It has been twelve years since the release of Midge Ure’s last album of original material. Since the 1970s, he has been a prominent, innovative force whose wild musical ambition has known no bounds. He was the frontman of new wave band Ultravox, the guitarist and synthesiser player of Visage, and served as the bassist of hard rock legends Thin Lizzy.
Ure is entitled to take as long a break as he wants. However, he is just as aggravated with himself, as his fanbase might be. “No! You should be rude and ask why it took so long, because I ask myself that as well”. I got to speak to Ure about how moments in his artistic career are still felt today, and with a new album and tour on its way in May and June 2026, why he still feels more is yet to come.
Midge Ure
Creating The New Album
“There is a whole slew of factors. There is no record label banging on your door insisting this has to be ready for the summer, like they used to. There’s no clock counting down to the day you get kicked out of the studio, so you don’t have that deadline looming over you anymore.”
His upcoming double album A Man Of Two Worlds, and its accompanying tour, represents staring a lot of creative and practical hardships in the face to create a huge project, and it all began with the COVID-19 lockdown.
“There’s the fact that I do this 99% of this alone. The only way I can gauge if it’s good or not is to walk away from it and do something else. During lockdown, when I was writing songs, there was nothing to walk away to! I couldn’t just go out on tour and play a few dates to clear my head, and then go back and listen to it.”
The new album has two distinct halves – one album of songs, and one album of instrumentals. Experimenting with instrumentals was key in the process of the concept of A Man Of Two Worlds coming to fruition.
“I ended up with an album that I thought was two albums until I played it to a friend, and he said “no, these are sister and brother. These two things belong together. They were created in the same environment, at the same time, have the same essence, the same atmosphere, the same melodic structure – they belong together”. And that excited me – the idea of putting out a double album”.
Ultravox and instrumental music throughout Ure’s career
While this is the first instrumental album of Ure’s career, he has dabbled with individual instrumental tracks on most of his albums. He seems almost fascinated by the additional challenges, and his voice noticeably escalates as he lists all of their components.
“Instrumental music is very different from writing a backing track and forgetting to write the lyrics. It’s a piece of music that has to stand up on its own right, and tell its own little story, which can mean something different for everyone. But do it without the aid of lyrics, without the big chorus, or without a big build-up to the chorus, or the mid-section, or the intimate verse”.
He remains remorseless for opening even Ultravox’s biggest album, 1980’s Vienna, with a 7-minute instrumental. Even the length of the synth-pop, smash hit, title track was too long for many radio playlists (an epic 4:37). “The Americans weren’t happy about it! They freaked when we played them the album. They said we had to change the running order, because we had to start with the radio-friendly hits. And we said no! It starts like that because that’s how we want it to start. That’s a lovely way to start it, I think. But, I’ve always been a bit awkward”.
Ultravox lost their argument, and the running order was changed on US pressings. Ure reflects upon what he thinks captured so many listeners’ imaginations, even though record execs might not have seen Vienna as an accessible record.
“The thing that made it work was that none of it was sequenced, and all of it was played live – it was human. There are a lot of electronics in it, but there are a lot of traditional rock instruments in there as well. A lot of guitar throughout it. A lot of the music that came out straight after that, using new technology, was all sequenced and quantised, and the human element was really taken out of it. All very robotic, where a lot of the old – stuff really wasn’t.”
Creating a new live experience
The A Man Of Two Worlds tour will be another departure from the norm. The concept of the tour had been brewing for a while, before the decision was made to put a new album out in 2026. Ure decided that it would be unfair to unleash a wave of unfamiliar material on an audience in one go. He explains that those older instrumental tracks will be integral to how the performance unfolds.
“This time around, I wanted to add more of the older instrumental stuff. So I figured out how to incorporate them in amongst all this other stuff. The way that I’m thinking of doing it is to kind of sequence maybe half of the show where it’s non-stop, and it takes people on a journey. Maybe starting with an instrumental piece, which morphs straight into an album track, which morphs straight into a single of some description, which morphs straight into something else, and then goes back into another instrumental piece.”
Midge Ure
Metal Gear Solid and finding a new audience today
Ure is well aware that with such a lengthy career and so many projects, that he is going to have a variety of fans at his concerts (“50% of the audience who come and see you, probably don’t know more than 5% of what you’ve done, because they are there with their other halves!”), but not even he had anticipated that he would “touch base with a youth gaming audience, that [he] didn’t even know existed”.
In 2015, Ultravox’s Dancing With Tears In My Eyes, and a solo cover of David Bowie’s The Man Who Sold The World, both recorded during the 1980s, featured in the popular video game Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. Over the following years, they would both become the most streamed songs of his entire catalogue. So, how does it feel to become a part of a new entertainment medium at this stage?
“It’s fantastic. When Ultravox got back together again (in 2013), Hideo Kojima who was the creator and director of Metal Gear Solid, who I didn’t know, was a massive Ultravox fan, and he turned up to see Ultravox in London. Through his interpreter, he said “I want to use your version of The Man Who Sold The World”, and I said okay, thinking that it would never happen. But of course, it did! Hideo Kojima and I have become friends since that point. So it was quite something.”
It was a similar resurgence to that of Kate Bush classic Running Up That Hill, after the song was used in the Stranger Things soundtrack. Speaking of whom, Ure was also lucky enough to collaborate with the enigmatic singer when she appeared on his 1988 track Sister And Brother.
“It was wonderful. I’m a huge Kate fan. I’m just annoyed that I wasn’t in the studio when she sang it. I gave her the multi-track tape and sent it across to her studio, not expecting to hear anything for weeks. She was in the middle of her own album. Then she called up a few days later, and said “do you want to come over and hear what I’ve done?”. I expected just a single Kate vocal, and of course there was a Kate choir on the end! I just stood at the back of the room with a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye. It’s Kate Bush singing my song, this is just ludicrous.”
Live Aid lives on (In the West End)
Ure is no stranger to collaboration, and of course, philanthropy, having co-wrote and produced the 1984 charity single Do They Know It’s Christmas, performed by the supergroup Band Aid, organised with Bob Geldof. He also organised the legendary Live Aid and Live 8 charity concerts with Geldof. In 2024, musical Just For One Day opened at The Old Vic in London, telling the story of the original Live Aid. However, as Ure explains, that this almost wasn’t the case.
“When they kept coming to us, asking if we could do a musical, we (the Band Aid Trust) kept saying no, because it’s such a miserable story to tell. The whole point of Band Aid and Live Aid was all about famine. They managed to tell the story incredibly well, so it was very balanced, and it wasn’t just fluff and nonsense. They asked the awkward, cynical and important questions that had been asked over the years about why it had to happen. The whole thing was funny, and poignant, and incredibly touching at times.”.
Over forty years since the original single and concert, their importance is still felt, and the Band Aid Trust continues to raise money. The musical’s first run rose over a million pounds for the trust, and it will soon tour around the UK.
“We tend to think that it’s such a weird thing to write a musical about, but we forget that it was a massive social moment. A historic social moment when the masses stood up and said “this isn’t right – we need to do something about this”, and it was at a time when music was still powerful enough to carry that.”
Whether or not he feels that music has that power, he is not remotely deterred from continuing to release exciting new material, and taking it on the road. It should have that power once again.
Midge Ure
New album A Man Of Two Worlds will be released, and Ure’s UK tour will begin on 8th May 2026.
Interview with Midge Ure by Nick Pollard, March 2026.
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