Ultravox

I talk a lot about Depeche Mode, and their best stuff is my favorite pop music, in large part because of it's underground, new wave edginess, polished, dark melancholic sound, and high quality of songwriting.

Of course, DM didn't operate in a vacuum. Vince Clark's change of the sound from a more traditional guitar and rock based structure to electronic music came about because he heard an OMD song. The New Romantic movement, to which Depeche Mode arguably never really belonged, although they looked like maybe they could have back in 1980-81 or so, had a lot of really great synthpop bands that would have sounded very similar to Depeche Mode in many ways. Actually, they were considerably darker and more menacing in most cases than early Depeche Mode, although later Depeche Mode mostly swapped that again, although not under the aegis of New Romanticism as a fashion movement, at least. Arguably, thought, the music and artistic aspects of it remain unchanged.

Here I'm talking about bands like Visage, Duran Duran, and Spandau Ballet. Boy George is also a quintessential New Romantic, but he's mostly devolved into a bit of a joke because his songs were campy and the Adam Sandler flic The Wedding Singer made fun of "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?" so much. In America, New Romanticism wasn't really a thing, but once bands like Duran Duran lost the worst of their "gay imagery" on their eponymous first release, then they were able to be labeled the Second British Invasion, a kind of slightly edgy, dance-oriented synthesizer driven pop. Their second album Rio and their third, Seven and the Ragged Tiger with heavily played, highly produced, fun to watch music videos on new cable channel MTV being a major driver of their success. Duran Duran were often compared to Spandau Ballet, who also had at least a few American hits (everyone knows "True", at a bare minimum, although a few other tracks are familiar to many) but I always thought they were better compared, in many ways, to the Midge Ure classic line-up of Ultravox.   Two member of this version of Ultravox were linked with Visage (Midge Ure and Billie Curie), and by sound and tone and mood and theme, they were quite similar to the early Duran Duran releases. They weren't really New Romantics, although they were often labeled such by the press; probably because they sounded like New Romantics and had two members who had been in Visage, but New Romanticism was always more of a visual/fashion movement than anything else, and New Romantic music could sound nearly identical to non-New Romantic synthpop or electronic music going to at the same time alongside New Romanticism. (Like OMD, Human League, New Order, Soft Cell, etc.) Unlike Duran Duran, they weren't young, art-school pretty boys either, they were rather more established musicians who had been in the punk and early new wave scene for some time, including the earlier punk and post-punk iteration of Ultravox, the Rich Kids, and others.

Anyway, Ultravox had been around through much of the later 70s, and are often credited with inventing the first synthpop song, "Hiroshima, Mon Amour", and the world's first synthpop album (although not super commercially successful, it is praised highly by Gary Numan and others, who said it was his single biggest musical inspiration) in Systems of Romance. But that version of the band imploded when lead singer John Foxx got tired of struggling with the band, went solo, released Metamatic (which ironically, due to some issues of timing, sounds derivative of Gary Numan in many respects) and the band reformed about a year or so later after Billie Currie had toured with Numan and done the first release of the Visage project, etc. He had met Midge Ure during this time, and invited him to helm Ultravox, and this line-up released four of the best, although sadly under-rated and unknown (at least in America) New Romantic or new wave or synthpop or whatever you want to call it albums during the early to mid-80s. I mean, they're just real classics—almost every track is good, and they have a very fresh sound, even today, almost 40 years later. They gradually drifted over this four album arc into a somewhat more mainstream sound, but they still manage to maintain that new wave edge. After the four albums, they put out a greatest hits album, canned Warren Cann, the drummer, and put out a fifth album with this slightly revised line-up, but it was a fan and critical flop, and Midge Ure left the band afterwards and that was that.

But Vienna, Rage in Eden, Quartet and Lament are all fabulous albums, and anyone who has any appreciation for 80s new wave Second British Invasion music should own all four and wonder to himself why Ultravox didn't get the same recognition that Duran Duran did. Although it's worth pointing out that in the UK, they did have a number of hits. Like Duran Duran, they also had a string of visually striking music videos. I discovered them, albeit a few years after the fact, when I got the Collection CD, which admittedly does have most of the highlights of this era. We kinda fell in love with their sound at my house when I was a teenager, and heck—my younger brother even went through a phase where he tried to grow Midge Ure's trademark pointed sideburns, as seen on the "Vienna" video, and honestly, throughout much of this era. (He was too young to pull it off, and it wasn't right without the mustache anyway.)