Midge Ure: Chapters: The Best Of – Album Reissue Review

Six months after releasing his latest studio album, Midge Ure returns to his most commercially successful solo era with a fresh look at his 80s material. It’s a treasure trove for synth-pop fans, with a whole disc of newly commissioned remixes. Robert Plummer does some living in the past.

What a strange career Midge Ure has had. It’s all laid out in this flawed but fascinating compilation, which takes the diverse threads of Ure’s 1980s non-Ultravox journeyman output and attempts to weave them into a rich tapestry. And you know what? It actually works – up to a point.

Music biz convention dictates that we call this an “album reissue”, since it’s based on “legacy” or “catalogue” material. But in fact, only 15 of the 44 tracks on this whopping three-CD package have been available before in these versions. That means it’s not really a conventional “best of”, more a subtle rewriting of history to create a sense of coherence that the music arguably didn’t possess at the time.

The intent is clear from the get-go, with two brand new recordings of pop staples from back in the day. For listeners of a certain age, the first notes of the album will immediately bring to mind images of spinning coloured vinyl discs falling from a cloudy sky. Yes, it’s the tune that accompanied the Top Of The Pops opening titles for much of the decade: Yellow Pearl, originally a Phil Lynott single co-written by Ure.

However, this new Midge Ure remake is beefed up considerably, with lumbering Belgian-style techno sequencers turning it into an electro-pop juggernaut. Something similar ensues on Fade To Grey, penned by Ure along with Ultravox’s Billy Currie and Tubeway Army’s Chris Payne but released by the Steve Strange-fronted project Visage. This version is bruising where the original was delicate, omitting the French lyrics spoken by Brigitte Arendt that gave the old single much of its charm.

Apart from these side projects and his role as Ultravox frontman, Ure found time for a solo career trial run in 1982. His take on the Walker Brothers’ No Regrets reached number nine in the charts: it adds little to the original, but suits his dramatic tenor voice down to the ground. That’s followed by an equally reverent rendition of David Bowie’s The Man Who Sold The World, recorded for a soundtrack album at about the same time.

After another off-piste collaboration, the pleasingly odd After A Fashion recorded with Japan bassist Mick Karn, the main disc concentrates on Ure’s two solo albums from the period. We get six tracks from 1985’s The Gift, including his big clunking cover of Jethro Tull’s Living In The Past, plus yearnsome chart-topper If I Was, his biggest hit. That album reached number two in the charts – a feat equalled by only one Ultravox album, 1984’s greatest hits compilation The Collection, itself re-released in deluxe form a year ago.

That mid-80s run of success was as good as it got for Ure and Ultravox, who split in 1987 after the disappointing performance of their U-Vox album. Ure released an epic but empty standalone single, Call Of The Wild, contained here, which made number 27 in 1986. Then he rallied with another album, Answers To Nothing, but it barely scraped into the UK Top 30 – his imperial phase was definitely over.

Five tracks feature from Ure’s sophomore solo excursion, which goes easy on the excessive bombast that had marred parts of his debut: it deserved a better fate. Highlights include a duet with Kate Bush, who adds impassioned multi-tracked choral effects to Sister And Brother. The album also spawned two singles – the title track and the despairing Dear God (“Is there somebody watching/Somebody watching over the mess that we’ve made?”)

All 17 tracks from the main album are also featured in instrumental versions on a separate CD. It’s an inspired move: heard in isolation, those wordless melodies impart the same widescreen, cruising-through-Mitteleuropa vibe that you get from artists such as Cluster and La Düsseldorf. Midge Ure produced his solo records himself, but he had clearly learned much from veteran German producer Conny Plank, who worked with both those bands and with Ultravox.

But the main draw for fans is likely to be the disc of 10 new remixes that update and expand Ure’s original synth-pop vision. As always in these cases, they’re a mixed bag. However, they work best when they strip back some of the more dated 80s production elements and allow you to appreciate the songs anew.

It starts with Chris Payne’s reworking of Fade To Grey, which joyfully restores the original single’s French spoken-word passages. Then Richard Barbieri’s remix of After A Fashion makes the tune sound even more Japan-like than before. Wolfgang Flür and Peter Duggal’s update of Dear God, complete with German-language monologue, is another standout moment, as is Ure’s own stately reconstruction of The Man Who Sold The World.

All in all, this is a lovingly assembled collection that showcases every facet of Midge Ure’s most successful solo efforts. It’s a body of work that has hitherto been neglected while Chrysalis Records concentrated on deluxe reissues of Ultravox’s albums. But now they have remedied that discrepancy, taking what was originally a piecemeal series of releases and joining the dots to give a rounded picture of the man.

So who is the target audience for this package, presumably issued with the lucrative Christmas market in mind? Obviously Ure and Ultravox devotees will snap it up – the limited edition Blu-ray disc is already sold out on pre-order. But casual fans of 80s electro-pop should take a listen too: in both style and substance, these tunes epitomise an era that still resonates today.

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You can find Midge Ure’s official website here. He is also on Facebook, Instagram and X.

All words by Robert Plummer. More writing by Robert can be found at hisauthor’s archive. He is also on X as @robertp926.