Midge Ure is most famous for his time in Ultravox, the British new wave act whose biggest hit was 1981’s “Vienna.” But outside of the group, Ure has quite a star-studded resume that includes stints in Thin Lizzy and Rich Kids, a short-lived band formed with Sex Pistols bass guitarist Glen Matlock.
In fact, the Glaswegian guitarist was himself asked to join the Sex Pistols in 1975, when manager Malcolm McLaren was forming the punk rockers. Ure had just exited a local music store in Glasgow when he found himself in the presence of McLaren and Clash manager Bernie Rhodes.
“They were selling some slightly hot equipment from the back of the car,” he recalls. “They’d driven from London and stopped off at cities all the way up to Glasgow. Bernie Rhodes saw me coming out of the music shop and approached me and asked that I speak to his friend Malcolm McLaren who was around the corner. Malcolm told me about the New York Dolls, about his fashions with Vivienne Westwood, all of which meant nothing.
“And then about 20 minutes into the conversation, he says, ‘I’m putting a band together. Would you join?’ And I said, ‘Well, no, because you haven’t asked me what I do. You don’t know if I’m a guitarist or a drummer or a singer or a musician at all. I just happen to be coming out of a music shop.’”
Ure was sporting short hair at the time, when everyone else was wearing their hair long.
“I must have looked the part rather than sounded the part,” he reasons. “It seemed that was what he was looking for. He was looking for a band that he could dress up in Vivienne’s clothes to sell some bondage trousers. I have to say, he chose the right guys. I would have been the wrong guy.”
Thin Lizzy
However, Ure proved to be the right choice for Thin Lizzy. He was quickly hired for his brief stint with the Irish rockers after Gary Moore had quit the band in the middle of an American trek in 1979 to support their album Black Rose: A Rock Legend.
“It was my first ever time in America, and I didn’t get to see much of it, as I was in a hotel room with Scott Gorham, working out harmony guitar parts,” Ure recalls. “I spent most of the night just rerunning those things because I was petrified of getting it wrong because every song had a harmony guitar part, every tune. And then I had to walk out in front of 30,000 people and hope and pray that I wasn’t going to make any massive blunders. And I probably did. But they were very gracious and very forgiving.”
Ure was working late in the studio when the offer to join Thin Lizzy came via a phone call from the group’s bass-playing frontman, Phil Lynott. Ure and Lynott’s friendship dated back several years to Glasgow, when Lynott was fronting a three-piece Thin Lizzy.
“I’d seen him play a tiny club just after Philip had set up Thin Lizzy after singing with Skid Row with a young 16-year-old Gary Moore,” says Ure. “I absolutely fell in love with Phil’s voice and his songwriting. I had bumped into him in Glasgow when I was playing in a band and he was wandering around the streets of Glasgow about to play at a university that night and I took him back to my mum’s house and she gave him egg and chips and fed him.
“And he remembered this years later when I moved to London. We bumped into each other again coming out of an underground in London and he said, ‘You’re that kid. I know exactly who you are.’ We just hung out together and became friends. Philip was a great guy, but I wouldn’t trust him with my girlfriend or my wife.”
Lynott may have also been thinking of Ure at that moment, as Ure had co-written the Black Rose track “Get Out of Here.”
By the time Ure returned home from the studio, a plane ticket, several cassettes of music and a list of songs he needed to learn were waiting for him, together with a directive that first thing next morning a driver would take him to London’s Heathrow airport so he could board the Concorde and fly to New York City.
“I was supposed to learn all the songs on the plane, which I couldn’t do,” he explains, “then get a connecting flight down to New Orleans, and meet up with the band there.”
Ure also brought along his main electric guitar at the time, a Yamaha SG-2000 that he first bought in 1976. But a few dates into the Thin Lizzy tour, he was told that the guitar needed to go.
“They decided it wasn’t cool enough and so, they swapped it out for a Les Paul Junior,” he says. “It was a really old Les Paul Junior, which might have been similar to the one that Gary was using. And I had two Marshall stacks, which were deafening. I’d never heard anything so loud in my life!”
Kate Bush
In 1982, Kate Bush was assembling a band to accompany her for a live performance at the Prince’s Trust Rock Gala concert. Ure was one of the musicians invited by Bush to join her backing band. During rehearsals for the show, Ure witnessed first-hand how much of a taskmaster the “Running Up That Hill” singer really was.
“She was an absolute perfectionist,” he remembers of Bush. “She would in a wonderfully kind of way, basically tell you, you weren’t doing a very good job, ‘Let’s run that again, let’s just make sure we get that part in.’ In the band was also Phil Collins on drums, Pete Townshend on guitar and Mick Karn from Japan and she didn’t hold back with those guys either. She would say, ‘No, no, it’s not quite right, let’s just do that one more time.’ She knew what she wanted.”
Robert Fripp
When Ure invited King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp to contribute his six-string atmospherics to several tracks on Ure’s 1996 solo album Breathe, it came with a caveat.
“When I asked him if he would do some of his Frippertronics and soundscapes and stuff on one of my albums, he was more than happy to do it, but asked, ‘Can I bring my Japanese students with me?’” explains Ure. “I said, ‘Yeah.’ So, he brought these 40 Japanese students along, who all had cameras, and were taking photographs of everything that Robert said and did.
“And so, Robert sat in the big room with me, while they [students] were in the control room. And he said, ‘This is Midge, this is his record. Midge does this, Midge does that.’ And they’re all taking photographs.
“And then he says, ‘I’m going to play this over a B minor, and this is,’ you know, whatever. And then he starts layering up these wonderful Frippertronics with his electronics. And it was amazing to watch him doing it in real time while he was teaching these 40 Japanese guitar students. It was quite incredible.”
Ure continued to run into Fripp, usually backstage at various ’80s festivals, where Fripp’s wife, Toyah Willcox, and Ure have been regulars on the retro festival circuit. “Robert is such a placid, lovely guy,” he says. “He is there walking around with his guitar strapped around his neck, doing scales — just playing scales, talking to you, chatting away. He still practices six hours a day! I’ve never practiced in my life. That’s why I’m not as good as him.”
