![]() Three weeks after the album’s release, Ultravox began the first of the year’s two UK tours, hitting Cardiff, Doncaster, Dundee and beyond. Chrysalis didn’t mess about, they would have kicked us off!” They did manage to get us in the top twenty, so we had come into the land of the living, but it was still a bit desperate. “It should have been in autumn, but the label just wanted it out. “It was an odd time for the album to be released,” says Currie. Initial reaction was cautious, with the album entering the charts at 14 on July 19, and anthemic lead single Sleepwalk – with wild solo’ing on the ARP Odyssey from Currie - reaching number 39 the following week. “Cut the bloody crap and stop gobbing and throwing things!” An album of powerful electronic rock with the influences of former Plank clients Kraftwerk and Neu!, and substantial pop flair, the whole was completed by the dramatic, quixotic title track, written in John Henry’s rehearsal space on London’s Caledonian Road. Having road tested material on a US tour in late ’79, the new line-up signed a deal with Chrysalis and decamped to London’s RAK studios in spring 1980 with Conny Plank, later finishing and mixing in the producer’s barn-studio in Cologne. “There was frustration and it came from all of us,” says Currie. Nobody involved was aiming to miss, it seemed. That was what was needed… I’m very serious about this group.” That’s nothing to be ashamed of, or embarrassed of. “When I joined the band they had no money but I was really just pleased to be in on it,” the telegenic, pencil moustache’d Ure told Paul Morley in September ‘80, adding, “I’ve got a commercial ear. The latter outfit, which also featured sometime Gary Numan collaborator Currie, would, mildly confusingly, run concurrently for a time with Ultravox. Just weeks after his departure, Foxx had been replaced by singer-guitarist Midge Ure, whose resumé included mid-seventies popsters Slik, Glen Matlock’s Rich Kids, Thin Lizzy and Steve Strange’s Visage. ![]() Indeed, so thoroughly did it zap the zeitgeist that "Vienna" has long lingered and, when reissued in Britain in 1993, it again made its stately way into the Top 15.Currie, drummer Warren Cann and bassist/ keysman Chris Cross were up for the fight, though. ![]() No song better skewered the genre's fascination with a long decayed past.Īnd the single, released in January, 1981, waltzed its way up the British charts, finally breathing its last at #2. In fact, "Vienna" was the apotheosis of all the New Romantics held dear: the romance found in the lush waltz in its center, the melancholy that rippled through its milieu, the feeling of isolation implicit in its minimalist opening and, indeed, its very opulence and pretentiousness, all were the leitmotif of the movement. Most listeners missed the joke, concentrating open-mouthed instead upon the song's sense of grandeur and glamor, its yearning for love lost and, by extension for a lost world and the nostalgia of the fallen empire that the accompanying video so exquisitely invoked - all of which made a nonsense of Ure's claims. ![]() "The whole thing was a bit tongue in cheek." "We wanted to take the song and make it incredibly pompous in the middle, leaving it very sparse before and after, but finishing with a typically over-the top classical ending," Ure explained. This epic was not merely unlike anything the group had ever attempted previously (although it was, to a certain extent, foreshadowed by "Hiroshima Mon Amour", it was entirely unlike anything any band had attempted. The title track to Ultravox's fourth album (Midge Ure's first with the band), "Vienna"'s arrival in October, 1980, was met with astonishment and, from some quarters, even stunned disbelief. For listeners of a certain age, the line "This means nothing to me, oh Vienna," has the same resonance as "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn," did to an earlier generation. ![]()
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