Ultravox E-Book

Brian J Robb

• Herausgeber: Sonicbond Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: On Track
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 258

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Ultravox made an indelible mark on the popular music of the 1980s despite never reaching the UK number one at any point: famously, 'Vienna' stalled at number two, while their only other top five single was the zeitgeist-capturing 'Dancing With Tears in My Eyes', reaching number three in May 1984. Between 1981's 'Vienna' and 1984's 'Love's Great Adventure', Ultravox scored 17 UK Top 40 hit singles and seven top ten album releases.
Fronted first by John Foxx, then Midge Ure, the band went from being an acclaimed but hitless art rock outfit to a Blitz club-era chart-storming quartet. They also proved to be a formidable live band, mixing in-vogue electronic synthesisers with drums and guitar and Billy Currie's trademark classical violin. The band became one of the most successful acts of the era, capped by their 1985 appearance at the Live Aid concert. They also made their mark with arty, distinctive, and influential music videos.
Having split following 1986's controversial U-Vox album, the 1980s Ultravox line-up regrouped in 2009, celebrating the 30th anniversary of 'Vienna' with a series of UK, US, and European tours. That led to a belated new album, 2012's Brilliant. Every album, every song - this is Ultravox.

Brian J. Robb is the New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling biographer of Leonardo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp, and Brad Pitt. He has also written books on silent cinema, the films of Philip K. Dick, Wes Craven, Laurel and Hardy, the Star Wars movies, Superheroes, Gangsters, and Walt Disney, as well as science fiction television series Doctor Who and Star Trek, and Depeche Mode for Sonicbond Publishing. His illustrated books include an Illustrated History of Steampunk and Middle-earth Envisioned, a guide to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (Winner, Best Book, Tolkien Society Awards). He is a Founding Editor of the Sci-Fi Bulletin website and lives near Edinburgh, UK.

Leseprobe

Ultravox

Every album, Every Song

On Track

Brian J Robb

Sonicbond Publishing Limited www.sonicbondpublishing.co.uk Email: [email protected]

First Published in the United Kingdom 2024 First Published in the United States 2024

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:

A Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright Brian J. Robb 2024

ISBN 978-1-78952-330-0

The right of Brian J. Robb to be identified

as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Sonicbond Publishing Limited

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Contents

Special Thanks

Introduction

1. Ultravox! (1977)

2. Ha!-Ha!-Ha! (1977)

3. Systems Of Romance (1978)

4. Vienna (1980)

5. Rage In Eden (1981)

6. Quartet (1982)

7. Lament (1984)

8. U-Vox (1986)

9. Revelation (1993)

10. Ingenuity (1994)

11. Brilliant (2012)

Bibliography

Special Thanks

Special thanks to Rob Kirby of the re:VOX fanzine and Stu Entwistle of Ultravox Unofficial on Facebook (and across social media) for their much-appreciated editorial feedback.

Any errors or omissions remaining are purely those of the author, as are all opinions expressed.

Introduction

If there’s one track most music fans know by Ultravox, it’s their popular 1981 hit single ‘Vienna’, and the fact that this iconic track was kept from the top spot in the UK thanks to an irritating novelty song by Joe Dolce titled ‘Shaddap You Face’! With four weeks stuck at number two, ‘Vienna’ nonetheless became the sixth best-selling single of that year. Losing the top spot was an egregious injustice in British musical history, one the often- too-serious band never lived down. However, it may have also done them a favour, as Ultravox made an indelible mark on 1980s pop music despite never reaching number one – their only other top-five single was the zeitgeist- capturing ‘Dancing With Tears In My Eyes’, which reached three in May 1984. Between 1981’s ‘Vienna’ and 1984’s ‘Love’s Great Adventure’, Ultravox scored 12 top-30 hits (17 reached the top 40) and seven top-ten albums.

Though their final album (to date) was 2012’s Brilliant, Ultravox have existed in one form or another for the better part of five decades. With their 1980s frontman Midge Ure still enjoying a hugely successful solo career (he’s the hardest-working man in showbiz, seemingly always touring, either solo or with a band), the band’s DNA continues to prosper.

Founded by their original vocalist John Foxx (born Dennis Leigh in 1948) in April 1974, the band – then named Tiger Lily – arrived during the punk years (a musical style some of their early songs toyed with, notably ‘ROckWrok’, ‘Fear In The Western World’ and ‘Young Savage’). They were more interested in the post-punk new wave that swept through music after 1976. Their art-rock poise saw them signed to Island Records, the band now operating under the name Ultravox! (complete with exclamation mark), issuing the trio of late-1970s albums Ultravox!, Ha!-Ha!-Ha! and Systems Of Romance. These albums were diverse, exploring the clash between Foxx’s cold machine-like songs and keyboard player Billy Currie’s classical training and instrumentation. Despite their best efforts and significant support from their live show audiences, early Ultravox! albums and singles failed to reach any UK charts.

Their music evolved with the standard guitar-and-drums approach, supplemented first by Currie’s distinctive electric violin, an early Roland Rhythm 77 drum machine and a saxophone on the prototype synth-pop of ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’, the final track on Ha!-Ha!-Ha!. Despite their innovations, the band were largely met with indifference by the music press, as Sounds (19 August 1978) noted: ‘Ultravox! exist in a media limbo. Although they constantly attract big audiences, the general media view seems to be that they are, quite frankly, pretentious’.

The first of several reinventions came in 1978 when they not only dropped that tricky exclamation mark but replaced guitarist Stevie Shears with Robin Simon. Systems Of Romance – the third and final album from this initial version of Ultravox – developed their sound further, thanks to a collaboration with German producer Conny Plank, who’d worked with krautrock outfits like Neu! (who the early Ultravox! had lifted their exclamation mark from) and Kraftwerk. The evolving sound saw a greater use of synthesizers combined with traditional rock instruments and Currie’s classical approach. Several of the Systems Of Romance tracks – including ‘Slow Motion’, ‘Quiet Men’ and ‘Dislocation’ – pointed to the band’s 1980s evolution. Despite the evident innovation at play, Systems Of Romance had no commercial impact (even with positive critical coverage in the often-sniffy music press), and Island decided to cut their losses, finally dropping the band. This saw an increasingly frustrated John Foxx embark on what became a successful solo career, with his first album Metamatic in 1980.

In the wake of the seeming dissolution of Ultravox, Billy Currie took up an offer to tour and record with synth-pop pioneer Gary Numan (an avowed Ultravox fan) in 1979, Canadian drummer Warren Cann went to work with New Zealander Zaine Griff, and bass guitarist Chris Cross played shows with James Honeyman-Scott (of The Pretenders) and Barrie Masters (from Eddie and the Hot Rods). Guitarist Robin Simon had remained in the US at the end of Ultravox’s early-1979 tour. It seemed the band had come to a premature end.

Currie found himself involved with a new project – the studio-only band Visage included among its members the 26-year-old Midge Ure. Ure was an experienced musician who’d already enjoyed a degree of chart success and fame in the 1970s with proto-boy band Slik and also played with the Rich Kids (with Visage drummer Rusty Egan) and Thin Lizzy as a guitarist and later keyboard player. Egan encouraged Currie to recruit Ure to front a new iteration of Ultravox. Ure recalled in Dylan Jones’ history of the New Romantics Sweet Dreams (2020): ‘Towards the end of 1979, I was asked to join Ultravox. There was no plan; I kind of fell into it. When I joined Ultravox, I wanted to be part of a rock band. I wanted it to be something experimental; I wanted it to be art rock … I was allowed to kind of experiment and play and be led by these three other guys who had much more experience in that world than I had’. While Currie and Cann had reservations about bringing in an experienced pop musician (Ure wrote songs, sang, and played guitar and keyboards), bassist Chris Cross was all in favour of the development – as he told Electronic Sound #69 in 2020: ‘I distinctly remember not being flavour of the month, because I was arguing that it sounded like a good idea. Where Midge was coming from was completely different. It was like with the original version of Ultravox, only this was even more different. I knew we were perfectly capable of doing the experimental stuff, but I thought the idea of having someone more tune- based was interesting. I didn’t know if it would work or not, but it all fell into place after that’.

Ure had no particular mission in mind to save Ultravox. He simply saw becoming a member of a band – whose earlier work he’d admired – as a positive next step for him. Ure admitted to Electronic Sound:

The three guys I was joining knew a lot more about the technology and the whole electronic creative process than I did. I wasn’t going in there to fix something or to make something better; I was going in to make the noise I’d heard in ‘Slow Motion’ and ‘Quiet Men’. That sound was so exciting, and I was going to be a part of that … It wasn’t about aiming for success; it was about being a part of something that was so far removed from Slik that it was like being on another planet – and musically, it probably was. Bear in mind that this was three years after Slik had been to number one with ‘Forever And Ever’. All of a sudden, I’m in this synthesizer art-school rock band, not worrying about trying to write three-minute pop songs but thinking about what we could create without any parameters. That was the driving force, and it completely overshadowed any thoughts about upsetting the odd John Foxx fan.

The new 1979 Ultravox fusion laid the foundation for their dramatic (in contrast to the John Foxx years) 1980s chart success. New songs came quickly, and the band were able to issue the new album Vienna (on Chrysalis Records) in July 1980. The first single, ‘Passing Strangers’, saw them finally crack the UK singles chart (only at 57, but it was a start). The second single ‘Sleepwalk’ reached 29 – the band breaking into the top 30 for the first time – while Vienna peaked at number three in the UK album chart. All this was a level of success Currie, Cann, and Cross had not experienced previously, putting to rest any doubts they initially had about teaming with Ure. Things got even better with the 1981 single release of the title track ‘Vienna’, which stayed at number two in the UK for four weeks, gaining infamy evermore for being kept from the top spot by John Lennon and then Australia-based Joe Dolce.

The 1980s were hugely successful for the retooled Ultravox. Each album cracked the UK top ten – Rage In Eden (four), Quartet (six), Lament (eight), and even the fan-derided U-Vox at number ten. The band became one of the most successful acts of the era, capped by their 1985 appearance at the Live Aid concert, partly due to Ure’s involvement with Bob Geldof in the Band Aid project that put the Ure/Geldof co-write ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ at number one in the UK for five weeks across Christmas 1984 and into the new year. In some ways, it was Band Aid/Live Aid that sowed the seeds of the end of the most successful incarnation of Ultravox. Pursuing a solo career,

Ure scored a number-one hit in his own right with 1985’s ‘If I Was’, while his debut solo album The Gift reached number two in the UK. Regrouping, Ultravox produced their final album of the 1980s – the controversial U-Vox – without drummer Warren Cann. Tensions between Ure and Currie were making life increasingly difficult, and the new musical directions evident in the U-Vox material didn’t find favour with many fans. The October 1984 non-album single ‘Love’s Great Adventure’ (promoting the 1984 greatest hits package The Collection, which reached number two in the UK) was Ultravox’s final UK top-30 hit, peaking at number 12. In the wake of the commercially successful yet critically derided U-Vox, the band went their separate ways – Ure to a solo career, Currie to producing his own instrumental albums, Cann to pursue a possible acting career in L.A. and Cross to retrain in psychology.

The 1979-1986 version of Ultravox was distinctive, cultivating a collective image in support of the music. Austere black-and-white band photos adorned the stark cover of the Vienna album, while the title track’s music video broke new ground. Ultravox became known for their iconographic videos, which were often mini films that told a story across three or four minutes (‘Passing Strangers’, ‘Vienna’, ‘The Thin Wall’, ‘The Voice’, ‘Reap The Wild Wind’, ‘Hymn’ and more). Director Russell Mulcahy guided the band through the first few videos, but from ‘The Voice’ through to ‘Love’s Great Adventure’, Midge Ure and Chris Cross were behind the image the band collectively projected.

Inevitably, the 1980s Ultravox were tagged as New Romantics despite their music, videos and image being very distinct from the likes of Duran Duran or Spandau Ballet. Perhaps it was this failure to fit into a clearly-defined New Romantic niche that caused the music press to often keep Ultravox at some distance – they were never embraced in the way some other 1980s bands were, despite turning out hit after hit. As a live band, Ultravox surprisingly proved themselves to be a formidable rock outfit that used not only synthesizers but classical instruments when it suited the music. Each album was supported by significant tours across Europe.

Ultravox also stood out by pioneering the use of clear vinyl for their singles. They’d discovered that – unlike black vinyl – clear vinyl was produced from non-recycled elements, leading (or so the band believed) to a sharper sound. Working with producers like Conny Plank (Vienna, Rage In Eden) and George Martin (Quartet) prepared the band for self-producing their later albums Lament and U-Vox. They also included instrumentals, opening Vienna with the seven-minute epic ‘Astradyne’ and working extended instrumental sections into Rage In Eden. It was the ‘Vienna’ single that typified their unconventional musical approaches, which they maintained across their chart-reaching output through the decade, constantly changing and evolving (sometimes in directions their fans didn’t entirely appreciate). It was a degree of success that was difficult to recapture beyond the 1980s.

After that classic hit-making lineup split in 1986, Billy Currie attempted to revive Ultravox without the participation of any other previous members, releasing two albums featuring two different lead singers (1993’s Revelation with Tony Fenelle, and 1994’s Ingenuity, with Sam Blue, co-produced by Currie), but little notice was taken by either fans or the music press, and the project was abandoned by 1996. It wasn’t until the 30th anniversary of Vienna that a proper reunion of the 1980s lineup took place, resulting in the 2009 Return to Eden UK tour and the 2010 Return To Eden II tour of Europe. While recording wasn’t the band’s intention during the live reunion tours, thoughts soon turned to producing new music, resulting in 2012’s Brilliant album.

The band’s final live performances came in April 2013, supporting fellow 1980s stars Simple Minds for four UK dates. By 2017, Currie – always keen to keep Ultravox alive – finally came to the conclusion that the band had run its course after over 40 years. That same year, Midge Ure spoke to the Daily Express: ‘I think it’s probably finished. It was lovely to come back five years ago and do those shows. It was great to make up again, not that we really fell out, but we’d moved our separate ways. After 20-25 years of heading in different directions, to come back and perform those songs one more time, it was a glorious thing to do’. Ure – the band’s youngest member – celebrated his 70th birthday with a concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall in October 2023. While he’s still creating new music, repackaging old classics and continuing to tour, chances are the band will never perform or record together again, especially following the death of bassist Chris Cross in March 2024, aged 71. Whatever happens, the classic songs remain, as Ure pointed out: ‘These songs are old enough that they’ve been part of people’s lives for most of their lives. And [the fans are] very precious about those things, just as I am.’

In 2020, Midge Ure summed up the Ultravox legacy to Electronic Sound: ‘Ultravox were all about creativity, we were about trying to make something interesting. It wasn’t for everybody, but then nothing is. You want to be perceived as something unique, and Ultravox were certainly that.’

Chapter1

Ultravox! (1977)

Personnel:

John Foxx: lead vocals, acoustic guitar (‘I Want To Be A Machine’), harmonica (‘Saturday Night In The City Of The Dead’)

Stevie Shears: guitars

Warren Cann: drums, backing vocals

Chris Cross: bass, backing vocals

Billy Currie: keyboards, violin

Producers: Brian Eno, Ultravox!, Steve Lillywhite

Recorded at Island Studios, Hammersmith, London, autumn 1976 Label: Island

Release date: 25 February 1977 (UK)

Charts: UK: -, US: 189 (Cashbox),

SWE: 25

Running time: 38:04

In the early 1980s, many young fans of the popular Midge Ure incarnation of Ultravox may have been surprised to discover the existence of the earlier John Foxx-led group. Those who became teenagers in 1980 were just too young to have experienced punk as active record buyers, so the 1976-1979 Ultravox! and the trio of albums they produced passed those listeners by and remained an unknown quantity. They’d have been even more perplexed to discover that the roots of their favourite band reached as far back as 1973/1974: the height of the prog rock era.

The initial founder of the band was Royal College of Art student Dennis Leigh, who later styled himself as ‘John Foxx’. Leigh once declared, ‘John Foxx is more intelligent than I am, better looking, better lit.’. Leigh’s glam- rock outfit operated under the name Tiger Lily (taken from J. M. Barrie’s 1904 play Peter Pan) and consisted of Foxx on vocals, Chris St. John (born Christopher Allen, later known as Chris Cross) on bass, and Stevie Shears on guitar. Chris Cross recalled in Classic Pop’s 2020 SynthPop Special Volume II: ‘Art, film and music were starting to interweave more. The timing was perfect. Dennis was the catalyst and a great instigator’. They formed in London in April 1974 but realised they needed a drummer. In Jonas Warstad’s in-depth online interview with Warren Cann on the earliest days of Ultravox!, the British-Canadian Cann recalled simply responding to a ‘drummer wanted’ ad in Melody Maker. ‘I just turned up at the audition’, Cann told ZigZag in 1984. ‘As soon as we rehearsed together, I realised we had something quite special’. Cann liked the sound of Foxx’s songs, so he signed up in May 1974. ‘The idea was to be the London Velvets’, said Foxx in Sweet Dreams – Dylan Jones’ history of the New Romantic movement. ‘We even had a base in a factory at King’s Cross!’.

At this point, the band had not played any gigs and were simply developing their material in rehearsal at the Royal College of Art (Foxx and Cross were still students there). In August 1974, the four-piece Tiger Lily made their live debut in Chorley, Lancashire – Foxx’s home town. According to Cann, Foxx used his connections to arrange a gig in ‘a local youth club’s hall’. This served as a warm-up for what they considered their true debut gig: London’s Marquee Club, supporting Heavy Metal Kids, at the end of August. Before the end of 1974, the band added a fifth member: classically trained violinist William (known as Billy) Currie.

Drawing heavily on glam acts like David Bowie, Roxy Music and New York Dolls, Foxx set out to mix his songwriting and performance approach with classic 1960s pop groups like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones (bands he was to turn against later in the decade: see ‘Life At Rainbow’s End’). Tiger Lily only released one single – a cover of Fats Waller’s ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’ through Gull Records on 14 March 1975, with an original B-side titled ‘Monkey Jive’. Through their next few gigs, the band cycled through several monikers, including The Damned (‘...for a week or two until we discovered another band had beaten us to it’ (Warren Cann)), The Zips, London Soundtrack and Fire of London. By October 1976, they’d settled on Ultravox!. According to Foxx in New Musical Express on 13 July 1977: ‘It sounds like an electrical device, and that’s what we are’. Many of the songs composed during the Tiger Lily years were to appear on their debut album Ultravox!.

‘Looking back now, it was an exciting time’, recalled Cross. ‘Something was changing’. Ultravox! scored a handful of reviews. In Record Mirror on 12 March 1977 under the witty headline ‘Voxy Music’, Seamus Potter noted: ‘The wide range of ideas far surpasses any piracy of musical styles ... Roxy Music and Bowie, consolidated by Eno’s production, have both made their indirect contribution, but a band with so much to offer are unlikely to need any musical crutches for long’. In NME on 23 April 1977, Phil McNeil commented:

Energy and anger have little to do with the romantically bored pose Ultravox! strike … Shears and Currie, and even Foxx, are sublimated to the mood at all times, and the underlying mood of the record is coldness … (Foxx) writes a good tune, mind. Every song is memorable, and only ‘Lonely Hunter’ is boring, and that’s saved by the intricate yet simple machinery riffs. They really do carry off the machine sound well.

McNeil concluded that while he didn’t like Ultravox!, he liked their album.

‘Saturday Night In The City Of The Dead’ (Foxx) 2:35

A fairly straightforward rock ‘n’ roll track opens the album; more Cockney Rebel than Roxy Music. Ultravox! were clear that their earliest work was reflective of their lives in London (perhaps about London’s ‘home of punk’, the Roxy), and so it is with this song (sometimes styled as ‘Sat’day’). They no doubt spotted the ‘all night boys in the Piccadilly Arcade’, had seen the ‘Tottenham Court Road litter, skitter in the wind’, and they’d spent their time ‘in the dole queue, face like a statue’.

There’s something proto-rap in Foxx’s rapid-fire rhymes (‘Spiked hair, don’t care, Oxfam outlaw’), but the track was created right on the cusp of punk.

That’s evident in the live performance captured on the EP Live At The Rainbow (recorded in 1977, released in 2022), where Foxx all but leaps off the stage. However, his pub-rock harmonica bits cut into the track’s punk cred. There’s a rawness to this opener that’s rarely recaptured on the rest of the tracks (only ‘ROckWrok’ from Ha!-Ha!-Ha! comes close), but it does suggest an equally valid direction in which the early Ultravox! could’ve moved. Seamus Potter’s Record Mirror review described the track as ‘a misleading opener … for all its crashing rock ‘n’ roll energy, it doesn’t serve as an intro to yet another new wave ensemble’. The song is inherently simple – about the teen longing for the freedom of Saturday night on the town, where ‘The city’s pretty dead but I’m still alive’. The collective enterprise that was Ultravox! – driven by Foxx’s art-student interests – felt they had so much more to offer.

‘Life At Rainbow’s End (For All The Tax Exiles On Main Street)’

(Foxx) 3:44

Guitars and drums are to the fore in this ripped-from-real-life story. Foxx is ‘The cold boy from the suburbs’ who moves to the big city in search of fame and fortune. The concept of ‘Life At Rainbow’s End’ is the good life – fortune and security – achieved in a deal with the Devil. Having had ‘a good introduction from a formerly trusted friend’, the singer achieves the good life he sought, having made the necessary sacrifice and having ‘burnt all the maps that lead here’ he’s denied anyone else the opportunity of following. There’s a price to pay – his lofty isolation leads to ‘lonely parties’ and ‘the dark side of this world’. It’s a reading validated by its deconstructive destructive climax where the instrumentation collapses into cacophony. This was seen as Foxx’s riposte to those 1960s bands who’d made it big and then either split or indulged themselves (mainly The Beatles and The Rolling Stones; the title recalls the Stones’ 1972 album Exile On Main St.). Having ‘made theirs’, they were seen by the up-and-coming proto-punk 1970s generation as having pulled up the ladder to success behind them. However elegiac and sceptical the song might be about the possibilities of fame and fortune (the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow; the quiet life on easy street) through rock ‘n’ roll, it’s a much stronger pointer to the future of Ultravox! (and certainly to the hit-achieving Midge Ure era). That was the view of Seamus Potter in Record Mirror: ‘(It establishes) the overall mood, firmly – Billy Currie’s swirling violin offsets the intense, anguished vocals of John Foxx with occasional harshness’. In NME, Phil McNeil noted Foxx’s inspirations – ‘Foxx puts-on his Bryan Ferry voice for ‘Life At Rainbow’s End’, as Brian Eno gets his clanky production into stride; rhythm section mixed high and thuddy, a very non-hero guitar sound for Stevie Shears, who’s always plinking towards the periphery with attractive grey tones, and a wide range of colourless tones from keyboards/ violin player Billy Currie’.

‘Slip Away’ (Currie, Foxx) 4:19

The first true Ultravox! epic ‘Slip Away’ is three songs in one. As the first track with a writing contribution from a band member other than Foxx, the extended instrumental second half has Billy Currie’s nimble fingers all over it. Lyrically, it’s a word salad in search of meaning. There are hidden gems buried here: ‘All things blow by me/My sorrows have sails’. Overall, the lyric simply exists to accompany the music. Verging on prog (though not quite as long as the next track), it starts as a pop song, but the pretension is strong. The first section is engaging enough, driven by drumming and piano flourishes over which Foxx’s voice sails (whatever the lyrics mean).

The ‘Just wasting time section’ suggests an entirely different track before it goes off in yet another different direction with the lengthy instrumental epic that follows Foxx’s fade-out line ‘dissolve’. This is Currie strutting his stuff uninhibited, and it’s delightful. It doesn’t connect with the earlier material, and it’s very much of the mid-1970s (punk-prog, perhaps), but it is great pretentious fun. The final barely audible tingle sends ‘Slip Away’ off into the night.

‘I Want To Be A Machine’ (Currie, Foxx) 7:21

This was one of their earliest songs (then under the Tiger Lily moniker), was possibly the first song Foxx wrote, and had been part of their live set for a while alongside ‘Life At Rainbow’s End’, ‘Dangerous Rhythm’ and ‘Lonely Hunter’. These songs were on a demo tape that secured their initial deal with Island Records, but as a last-minute check, they were summoned to play live in a conference room at Island’s Hammersmith HQ. If the latter half of ‘Slip Away’ turned that track into an epic, Ultravox! were only just beginning.

Unlike the sometimes-frantic pace of the album’s earlier songs, ‘I Want To Be A Machine’ opens with a more-stately approach, the initial fairy-tale lyric backed by acoustic guitar. Each chorus adds instrumentation, becoming more insistent and – in the electric guitar and drums – machine-like. Currie’s violin begins in-earnest after the second chorus, connecting to the final verse. It dominates the final run, faster than before, driven by drums, through to Foxx’s conclusive cry of ‘Ah!’.

Perhaps inspired by Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis (‘In mitternacht, die mensch-maschine’), the lyric features many modern obsessions of both popular versions of Ultravox – ‘cathode face’, ‘video souls’, ‘flesh of ash and silent movies’, ‘broadcast me’ and ‘In the star cold beyond all of your dreams’. The song’s subject was to influence many Foxx songs: ‘I was looking at the next stage of evolution, as we merged ourselves with new technologies. What would it feel like? … (I saw) the need for a new combination of genre and ideas, a kind of romantically despairing sleaze mixed with sci-fi’.

An effective closer to side one, this saw Foxx zoom in on an obsession that would provide him with material for years to come. Oddly, he sings ‘nebula’ as ‘nee-bula’!

‘Wide Boys’ (Foxx) 3:16

Written around the time the band signed with Island, ‘Wide Boys’ was another ripped-from-real-life song: ‘Our environment and lifestyle was our subject matter,’ said Warren Cann of their earliest inspirations. ‘Almost everything on the first album is about what it was like to be living in London at that time’. Perhaps the band thought of themselves as wide boys, defined as a ‘British slang term for a man who lives by his wits, wheeling and dealing’. ‘Wide’ in this context means ‘wide awake’ or ‘sharp-witted’.

This is the closest Ultravox! ever came to a teen anthem: ‘With the wide boys/Up on the streets/Wide boys/Ah, go on and meet me/Wide boys/ Delightfully unpleasant’. Some have seen the entire inspiration for Duran Duran’s oeuvre in this track.

‘Dangerous Rhythm’ (Cann, Cross, Currie, Foxx, Shears) 4:16

The first single (released on 4 February 1977) has been dubbed the white reggae track. Its creation was laid at the door of Shears’ taste for reggae and the influence of fellow Island artists. Record Mirror dubbed it ‘cosmic reggae’, noting the ‘heavier-than-lead bass and ice-cold vocals’, calling the result ‘very weird and wonderful’. In NME, it was called ‘by far their most memorable number, a reggae abstraction, mesmeric, simple, and subliminal, with Ferried vocals’.

The demo had been recorded by Steve Lillywhite at the old Phonogram Studios near Marble Arch, where (according to Cann) Lillywhite had been engineering for the likes of Status Quo and Rolf Harris. Through Lillywhite, Ultravox! had access to the studio in downtime. ‘We experimented a lot and did our best to learn how to use it all’, recalled Cann. The band were to return to Phonogram for their second album. As a debut single, ‘Dangerous Rhythm’ was an interesting enough choice to capture attention (as the reviews show) but gentle enough not to be too challenging (as much of the album was).

For Seamus Potter in Record Mirror: ‘‘Dangerous Rhythm’ hypnotises throughout. It’s off-beat and easily justifies its choice for single release’. Sounds liked it too: ‘Their youth bestows upon them a direct brashness … rich emetic bass, precise Ringo drums, synthesizer cascades, and Eno’s hand in the production make this a most confident debut single’.

Brian Eno’s production credit came to annoy Cann: ‘We produced the record, gave Steve Lillywhite and Brian Eno credit as co-producers, and all they ever say is ‘produced by Eno’. It makes me angry because it is no more accurate than it is true. He only worked on three or four songs at the most … to be fair, his name did help bring about some attention that might not otherwise have been paid to us concerning that first album. The record company had a name involved with the record, so that’s what they pushed in order to boost interest and sales’.

Unfortunately, ‘Dangerous Rhythm’ didn’t bother the singles charts.

‘The Lonely Hunter’ (Foxx) 3:42

Another life-on-the-streets song from Foxx, this one sees him move from his cod-Bryan Ferry approach and begin to develop a more distinctive vocal style. Perhaps the weakest track on the album, it’s certainly the most straightforward. The ‘lonely hunter’ appears to be a teen on the prowl for romance, though the lyric has some atmospheric film-noir echoes, like the downtrodden private detective in pursuit of his prey: ‘My collar’s up and my coat is sleek’. The noir connection was to be developed even further in terms of image and music in the Midge Ure era. As it is, the track is short and inconsequential.

‘The Wild, The Beautiful And The Damned’ (Cross, Currie, Foxx) 5:50

This ‘gloriously grandiose’ (Classic Pop) track first appeared in October 1976 on the Island Records Front Runners compilation oddly titled Rock & Reggae & Derek & Clive. Cann recalled: ‘The record contained a track each from Island’s artists and was available as a special-offer sampler in conjunction with