Midge Ure: My greatest mistake

With hindsight, which as everyone says is a wonderful thing, the biggest mistake I made was walking away from Ultravox in 1985. The band was still riding high and probably had a lot more to give. But by then, possibly, delusions of grandeur had kicked in for me.

It wasn't really a question of having people around urging me to do it. The chance to go off and do stuff without having to work within the realms of a band was very appealing. Success brings many things, one of which is an ego. You believe you're utterly invincible; you have a sniff of success on your own and think you don't need to take anyone else's ideas or feelings into consideration. I'm sure we all go through that sometimes.

But of course when you leave a successful situation like that, you have to start all over again. It's like snakes and ladders – all of a sudden you're at the bottom again. And there's the horrible realisation that you're saying what you think, not what the band thinks. You don't have the security of three other people around you making collective decisions and working as a unit. It was pretty scary.

There wasn't a particular incident that caused me to leave; it was just that I'd got used to what was going on. It's like anything, when you find success at your chosen career it's fantastic, it's great, it ticks all the boxes and you're on a high. But it bombs out very quickly and starts to become routine. I was thinking, I'm not sure I want to have to water down my ideas to accommodate someone else's thinking. And that was wrong, because it wasn't what I'd set out to do.

I just felt that maybe Ultravox had had its day and it was time to move on. But the reality is, when you make an album that's not all that great, that doesn't sell that well, it's nobody's fault but yours. Sometimes it's easier to throw the toys out of the pram and walk away rather than be big and say, "This is my mistake, but there's better stuff to come."

It wasn't until 24 years later that I fully realised the extent of all this. It sounds like a line out of The Blues Brothers, but we got the band back together again, we did a tour in 2009 and it was great. That was the moment of realisation that we still had a lot there.

Looking back, I never realised that the most interesting thing I was doing at that time was actually with Ultravox. But sometimes it's not until you revisit things that you can see them clearly.

Midge Ure is playing UK dates this summer as part of the Here and Now tour