t we . On our last tour we were in Australia when everything started falling apart , the whole covid thing was kicking in and we managed to hobble our way across most of Australia , a couple of shows had been cancelled and we found ourselves figuring out how to get back home . One of the shows was meant to be in Dubai to break up the journey back home and of course that disappeared , and we had no idea whether the flights were going in or out of Heathrow . We couldn ’ t get any information from anyone . You couldn ’ t call an airline we just had to chance it and managed to get back and of course we thought that was the end of it , we thought it would all be over in six weeks and then you find yourself for the first time ever since being a professional musician with a diary with nothing in it . A tour not complete and then nothing , like all of us sat at home , we twiddled our thumbs and that ’ s when you realise that 50 % of what I do is like you say ‘ I never take a break ’ as I ' m always out touring . There ' s always shows to do and having that taken away from me was quite opponent but to have it back is just brilliant .
The 2022 and 2023 Voice & Visions tour is to celebrate 40 years since the release Rage in Eden and Quartet albums , is it ‘ greatest hits ’ or do you get to play the albums in their entirety ? I get to cherry pick , it ' s one of the joys of doing it . One of the horrors of doing it I have to say is going back and listening to the old stuff because no matter how well you thought you did at the time or how good you thought the piece of music was , 40 years down the line you can pick holes in it , I can sit there and analyse it and go ‘ I ' m not quite sure what I was thinking at that point ’ so I cherry pick the songs that make the transition now , make the transition live . A lot of things that you do in the studio don ’ t really cut it live , for whatever reason , and a lot of these songs I don ’ t remember performing live with Ultravox so it ' s quite nice to go out there and give the tour a
theme as such . It also reminds people , when you talk to anyone and they say , ‘ Oh Yeah Vienna ’, well yeah , we had another 20 hit records or something besides that , because that ’ s the one that overpowers everything . It ' s nice when people come and see you and they realise ‘ oh wow I had forgotten about that song ', so doing a tour that involves specific albums helps pull people in to come and see it and they ' re re-engaged again .
Lockdown didn ’ t stop you from performing for your fans . You started ‘ The Backstage Lockdown Club ’, which gave your fans the chance to still connect with your music . Have you continued to do that ? I have continued to do it ; I will explain why I had to do it . When I got back from Australia doing that tour , I found myself twiddling my thumbs . I saw loads of artists getting on their laptop ' s and doing similar performances from home , keeping fans engaged and connected and irrespective of how good they were as artists the quality of it wasn ’ t very good . They were just using laptop cameras and their laptop microphone , and I thought there has to be a better way of doing it ! So , being me , I delved into it big time and found the right cameras , the best quality cameras you could use , a little vision mixer where you can cut between camera shots , a tracking system that makes the camera move in front of you , I also had the audio going through various software ' s on the computer to give it the right studio sound . Audio wise and visually it looked like I was making a broadcast from my house instead of doing something from my bedroom and people really appreciated the effort I had gone through to do it . When you ' re out travelling and touring you can ' t lug all that stuff with you , you have enough stuff to take around just to perform . It ' s a very different thing , a lot of the Backstage Lockdown stuff was Q & A ’ s , I could spend an entire evening or just sit for an hour or two answering questions that people want to know the answers to . I do engage all the way through but try to do the full-on performance all singing all dancing is very difficult when you ' re travelling around . No one wants you in a hotel room next to them singing your head off at midnight , it would be really annoying for people !
You are one of music ’ s great collaborators , having worked with everyone from Alice Cooper to Kate Bush and Paul Young and you ’ ve been involved with many projects , but one that seems a little unusual is your time with Thin Lizzy . How did you get involved with them , and what was the experience like ? I was a Thin Lizzy fan from the very early years when they were a three-piece band coming to Glasgow to play the little clubs that they used to play when I met Phillip Lynott wondering around the streets of Glasgow at one of these shows . I was already playing in bands at the time and when I moved to London , I bumped into him again and he remembered me , so we used to hang out . I had then moved to London to join the ‘ Rich Kids ’ and Thin Lizzy had just released their Live and Dangerous album , one of the best live albums ever .
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