He’s the missing link between Thin Lizzy and the Sex Pistols, Scott Walker and glam rock, and the former teen star who tried, along with his Live Aid partner Bob Gel­dof, to feed the world. And then there was that time he changed the face of popular music with Ultravox.

“It’s ludicrous, isn’t it?” says Midge Ure, calling the Straight from a hotel in Palm Springs. “On paper, if you look at my bizarre career, it just makes me look like a dreadful musical tart. But if you look at it properly, there’s a line running all the way through it. There’s a reason that all these things kind of happened. Luck has a lot to do with it, but buying a synthesizer in the Rich Kids, you know, which instigated Visage, which led to Ultravox—there’s a path that runs all the way through it, although it just looks like a spider has run across the page with ink on its feet.”

In the mid ’70s, Ure was a whey-faced kid fronting the prefab Scottish bubblegum group Slik. (Check out the band’s No. 1 U.K. hit “Forever and Ever” for one of the most strikingly weird pop songs of the period.) By ’77 he was invading London’s punk scene with former Sex Pistol Glen Matlock in Rich Kids. Not long after that, he was plunging the U.K. into its modern-romantic period with Ultravox and the paradigm-shifting 1981 megahit “Vienna”.

“I think it was quite a brave—or ridiculously stupid—move that Ultravox did to release something that went so against the grain,” he says. “But if you look back over musical history, it’s the ones that go against the grain that change everything—the ‘Wuthering Heights’ or the ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’s or whatever. For us to put out a four-minute-long electronic ballad that speeds up with a viola solo in it, you know—it could easily have gone the other way, but it became hugely successful. Which, of course, catapulted Ultravox into the stratosphere.”

Before he went into orbit, Ure financed Ultravox with that brief (and seemingly unlikely) aside as Thin Lizzy’s touring guitarist in 1979. “I stupidly thought I could learn the songs on the plane, and they flew me out on Concorde,” Ure recalls with a laugh. “So I find myself in a hotel room with [Lizzy guitarist] Scott Gorham learning all these harmony guitar parts, and within 48 hours of getting the phone call I was on-stage in front of 20,000 people. It was crazy.”

Crazy or not, he also remembers that it was Lizzy honcho Phil Lynott who first told him, “You’ve got a very distinct vocal style. The way you do things is your signature; it’s your fingerprint; it’s your thing.”

He’s still doing his thing, this time with an acoustic guitar and a body of work stretching back over 40 years. When Ure brings his one-man show to Vancouver, punters can expect to hear stripped-down versions of Ultravox classics like “Dancing With Tears in My Eyes” along with a few cuts from Fragile, Ure’s first album of new material in 13 years. “I just have to learn them first,” he says, chuckling. Maybe he can do that on the flight over?

Georgia Straight, September 2014