Midge Ure doesn’t look tired—he looks like a man who’s learned to outwit fatigue. Maybe it’s the Scottish stoicism, or maybe it’s just the adrenaline of a veteran pop architect who still gets to spend his nights rewriting the rules of nostalgia. He’s out with Howard Jones right now, just two men and a forest of keyboards making what he calls “a fearless noise.” “It’s only the two of us on stage,” he says. “We make a lot of noise. I’m playing guitar and keys, and Howard’s loaned me his young keyboard player. We make a fearless noise.” He says it twice, like he still can’t quite believe it works.
It does. The tour’s five shows deep when we talk, and each one, he says, “gets better.” Which is saying something, considering that his biggest worry was whether two people could replicate the sweep of Ultravox’s cold romantic grandeur. “I’ve kept the setlist Ultravox, Visage, and solo heavy,” he grins. “Kept it as difficult for Howard as possible. I want him to have a bar to hit.” You can hear the mischief in his voice.
The last time Ure and Jones toured America together was 1989, a strange year when synthpop’s glitter was giving way to grunge’s plaid and nobody knew where men in tailored jackets with eyeliner fit in anymore. “That was the first time I’d ever done the sheds—outdoor arenas,” he says. “Howard was commercially successful here. Ultravox were always the alternative, underground band. We never hit those heady heights.” Back then, Ure had his own bus, his own band, and very little downtime with Jones. Now they share a bus, a crew, and a rolling sense of déjà vu. “This is kind of like a vacation,” he says. “This isn’t what I call work.”
He remembers the soundchecks from those days with mock trauma. “We had to soundcheck for nearly three times longer than we would play,” he laughs. “Everything was live. Nothing pre-recorded. It was five-hour soundchecks. You can’t open for someone when you’re doing that.” In other words, Ultravox’s ambition outstripped the technology. “In 1989, that was as close as I got to moving up the live ladder in America,” he says, half-shrugging, half-smirking.
Still, the timing was right. “Dear God,” his solo single that year, snuck onto American radio and gave him a brush with chart legitimacy. “The label heads flew down to the Caribbean while I was finishing it,” he remembers. “They said, ‘Great track, but it’ll never get played on American radio.’ I said, ‘Why?’ They said, ‘It’s got God in the title.’ I said, ‘God Only Knows—Beach Boys—did pretty well with that.’” He lets out a laugh. “Turns out, I was right. It resonated. It was my dabbling with a hit. The closest I got.”
He’s told this story enough times to know where the irony lands, especially when I point out that XTC had a hit with their own “Dear God” around the same time, and Kate Bush had her “Deal with God” smuggled into “Running Up That Hill.” “Yeah,” he smiles, “I think my label guy’s probably no longer a record person.”
Kate Bush, of course, is a recurring name in Ure’s orbit—she sang on his track “Sister and Brother,” the kind of art-pop duet that should’ve been a platinum Bond theme. “To have Kate Bush agree to perform on one of your songs—it’s the ultimate pat on the back,” he says. He wasn’t there when she recorded it—she worked alone, in her own studio—but when he went to hear it, he expected “just Kate’s voice, not this multi-tracked Kate choir.” He grins again. “She’d obviously spent a huge amount of time on it.” Then, right on cue, the man himself, Howard Jones, strolls into the frame mid-interview. “Look,” Ure says, turning his camera. “We’ve got Howard here!” Jones laughs, waves, and disappears again, leaving Ure chuckling. “See? It’s like a traveling circus. Everyone’s clothes are in the lounge.”
The mood shifts when I mention “Answers to Nothing,” a song that’s been haunting him—and a lot of listeners—since 1988. “Any writer writes about what affects them,” he says. “It’s just sad that some of the subject matter I’m writing about now is the same I wrote about forty years ago. We get older but we don’t seem to learn much.” He pauses, clearly thinking of the news that morning. “We’re still beating people up because of their religion or color or language. So yeah, it’s a double-edged sword. It’s great that the songs are still relevant. It’s sad that the songs are still relevant.”
The funny thing about Midge Ure is that he’s almost allergic to nostalgia, yet his entire setlist is a masterclass in it. 2023 marked the 40th anniversary of Ultravox’s Quartet, and another milestone for The Anvil with Visage, but he insists he doesn’t track anniversaries. “You’re more aware of them than I am,” he laughs. “I’m dreadful with time scales. Everything to me happened three or five years ago.” Still, he admits he’s revived “The Man Who Sold the World” for the first time ever live. “I dug it out because it just felt relevant,” he says. He nods toward his tourmate’s invisible presence. “Howard approved. So that’s my seal of approval.”
Ure’s humor turns sharp when I refer to him and Jones as “human jukeboxes.” “We’re not just the jukeboxes,” he fires back. “We built the jukeboxes. We manufactured them.”
But it’s not all vintage circuitry. Ure’s recent collaboration “Das Beat” with Wolfgang Flür—the Kraftwerk percussionist who built the future’s metronome—scratched a very specific electronic itch. “It was like a demigod coming to see me,” he says of meeting Flür in Düsseldorf. “He took me aside and said, ‘I’m doing an album, working with Peter Hook… would you write something?’” Within days, Ure had the phrase Das Beat spinning in his head—a sly nod to Das Boot and the universal rhythm that unites us all. “He didn’t understand at first,” Ure says. “I said, ‘Of course you don’t understand—you’re the one we all revere. You are the beat.’”
They each released their own versions, a sonic mirror of the same song. “It’s great that music can be that malleable,” he says. “And it’s fun to listen to. Pure electronic pop. I was like a school kid indulging myself—pretending I was in Kraftwerk.” He grins, a little proud, a little self-mocking. “It’s an earworm. The Germans call it that for a reason.”
If that were all, it’d be enough—a comfortable victory lap for one of synthpop’s original architects. But he’s still tinkering. “There’s a solo album that’s been on the go for the last three or four years,” he says. “Very slow.” He’s also plotting a follow-up to his orchestral record Orchestrated, though he admits that one “takes a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of love.” In the meantime, he’s finished something different entirely: an instrumental album, written during lockdown. “It’s kind of like wearing a different hat,” he says. “Not like writing songs. More like writing film soundtrack music.”
So what does it sound like? “It sounds like me,” he says, without hesitation. “That’s all I can sound like. I’ve never jumped on the bandwagon—never got the cool DJ remix. Because in my mind, the artist knows what it should sound like more than anyone else. The more people you bring in, the more your ideas get watered down.” It’s a philosophy that sums him up perfectly: self-reliant, precise, allergic to bullshit. “Sometimes that can be a good thing,” he adds, “but for me, it doesn’t work. I’m happy following my own little path.”
And with that, Midge Ure heads back to the tour bus where Howard Jones is probably still hunting for a clean shirt. The man who built the jukebox isn’t done playing.
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