What happens when New Romantics grow old? Just ask Midge Ure

James “Midge” Ure was 10 when he got his first guitar, having plagued his parents to buy one for months.

It may have cost only three pounds, but for a young boy raised in a Glasgow “tenement slum”, he understood this was a significant investment.

Though he’d always sung – partly because he could, and partly because it was free – his passion for music was truly stoked by the family radio, a “lifeline” that on any given evening would deliver artists as diverse as Frank Sinatra, The Beatles, The Shadows and Mantovani directly into his living room.

Midge Ure performs onstage during the Rewind Festival at Dreamland Margate in England in June.Credit: Lorne Thomson/Redferns

There was another, equally potent urge driving his teenaged desire to become a musician.

“I was absolutely useless at sport, so I had nothing to impress the girls with at all,” says the 71-year-old from his home in Portugal, where he’s lived for the past few years. “And I remember seeing a movie at the Saturday morning pictures called The Duke Wore Jeans with Tommy Steele, and in it he wore a white suit and had a guitar. And I thought, ‘That’ll do it.’

“It was this weird fantasy that by having a guitar I’d all of a sudden be attractive.”

The guitar became more than a tool for attracting members of the opposite sex – it became the driving force in Ure’s life.

So too did the synthesiser, even if it was viewed with distrust by some of his early bandmates.

After buying one in 1978, he tried to incorporate it into his punk band, Rich Kids, which featured former Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock.

It was so polarising that it led to the group’s demise.

Undeterred, Ure and Rich Kids bandmate (and influential club DJ) Rusty Egan co-founded Visage, the New Romantic frontrunners who had a hit in 1980 with the song Fade To Grey.

In the decades since, Ure has become one of music’s most reliable practitioners, successfully proving there is a world in which guitars and synthesisers can co-exist, first with his post-Visage band Ultravox, and then as a solo artist.

Midge Ure in 1981.Credit: Syndication International

And though the days of releasing hit singles may be behind him, his catalogue is blessed with enough fan-friendly deep cuts – solo chart toppers such as If I Was and mainstream hits like Ultravox’s Vienna – to sustain a healthy touring schedule.

In October, it will bring Ure to Australia for the aptly named Catalogue tour, in which he will perform music from throughout his career, including tracks from the ill-fated Rich Kids. (There may also be a few Thin Lizzy songs, given Ure was drafted in by frontman Phil Lynott to replace guitarist Gary Moore on a US tour supporting Journey in 1979.)

“I wanted to avoid ‘the hits’ tour, so I called it ‘Catalogue’, but ‘the hits’ managed to squeeze its way onto the tour poster,” he says. “You’re expected to play a lot of those anyway. But I dug deep and started looking at songs that should have been singles in retrospect, and other key tracks for me.

Midge Ure with Bob Geldof at the Live Aid 40th Anniversary Gala.Credit: Getty Images

“They’re not all three-minute pop songs. I do things like [Ultravox’s] Your Name (Has Slipped My Mind Again), which is a long, atmospheric, filmic thing.”

The idea for the Catalogue tour stemmed from a similarly themed 2023 concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall to mark Ure’s 70th birthday.

Given Ure has now joined the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Robert Plant in the ranks of septuagenarian musicians still going strong, it raises the question: is rock’n’roll no longer just a young person’s game?

“It’s totally changing!” says Ure. “I’m reading a book called Hope I Get Old Before I Die [by David Hepworth], and it’s all about the fact that at Live Aid, something changed. There were no youngsters on Live Aid, the youngsters were in their mid-to-late thirties. Ultravox and Spandau Ballet were the youngsters.

“McCartney was 48 when he did Live Aid, and we all thought of him as an old guy! So it all changed at that point and became more about whether you were good or not as opposed to whether you were new or not.”

No matter the magnitude of Ure’s achievements, the spectre of Live Aid – which this month marked its 40th anniversary – and 1984’s Band Aid charity single Do They Know It’s Christmas? will forever loom large.

Ure co-wrote the song with Bob Geldof, who spearheaded the project to fight famine in Ethiopia.

“Bob came to mine with a song he didn’t tell me at the time that he’d kind of half written and played to The Boomtown Rats, who thought it was shit,” laughs Ure. “It wasn’t a great song. It felt like we were trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. It had no chorus, there were no repeating bits, there was nothing that people could latch on to.”

Ure recorded the music and arranged Do They Know It’s Christmas? over a four-day session in his home studio. Geldof, meanwhile, set about enlisting some of Britain’s biggest pop stars to sing on it, including Bono, Boy George, George Michael, Simon Le Bon and Sting.

“Maybe tenacity and desperation of trying to get [the song] done and out there was what drove it through in the long run,” says Ure. “As a record it worked incredibly well, and that was due to the fact we had some of the best artists that the UK had to offer lending their name and their fan base.”

Though well into his sixth decade as a performer, Ure says he will get the same buzz walking onstage at his Australian dates that he felt as a teen watching artists such as Led Zeppelin and The Carpenters at The Apollo in Glasgow.

“If you don’t, you’re dead,” he says. “There’s something not right. I’m still enthusiastic about it. You know why? Because it’s too much like hard work if you don’t feel it.”

Midge Ure plays the Enmore Theatre in Sydney on October 16 and the Palais Theatre in Melbourne on October 17.

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