Scottish rock musician Midge Ure thought his first solo acoustic tour of the United States six years ago would also be his last.
“At the time, it was to make a point,” says Ure, the former Ultravox frontman and a onetime member of bands Visage and Thin Lizzy as well. “I’d been speaking to young music students and they were asking questions about multi-album deals and world tours and whatever.
“It was fairly apparent that most of them in the room would maybe never get the opportunity to do something like that,” he says. “So I wanted to show how difficult it is to try and do this stuff on your own.”
At the end of the Fragile Troubadour tour in 2015, which Ure filmed, he asked himself if he’d ever do another like it.
“Probably not,” Ure says he answered. “Because it was seriously hard work.”
But then the pandemic turned the world upside down, and suddenly the unthinkable seemed the very thing to do.
“With the way things have been for the last two years, I think it was kind of time to go back out, even though it feels a little premature,” Ure says. “It’s one thing performing in front of your computer for hardcore fans around the world. It was no substitute for face-to-face.
“So I decided to jump on board and go and put myself through the rigors again.”
Now the Un-Zoomed and Face to Face tour is headed to Southern California for shows on Friday, Nov. 12 at the Concert Lounge in Riverside, and Sunday, Nov. 14 at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano.
New songs and visuals
Like many musicians stuck at home in 2020, Ure decided to play music for fans online and his Backstage Lockdown Club delivered a higher quality of audio and visuals than most.
“I’ve already got the audio quality because I have a studio,” he says. “I just had to figure out the best cameras. So I hit YouTube. I looked for youth, for young people who vlog and blog and do all of that.”
When he was finished, he had not only a professional recording studio, but enough video gear to allow him to automatically have the cameras move and other near-professional tricks.
“I find myself with what kind of looks on the screen like I’m in a proper video-recording studio, with not just myself, because of the way it cuts between shots and things,” Ure says. “A lot of artists are asking just how I do it, so I think I’m the go-to who’ll send them sheets of information.”
The Backstage Lockdown Club shows also expanded his ability to play solo and acoustic versions of songs he originally wrote for a band and electronic instruments.
“Just the nature of that couple of performances every month meant that I was challenged by an audience,” says Ure, who recalls the fans asking for less obvious cuts from his catalog. “I set about looking at songs that maybe I’ve never performed, certainly in this format before, and delved into some of that.
“So there will be tunes that I’m playing this time that I’ve never, never played before on any previous tours. And that’s been fun, because it really kept me on my toes.”
‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’
Ure mixes up his setlists from night to night, though the bulk of the material is drawn from his solo records and Ultravox albums. But one of his best-known songs probably won’t show up, at least not this early in the year.
In 1984, Ure and Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats wrote “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” as a fundraiser for famine relief and recruited a host of stars such as Sting, Bono, Phil Collins and Boy George to sing it.
“It’s still a bit premature for that, I think, but who knows?” he says on the call from New York City. “I’ve been here 10 days, and I’ve seen America transform from pumpkins and brown leaves to Christmas overnight. It’s quite a spectacular thing to see.”
Ure says that when the 1984 winter holidays ended, he thought that was the end of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” too.
“Not once did it cross our minds that if you have a successful Christmas song, even though it was very specific about the famine, that it might appear again the year later,” he says. “And then, you know, still 37 years later.”
That amazes him in part because he doesn’t think of the song as a particularly great composition.
“But the record works, the production works,” Ure says. “It makes something out of what wasn’t a great song to start with — it’s a song with no chorus, for a start.
“Every time I do hear the song randomly on the radio or in a supermarket or something, the opening clang, that intro, just still gets me, it still does its job.”
And, he notes, it’s still doing the job it was made to do. Both he and Geldof donated their writers’ royalties to the Band Aid Trust.
“So yeah, who expected that?” Ure says. “That’s an income source for the cause that nobody ever saw, so it was quite something.”
Midge Ure shows
Nov. 12: The Concert Lounge, 3557 University Ave., Riverside. Tickets are $20-$40.
Nov. 14: The Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, Suite CSan Juan Capistrano. Tickets are $25.
For more: midgeure.co.uk/shows.html
