Ure A Star

Midge Ure has enjoyed a multitude of guises since he first took up the pop music game in the mid-seventies.

He was a member of the original boy band, Slik who took their teenybopper anthem ‘Forever And Ever’ to the number one spot in 1976. He dabbled with punk/new wave in the Rich Kids before eventually finding fame with new romantics Ultravox, who scored in 1981 with their massive worldwide hit ‘Vienna’. Along the way he was involved with Visage and even spent a short spell as a guitarist in Thin Lizzy. A successful solo career followed in the 1980’s while he also produced other artists and directed music videos for the likes of Bananarama.
“It makes me look like some sort of a dreadful musical tart,” he laughs. “By rights I should have never left Glasgow and stuck to the job I had as an apprentice engineer after I left school.”
Ure’s story is told in his compelling biography, If I Was, which charts his life from early days growing up in a Glasgow tenement to finding fame as a pop star. Of all of his musical adventures his time with Thin Lizzy appears to be the most bizarre. Ure had become friends with Lynott in the late ’70s and had collaborated on a song on Lizzy’s Black Rose album. The call to join the band came in the middle of an American tour when the then Lizzy guitarist Gary Moore had walked out following a disagreement with Philo.
“It came at the right time for me,” Ure reflects. “I was between projects and needed something. It was the first time I’d really seen that kind of rock star stuff – the limos and all that. But there was no question of me ever joining Lizzy. I was a hired gun for about six months. Phil could have chosen any whiz-kid guitarist he wanted but he had his finger on the pulse and wanted to bring in a new element. He wanted me because I didn’t look like the classic heavy rock guitarist.”
Ure got to know the late Irish rock superstar extremely well and went on to work with him after Lizzy’s break up collaborating on tracks like ‘Yellow Pearl’, which became the Top Of The Pops theme.
“He was a very quietly spoken guy who kept to himself, which seems strange when we think of the extrovert we all knew and loved. But I don’t think he was comfortable with fame. He would never eat in public. I only ever saw him in a restaurant once and that was in Tokyo where no-one knew him. He just wanted to hang out at home.”
Of all his successes Ure is probably best known for his involvement in the Band Aid song ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ which he co-wrote with Bob Geldof and produced. Ure says in the book that the song stands apart from the rest of his career.
“It’s a song that has nothing to do with music,” he writes. “It was all about generating money. That was the mantra. The song was secondary, almost irrelevant.”
Does he still feel that way about the biggest selling single of all time.
“It did its job as a piece of music and it wasn’t that bad but out of the entire rock and pop canon, it’s not that great is it? We’re re-recording it for release to raise funds for the Sudan. It’ll be a kind of Q magazine version of the song with people like Coldplay, Robbie Williams and Keane.”

Midge Ure’s If I Was autobiography is published by Virgin Books.