23 Aug '07 - 346 W - + 8 - 11 Midge Ure - From Glasgow To Vienna

Midge Ure is one of the guiding figures of the whole New Romantic movement. Singing with Ultravox, he took that band out of the ‘cult’ backwaters and into the Top Ten mainstream. He was also a founding member of Visage.

But before any of that he had been in a short-lived 1970s ‘boy band’ named Slik. I interviewed Midge in the early ‘80s for a feature called “Things I wish I’d known at 15”. Here’s a bit of that interview...

Even when I was seventeen or eighteen I still used to believe it when people would say ‘Wow, what a guitar player! What a star!’ So when I joined Slik and we had a successful record I thought: ‘Hey, they are right, I am a star!’ and so I started behaving the way I thought a star should behave - in other words, like a prat.

Then, six months later, when all that was whipped from under my feet, I couldn’t take it. Some musicians go to pieces when they no longer get all that adulation or have people asking them to do interviews. Luckily, I did manage to pull myself together, but it was quite a shock to my ego.

My business associates in the early years were as naive as I was. We went through some really dodgy patches and ended up owing fortunes to our management. Every time we flew from Glasgow to London to do TV or a photo-session they’d pay for it. When Slik ended we owed £100,000 to these people. That’s a hell of a lot to owe someone when you’re twenty

I’d like to have arrived at the sort of success that I have with Ultravox when I was about eighteen. Then the last ten years would have been really fun. But then, who knows, if that had happened, maybe I would have burnt myself out by the time I got to twenty-two? So perhaps things turned out for the best after all...