Ultravox’s Lament anniversary interview

When Ultravox’s Lament received a deluxe 40th anniversary reissue, surviving members Midge Ure, Billy Currie and Warren Cann looked back on the album that called time on their imperial phase…

Forget nuclear winters: in 1984, fear of atomic annihilation was officially the soundtrack to summer, with everyone from Queen (Hammer To Fall) to Nik Kershaw (I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me) issuing stark warnings about mushroom clouds and “power gluttons” with their fingers on the button.

But the Cold War was never hotter than on 10 June that year, when Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Two Tribes landed with a seismic blast at No.1, to sit alongside fellow nuclear earworm Dancing With Tears In My Eyes by Ultravox, then enjoying its fourth week in the Top 10.

“It was definitely a hot subject at the time,” reflects Ultravox’s frontman, Midge Ure, 40 years on. “Though I’ve never actually made the Frankie connection before. The great thing about songs is that people can sing along, completely oblivious to what it’s actually about. It wasn’t until the video for Dancing was on Top Of The Pops that we got a lot of irate mothers going, ‘How dare you show this on television!?’”

Dancing With Tears In My Eyes

Directed by Midge and Ultravox’s late bassist Chris Cross, the memorable promo showed the singer racing to get home to his wife as Britain erupted into full-on nuclear panic (beating the BBC’s infamous Threads film to the punch by several months). The song itself had been inspired by Nevil Shute’s apocalyptic novel On The Beach, about a group of people waiting for deadly nuclear radiation to reach their shores: an unlikely subject for a pop banger, perhaps, but one that delivered Ultravox their biggest chart smash since Vienna three years earlier.

“I knew instantly that it was going to be a hit,” recalls Billy Currie, the band’s multi-instrumentalist keyboard wizard, who had “stumbled” across the song’s anthemic chorus while he was messing around on his baby grand piano at home. “I brought it in and, straight away, it got the whole band going.”

Issued in May as the second single from their seventh album Lament, the song peaked at No.3 in the UK (while Vienna had famously been kept off the top spot by Joe Dolce’s Shaddap You Face, this time Ultravox were denied by Wham!’s Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go and Deniece Williams’ Let’s Hear It For The Boy), and made the Top 10 across Europe.

Breaking New Ground

Having departed from long-standing producer, krautrock and kosmische pioneer Conny Plank, to work with George Martin on their previous album Quartet, Lament found Ultravox going it alone for the first time.

“From our earliest days, we were hands-on,” explains drummer Warren Cann. “We wanted to learn, and learn from the best. With Quartet, we had thought: this is the guy who made Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – we are going to learn so much from him. We said, ‘George, we’re not shrinking violets: if you want to bring in half a dozen washing machines and fill them with rocks, we’re up for it’. But I think it was maybe a little too far along in George’s career. He’d already been there and done that.

“By the time of Lament, we thought it would be nice to have just one more person to break some new ground with. But no one was jumping at the chance, so we decided: OK, we’ll do it ourselves. To be fair, we were always leaning towards that. Our attitude was: no one’s going to know us better than us.”

“Every band needs a producer – or a referee – to stop it descending into chaos,” reflects Ure. “But I think we felt we’d grown up sufficiently to be able to do it ourselves. Plus, I’d just built a studio at the bottom of my garden in Chiswick, and Billy had started putting a studio together. So, it was like all the stars had aligned.”

Rival Schools

Matured they may have, but there was a “funny vibe” among the band, says Currie, when they convened for the Lament writing sessions in the summer of 1983. “There was a bit of paranoia, and a bit of finger-pointing,” he recalls. “We had been impressed with what some of the competition were doing – people like Talk Talk and Depeche Mode – and there was a worry that maybe we were being left behind a bit.”

New Order were another emerging rival, whose influence can clearly be heard in the Moroder beats and twanging bass of Lament’s Blue Monday-riffing opener, White China. “We were quite schizophrenic, so we could do that: just stick a drum machine on to get that dance vibe,” recalls Billy. “And then the next track might be a straight rock song.”

Midge concedes there was an element of trying to “recover the magic” in those sessions. “We were trying to simplify and go back to basics a bit,” he explains. “We’d got so bogged down with technology that, when we went into rehearsals, it was like trying to build a space rocket. It seemed we’d lost the idea of what happens in the moment.”

“Bands have first album syndrome and second album syndromes… it seemed like we had lots of these syndromes,” laughs Cann. Currie, for his part, admits he felt “detached” from parts of the album’s creation. “I tend to lead from the front on songs, which is what I did on the title track, and Dancing With Tears In My Eyes. But on some of the other songs, I was kind of slightly wrong-footed, so I kept in the background.”

Rock Star Lifestyle

Away from the studio, Midge and Chris decamped to the Isles of Lewis and Harris for writing sessions, which ended up impacting both the lyrical and musical themes of the record. “There’s definitely a Scottish thing there,” says Ure. “There’s some lilting keyboards, and a lot of the melodies are very Celtic in their form – they are very melodic and haunting. I think there’s an element of me realising all those years of being taught traditional Scottish music at school, which I thought I’d completely ignored, had actually sunk in.”

Lyrically, an element of self-pity had begun to creep in, admits Midge, with lead single One Small Day and the stately remorse of the title track suggesting the pop star life might be taking its toll.

“It was probably before I realised I had a bit of a drink problem, and the isolation that comes with that,” he reflects. In retrospect, fame and success were probably also beginning to turn him into “a bit of a dick”, Ure continues. “Is it success or is it money?

It’s probably a heady combination of both. I was a bit of a tyrant around that time. And you do start to think, ‘Hold on a minute, what am I doing? I’ve got a garage with half a dozen classic cars that don’t run, so I’m having to drive around in aVW Golf.’ It’s just lunacy. It’s everything you’ve ever read about rock stars.”

He wasn’t alone, though. “I could be a bit of an arsehole at times,” confesses Billy. “Around the time Dancing With Tears In My Eyes was high in the charts, I was a complete bloody lunatic. I wrote off a Porsche 928 S. I mean, how rock star is that?”

None More Black

Released on 6 April 1984, Lament’s initial pressing boasted a striking (and ruinously expensive) Peter Saville sleeve with a chequerboard of gloss and matt black squares. Originally, the band hadn’t wanted their name to feature at all (Chrysalis, unsurprisingly, had other ideas), hoping the all-black cover would stand out as their own photo-negative version of The Beatles’ ‘White Album’.

This was years before Metallica had the same idea – but the cover did end up bearing an unfortunate similarity to another iconic 1984 record, Spinal Tap’s “none more black” Smell The Glove. “I didn’t watch This Is Spinal Tap until a couple of years later and thought ‘Shit – it’s us!’” laughs Ure.

With compact discs still being a shiny new novelty back in 1984, the CD version of Lament featured an exclusive tracklisting, with the songs interspersed by extended remixes. “Normally, 12″ dance mixes would only be heard by a handful of people,” explains Midge. “Then this new format comes out and we just thought: ‘Why not put them all on the CD?’”

Those mixes are among the whopping 72 tracks (45 of them previously unreleased) on the new Lament 40th anniversary edition – the latest of Chrysalis/Blue Raincoat’s lovingly curated series of deluxe reissues.

40th Anniversary Edition

So, has the album stood the test of time? “I listened to it about a month ago, and it has its moments,” offers Warren, cautiously. “I’m not going to name particular tracks, but there are four songs where I think we did well. One or two are okay, and one or two were greatly disappointing. But we tried. We weren’t shy when it came to experimenting – and when you experiment, you’re not always successful.”

“It never really felt like an album to me,” admits Currie. “It felt like we were making a bunch of songs. But actually, it ended up being quite strong.”

Ure finds nothing about the record to… well, lament. “I’m very proud of it,” he says. “Along with Rage In Eden, it’s probably my favourite album we did. It was an emotional peak, musically, and things were definitely on a decline after that. The cracks would begin to show quite quickly.”

Indeed, within months of Lament’s release, Midge had written and recorded Do They Know It’s Christmas? with Bob Geldof, and the following year would see him distracted from the day job by both Live Aid and his debut solo album, with its Vienna-trumping chart-topper, If I Was.

Imperial Phase

Though Lament performed solidly – it was certified gold in the UK and made the Top 10 in several other countries – North America remained stubbornly resistant to Ultravox’s charms (“Chrysalis America were absolute idiots,” is Cann’s blunt assessment), and the mood in the camp was uncertain. “It did feel a bit like we’d reached the end of the cycle,” reflects Billy. “I’m not an idiot, I could see they were setting up a solo deal for Midge.”

No one, though, felt the end of Ultravox’s imperial phase more sharply than Warren, who was fired ahead of the band’s next album, U-Vox. “I was called into the office one day, and given the news by Chris Morrison, our manager,” he recalls. “The band chickened out – they made him drop the hammer on me. I was gobsmacked and can’t explain how devastated I was.”

“I don’t know what we were thinking,” admits Midge, shaking his head. “Why would you think you could make a table better by cutting off one of the legs? It’s Lord Of The Flies stuff – you start attacking each other.”

Cann recalls a sudden lightning bolt premonition at Live Aid. “I was standing on the stage, with McCartney on the piano playing Let It Be, and David Bowie standing close enough to put my hand on his shoulder. And it just popped into my head: ‘What if this was the last time I did a show with Ultravox?’” And so it proved to be – at least until the band’s 2012 reunion. Warren is candid about the continued emotional fallout from his dismissal. “My friendships in the band didn’t really survive,” he says. “When we did the reunion, we managed to rekindle enough so that it wasn’t pistols at dawn. But there were a lot of topics that didn’t get talked about, in order to get through that.”

End Of An Era

As for the future, the sudden death of Chris Cross in March this year draws a definitive line under Ultravox, says Midge. “It was a massive shock, and it puts an end to the speculation the band might do something again. Without Chris, I don’t think that’s ever going to happen.

“No one knew it was coming, he went for a nap, and never woke up. He was my sidekick – we were the Butch and Sundance of Ultravox. We used to write lyrics together, we went on holiday together. We were really close.”

“It was such a bolt out of the blue,” says Warren. “Being in a band, especially one that’s been through a lot of ups and downs together, it’s like a marriage. In some ways, it’s closer than a marriage. And Chris was always the one on the most even keel.”

“I can’t remember ever having an argument with Chris,” says Midge. “I can’t say that about everyone. But Chris was Chris. He was the glue that held us together.”

Losing one of the gang inevitably stirs up emotional silt. Has Chris’ death prompted the others to reflect on questions of mortality, the passage of time, and all the friendships and fallings out that come with being in a successful rock’n’roll band?

“You can’t not think of those things,” says Ure. “A lot of the time, you were swimming upstream, and going against the grain, but there was a real camaraderie to it, and when an element of that camaraderie disappears forever, it is devastating. But the good memories outweigh the bad ones, completely. It was a glorious time to be in a band, and Ultravox was a glorious band to be part of.”

Ultravox’s Lament 40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition is out now via Chrysalis. To order click here

Want more? We take a look through the albums of Ultravox