From the author of ‘Listening To The Music The Machines Make – Inventing Electronic Pop 1978-1983’ comes ‘Looking Backwards Towards The Future: The Story of ULTRAVOX’.
This first authorised biography of ULTRAVOX is the work of Richard Evans, a music industry stalwart who founded the popular website This Is Not Retro and currently holds down a day job working for ERASURE.
Drawing from a vast archive of research materials and incorporating exclusive input from band members, as well as from their peers, their label and management teams, ‘Looking Backwards Towards The Future’ tells the many varied stories of the band, from fractures and fallouts to ambition and ego.
Written with the knowledge, permission and co-operation of the majority of the band’s surviving core members, the book traces ULTRAVOX’s art school beginnings led by John Foxx, changes of line-up and reinvention as a hit band fronted by Midge Ure on the back of the New Romantic movement. ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK sat down with Richard Evans to get the lowdown on its genesis and realisation…
It came as a surprise when you announced your ULTRAVOX book but then again, with the title of your last book ‘Listening To The Music The Machines Make’, it was blindingly obvious!!!
At the end my last book, I didn’t know what I was going to do! *laughs*
So there wasn’t a big joined up plan at any point but ‘Listening To The Music The Machines Make’ did well enough for Omnibus to ask whether I would like to do another book. I went up to London to meet with them and I pitched 4 ideas… and they favoured the ULTRAVOX book.
There IS a gap in the market, that first ULTRAVOX book ’In Their Own Words’ back in the day was some tacky thing like ‘A Tourist’s Guide To JAPAN’…
Yes that’s right, lots of pictures and some quotes…
‘Listening To The Music The Machines Make’ was very much using archive material as references, so what was your approach this time?
It was similar actually… one of the reasons I came up with the ULTRAVOX book idea, apart from their not already being an ULTRAVOX biography, was the research was already in place as I had collected it from doing ‘Listening To The Music The Machines Make’. One of the things that interested me about ULTRAVOX in THAT story was they were one of the very few bands who were there at the beginning AND at the end of the period that I wrote about.
I started working from the research materials I already had and I put together some bits and pieces before I contacted the band. They all came on board in dribs and drabs. I didn’t want to take them through the same stories that they had told thousands of times since 1974, I wanted to write the book essentially first and then come to the band to talk about the things I needed more information about.
Who in the band came on board and was there any reluctance from some?
I got in touch with Billy Currie first as I had interviewed him before and about the same time, I got in touch with John Foxx as well. Billy connected me with Warren Cann and separately Midge Ure also said yes as well.
The next person I tried to get was Stevie Shears, the original guitarist and through a very convoluted period, I tracked down a friend of his and told him about the book; in the end, his friend said Stevie didn’t really want to go back to all those days. So unfortunately Stevie isn’t represented, however the ‘Systems Of Romance’ guitarist Robin Simon is represented and he was put in contact with me via Steve Malins, John Foxx’s manager.
What’s particularly interesting about Stevie Shears is he later trained to become a psychotherapist and so did the late Chris Cross after he first left ULTRAVOX in 1987, discuss…
I’m sure ULTRAVOX was not the reason they became psychotherapists! *laughs*
ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK’s own journey with ULTRAVOX is an odd one, it starts with the ‘Vienna’ album in 1980, jumps back to the ‘Ultravox!’ debut, then goes to the ‘Three Into One’ compilation and then ‘Rage In Eden’ in 1981 as that hadn’t come out yet and became next in line, what was yours?
I wish I had a cooler answer than this but it was the ‘Vienna’ album because it WAS everywhere and the single was such a slice of different music coming through at a time when there was loads of really interesting things happening, it was an unusual record. It caught my ear and I bought the single and continued buying the singles as they went through.
But they were never really my band; for me, they were always a singles band, I didn’t really have the albums. It wasn’t until later that I had the albums and rediscovered them in a more general way. Part of the appeal of writing the book was that I didn’t know much about them, I had no pre-conceived ideas and it was all new to me.
Do you have a particular favourite phase of ULTRAVOX? I love the Conny Plank trilogy but most seem to discriminate in between the John Foxx and Midge Ure eras, although no-one has said the Sam Blue period yet! *laughs*
The most interesting period for me was ‘Rage In Eden’ because the band were in this situation where the world was at their feet, they could have done whatever they wanted, they could have just taken the easy route and they completely threw that out of the window and did something so strange and idiosyncratic! That’s absolutely brilliant that they had the balls to do that, what an extraordinary body of music to come out with when they could have just been pop stars!
Did the band share any light as to what it was like to be stuck in the middle of the German countryside for 3 months recording ‘Rage In Eden’?
All of those who were involved are proud of ‘Rage In Eden’ and part of that was because it was made against all the odds in terms of the 3 months in Germany with Conny Plank and also the pressure on them individually with the things that were happening around them and also in their relationships with each other under those periods of stress.
How did you find everyone was when talking about their time in ULTRAVOX?
I was never able to speak to two people at the same time, all my interviews were individual. I interviewed them in different ways; Billy was interviewed on Zoom and we had a series of very lengthy conversations. With Warren, it was on the phone and they were lengthy chats as well. John would only really answer messages by email as he likes to consider them and have a think about things. Midge was unwell during the period I wanted to talk to him so I didn’t have a direct connection with him at all in the end which was unfortunate.
At the beginning of the process, the various members were very careful about how they portrayed the relationships within the band. But as I got to know them better, they got a little bit more secure talking to me and were little bit more honest! Some bits I was able to print, some of which I’m not! It was a bit of a balancing act! *laughs*
So the Midge version of the band fragmented just before ‘U-Vox’ in 1986 when Warren was ousted and then after the album and tour, the band was no more… fans will generally blame the others kicking Warren out as being the reason that it all fell apart, but do you think the cracks actually happened during the recording of the ‘Lament’ album in 1984? My evidence of that would be they put out an 8 track album which meant they didn’t have enough material and I know those songs are fan favourites but the ‘Lament’ album seems to deteriorate towards the end with ‘When The Time Comes’ and ‘A Friend I Called Desire’ sounding almost unfinished?
I would agree completely, that was the time in their history when their relationships got problematic. Also, each of them were being pulled in different directions. Midge wanted go and do solo stuff, Warren had that ongoing HELDEN project which he was so passionate about and so invested in… they had other things happening. Then of course there was Band Aid and then Live Aid, all those things that didn’t help!
Weirdly, do you think ‘Dancing With Tear In My Eyes’ becoming a Top3 hit didn’t help the situation and kept that line-up of ULTRAVOX together for much longer than necessary when perhaps it had run its course?
I think there’s something in that… creatively after ‘Lament’, they were already considering their options. But because they had that level of success, I suspect they had to keep following it while they were on a high! Maybe in retrospect, that wasn’t the way to do it!
The socio-political impact ULTRAVOX had in pop culture is often understated… in the early summer of 1984, you have Nik Kershaw with ‘I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’, Frankie with ‘Two Tribes’ and ‘Dancing With Tears In My Eyes’ all in the charts with their nuclear angst themes… so you have these families watching ‘Top Of The Pops’ before David Attenborough’s ‘The Living Planet’ and the BBC decide to show most of the ‘Dancing With Tears In My Eyes’ video including the explosion!?! Did you watch that edition back in the day?
I did watch it and it didn’t particularly resonate with me at the time. But I know this was a situation that the band had to navigate because people would approach them and say “my children were asking what the song is all about and they are upset!”; it was a strange paranoid period in our history where everyone was going “what’s happening?”
That American film ‘The Day After’ had been shown and BBC’s ‘Threads’ would come later in that year, it’s the whole antithesis of the legwarmers and Filofax thing that some think this Thatcher / Reagan “loadsamoney” decade is all about?
It feels like similar times in lots of ways now although I’m not feeling that reflected in the things that I’m hearing in the same way as the nuclear paranoia of 1984. But I think the way we listen and watch is so different, everything is so much broader now whereas back then, we HAD to listen to those records because they were the records that were on the radio!
So it’s 1987, Midge decides he doesn’t want to do ULTRAVOX anymore, Chris goes with him but Billy carries on! And there’s this period where Billy goes through a series of vocalists, Marcus O’Higgins, Tony Fenelle and Sam Blue. Was there still life in the ULTRAVOX name at this time for live bookings etc or was Billy just being bloody minded?
I would agree with the latter and I think Billy would agree with that as well. I think it became something that he wanted, it wasn’t available to him initially and made him want to pursue it even more! As a result, rather than concentrating on the nuts and bolts of putting together these new line-ups and exploring what they could do, it was more about what name was going to be put on it rather than what it actually was. That was a shame because these line-ups had potential in their own ways.
Photo by Rob Harris
So it’s 2008 and the classic line-up of ULTRAVOX unexpectedly announce they will reform for a tour the following year, what’s your take on that part of the story?
I don’t think anyone could have predicted that one coming. It was a complete surprise to me also but the fantastic bit was by that point, I had caught up with ULTRAVOX and I knew I’d liked them more than I realised previously and it gave me a chance to go see them as I’d never seen them before. So I saw them at Hammersmith Apollo and was absolutely blown away, I thought they were a fantastic live act so that was a really special moment from my point of view.
It seemed that they had got on well enough after 2 tours to do a new album ‘Brilliant’, what did you think of it because it did go through a few problems?
It did go through a few problems but obviously at that point, we the audience weren’t really aware of that. As far as we were concerned, the band had reformed, it had all gone extremely well and had led to this opportunity to make new music. New music from this line-up of ULTRAVOX was a very special thing and when the album came out, I reviewed it for This Is Not Retro and I liked it. I looked back at what I wrote when I was doing the book and fortunately I’d been quite enthusiastic about it. I said something like “it doesn’t push any boundaries” but would we want it to? I still enjoy it now!
I like it as well but I think it’s too long, it could do with 3 less tracks but which 3 is debatable… I think the important thing was it got the band on the road again. The thing about ULTRAVOX live in this period, they were quite clever in that the lighting was quite subtle, so you sort of couldn’t tell how old the band were! But how it all drifted apart after, how have you concluded what happened?
At the beginning of the reunion, they were able to draw on the “newness” of getting back together again but after the novelty of that wore off, it feels like some of the old issues were creeping back in! *laughs*
Of course, ULTRAVOX were much older than their peers at that point and touring is a tough old game. When I was talking to Warren about this, he was paraphrasing someone else but he basically said “they don’t pay me to play, they pay me to travel… the playing is great but the travelling f*cking sucks!” *laughs*
Usually, the fun bit about doing any kind of book or article is to find out something you didn’t know before, was there anything in the course of doing ‘Looking Backwards Towards the Future’ where that happened?
It’s a bit tricky for me to answer that one actually because I didn’t have that fan perspective going in, I didn’t quite know what the narrative was, and what was surprising and what wasn’t for other people. So I’m not really going to know that until people have digested the book and comment “I had no idea that was the case” etc.
Going back to the early days of ULTRAVOX, John Foxx has said before that he started the band as an art project, what is your take on that?
This feeds into what we were talking about and things I discovered, so I asked John specifically about that and if it was an art project, was it marked by the college? And they didn’t really! But the way his art course was, it was very self-directed and as long as people at the college knew what he was up to, he could kind of go off and do his thing. The fact that he seized upon this concept as a result of a lecture at art college and created this band and a world around it for the band to exist in, that was an interesting part of the story.
The John Foxx era of ULTRAVOX did not get a lot of good press, as Billy once pointed out in that Channel 4 run down show ‘Top Ten 80s Romantics’ in 1999, “you can do a lot of things with ‘Ultra’, there’s Ultrahype and Ultracrap” but despite all of this, Paul Weller was a fan?
Paul Weller apparently used to go and see them in the early days and was a constant presence…
Midge joining ULTRAVOX was as a result of VISAGE happening first, is the VISAGE story something you cover in the book?
I don’t cover VISAGE as such because it’s its own story, it’s a separate story and quite a complicated one… it’s possibly one that could be a book itself, not that I have a plan in that direction! *laughs*
Obviously I mention it and Rusty Egan in his machinations about getting everyone together but I don’t go into any of the side projects of any of the members…
So you don’t go into John Foxx with ‘Metamatic’ or Midge Ure with ‘No Regrets’ or ‘The Gift’?
No, I would have had to do the same for everybody and that would have made the book quite unwieldy and a bit bloated to be honest.
Now you’ve mentioned balance, with the core 7 members, how did manage it in the book?
In any situation, whatever I was writing about, I always tried to bring in as much of everyone’s view of that situation as possible. It’s not a book that makes judgements, it’s a book that sets out what happened in my understanding of it and I support that with the various conversations with the band members. Obviously, at times they were more friendly to each other than at other times.
As well as the music, a key part of both John Foxx and Midge Ure era of ULTRAVOX was the visual presentation and in the latter case particularly, the videos… how far do you go into the visual aspects of the band?
Quite a lot actually, I think that was a very important part of the band and the way they presented themselves because it was almost like presenting fantasy versions of themselves. They could create these little worlds they could occupy and they could present themselves in whatever ways they chose.
From a video point of view, they were pioneers for sure and that is definitely noteworthy. From an artwork point of view, the fact that John was an art student so art directed and designed so much of the early stuff, and then after, they started to use people like Peter Saville who is a key name in music design, they always seemed to be on top of that side of things. There’s an element of the band controlling their own career which is really important and a power behind their success. People at their label Chrysalis said ULTRAVOX would come in with their ideas and they would just need the record company to make those ideas come true.
I thought it was interesting that although ULTRAVOX did have Peter Saville do their sleeve designs, it is widely reported that he didn’t particularly like the music… did any of that come out in your research and how was this navigated in the working relationship?
I think it did matter… it was Chris Cross who brought Peter Saville into the ULTRAVOX camp because he was interested in the work he was doing with Factory Records. Peter Saville was a great designer in his moment because I studied design in university and he was someone I looked up to. The problem with Peter and I have worked with him since, is that he’s very very slow. So if you are on any sort of a deadline, then that’s problematic because you can’t be working on that sort of basis.
ULTRAVOX were often quite late in bringing a project to the point where it needed design so they needed someone faster to work with. I still think those Peter Saville covers are among the best of the ULTRAVOX cannon.
I wanted to throw this theory forward, that because he wasn’t into the music, Peter Saville’s more outlandish ideas got onto ULTRAVOX artwork and made it more striking. I would even argue that much of his ULTRAVOX work is better than what he did with OMD and in some cases, NEW ORDER?
Yes, that’s an interesting path to tread because there must have been a limited number of artists to work with who were that open to that sort of intellectual conceptualising to the extent that NEW ORDER did and that ULTRAVOX also did. In a way, they were a great match but it feels that they ran their course and just gently drifted from each other. I think that’s also quite healthy. The band was changing as well and it needed new visual approaches. I have to say that ‘U-Vox’, not the most successful or popular of ULTRAVOX’s albums, is one of my favourite sleeves in its original striped LP PVC outer package.
My favourite sleeve is ‘Rage In Eden’…
Yes, my other one would be ‘Rage In Eden’, it would be between both of those.
Video became very much part of the classic line-up of ULTRAVOX with Midge and Chris going on to direct them; my favourite is ‘The Voice’ because it’s so arty farty and has a lot of on-the-line imagery… I mean holding fire torches while walking up a hill at night can be perceived as something else, especially with the band’s attire at the time which was like Germans in the 1930s, the “dead man’s clothes” as Midge once put it! Do you have a favourite video? *laughs*
I would probably go with ‘Love’s Great Adventure’ because it makes me laugh every time, it’s funny and light-hearted.
Who was the driving force of the videos, was it Chris or was it Midge?
It was as a team, they found this little niche for themselves and they were happy to do it while Warren and Billy were less bothered by the conceptualising of that. They just ran with it and what a great thing to run with!
I remember when ULTRAVOX ‘The Collection’ came out in 1984 and it also came out as a video compilation and I bought the Betamax cassette of it! *laughs*
BETAMAX! *laughs*
There’s a lot of groundbreaking stuff that ULTRAVOX did with the “greatest hits” package like this accompanying full-length video and including a brand new track, do you think it’s something that they don’t get enough credit for?
I do, it’s almost like every version of ULTRAVOX from John Foxx’s concept right into their imperial hit phase, they were so groundbreaking and pioneering yet no-one ever gave them the respect. There’d always been someone just rushing up behind them who would take those ideas and run with them to get all the credit and all the praise. They were extremely unlucky in lots of ways.
Is the story of ULTRAVOX comparable in some ways to those of PINK FLOYD or GENESIS?
I think there definitely are some parallels with those progressive rock bands.
I know this sounds a bit obvious, but who are you aiming this book at? *laughs*
It’s a good question actually because in lots of people’s perception, there’s 2 ULTRAVOXs and you only like one or the other! I would love people in both of those camps to get the book, I would love them to read the section they are interested in, but I would also love them to read the other section so that they can get a sense of what else was happening around these people and their creative trajectories.
ELECTRICITYCLUB.CO.UK gives its warmest thanks to Richard Evans
‘Looking Backwards Towards The Future – The Story of ULTRAVOX’ by Richard Evans is published by Omnibus Press in the UK on 8th October 2026 – in North America, Australia and New Zealand, the book will be published on 9th February 2027
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Text and Interview by Chi Ming Lai
26th September 2026
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