Ultravox

From the very first beat of the first track of Vienna, I knew everything had changed. The drums one-two punch the air out of you, a filter sweep rushes up breathlessly, and the synthesizers kick in. But instead of refined, subtle, intricately woven sounds, the synthesizer is pushy and insistent – almost rude. The entire musical track is made up of synthesizers (although electric guitars show up later on the album), and it is all pinned down by a killer backbeat, as exciting as any rock song I had heard. It was a revelation. In one crystalline moment, my two musical loves came together. I was transfixed.

Although it happens to me less and less now, there were certain songs that I ran across that were instantly addictive. I just could not get enough of them and the second the track ended – sometimes even before – I was ripping the needle back to the top to shoot myself up with its infectious sound again. This song, the opener of Vienna, was such a song. I knew that with a promise this great, the rest of the album had to have merit and was worth exploring, but I just couldn’t get past the rush of Sleepwalk. Over and over I played it, compulsively, my heart leaping out of my chest with excitement every time, until my mom came in and begged me to play something else, so I let the needle go through the rest of the record and I fell back onto my bed, spent and exhausted, ready for a cigarette and a little post-coital cuddling.

Ultravox was not fashionable, but most groundbreakers aren’t. At the time they started in the late ‘70s, punk was the name of the game in England and these guys, with their suits, synthesizers, and lush sonorities, were regarded with skepticism, if not downright hostility. Punk was all about ugly, and anything that hinted at culture or refinement was openly scorned. I didn’t know it at the time, but Vienna marked a significant change in Ultravox, and led to the brief New Romantic genre which got folded into new wave. I’m sure other people would point to other influences as being more important, but for me, Vienna was the beginning of synthpop and was a harbinger of the only time in my life in which my taste and popular tastes coincided. Sort of.

The rest of the album was spectacular, although there was nothing on it like the blistering Sleepwalk. There’s a peculiar tension on the album, created by the close proximity of wildly different elements. It’s wholly synthetic and artificial except for the drums, which push and throb and drive the songs out of the brain and into the feet. The synthesizers and occasional electric guitars are both edgy and lush at the same time, with insistent, pushy leads on top of gorgeous beds of swirling sonorities. The singing alternates between impassioned and coolly detached. The look is refined café society and the sound is sweaty dance club. All these elements gelled on this one album, and a whole new style was off and running. Every song on the album is worthwhile, from the icily angular and mysterious Mr. X to the gorgeous torch song Vienna to the robotic frenzy of All Stood Still (which planted the lyrical seed that sprouted into my own Lonesome Pie song Standing Still fifteen years later). Throughout the whole album is a thread of decadence and melancholy which is distinctly European in feel. And not only were there synthesizers standing on equal footing as the drums and electric guitars, but one of the members actually played violin and viola. Viola! The red-headed step-child of the orchestra, my own personal musical albatross, was featured on the most excitingly modern album I had yet run across. Emboldened by my love of this phenomenal album, I bit the bullet and plunked my entire monthly allowance on the import Three Into One the next time I made it into town.

Three Into One, as it turned out, chronicled the early years of Ultravox, before half the members – including founding songwriter and vocalist John Foxx – left the band. This would’ve left most bands in shambles, as John Foxx largely was the sound of Ultravox. Interested in electronics from an early age, he rejected the passionate sloppiness of punk for a cooler, more detached, keyboard-based sound. Eventually. One of the revelations of Three Into One is the first, and earliest, track on the record – a single that never made it on an album. Young Savage is all brutal beats and crunchy guitars with nary a synthesizer in sight, er, sound. Not quite as minimalist as the punkiest punk (the guitars arpeggiate the chords in different ways for each verse, something a little too subtle and artsy for most early punkers), it still has the vicious, violent thrill of punk running through its veins. But even though it’s called Young Savage, an appropriate image for punk, the lyrics are far too abstract and poetic for the genre. Foxx relishes disconnected imagery and fragmented narratives in his songs, and many of them are built up of tiny details that add up to an impressionistic whole.

Young Savage had the same affect on me that Sleepwalk did – I just couldn’t get enough of it when I first heard it. Nowhere else in the Ultravox canon – nor in any of Foxx’s solo releases – is there anything nearly so beautifully brutal. The second track on Three Into One is the scorching Rockwrok – which also rock(wrok)s, but they’ve started broadening their palette with keyboards. The little buzz they had created was enough to get them signed to Island Records and they went into the studio to record their first eponymous album under the direction of none other than Brian Eno. By this time, John Foxx had fully developed his icy alienation style of songwriting and singing, and even managed to break into the (British) charts with an odd and arty mood piece called My Sex which, to give you a flavor of his style, goes something like this:

and so on (sad to say, I wrote these from memory after not hearing the song for years – who knows what I could know if my brain wasn’t stuffed with useless trivia such as this). The music for My Sex is as fragmented as the lyrics, and the whole song works as a wonderfully disjointed tone poem of modern alienation and urban despair. Heady stuff.

However, Foxx can go overboard with the dramatics, and most of the first side of Three Into One does just that on such pretentious snorers as The Man Who Dies Everyday and The Wild, The Beautiful and the Damned. Ah, but side two, the side I heard a bit of in the record store, is a thing of beauty. With songs mostly culled from their second (Ha! Ha! Ha!) and third (Systems of Romance) albums, Ultravox had settled into a beautiful, refined synthetic sound to go with their evocative portraits of decay and decadence. Slow Motion, Quiet Men, and the classic Hiroshima Mon Amour are beautiful songs gorgeously produced, with a haunting mixture of icy metal enveloped in comforting velvet (to use Thomas Dolby’s phrase from his wonderful Dissidents “like an iron fist in a glove full of vaseline”). The high point for haunting moodiness and sparse alienation is the track Just For a Moment, which is little more than a heartbeat, faint humming electronics, a couple of unsettling piano chords played underwater in the dark, and Foxx’s oddly mechanical voice reciting disjointed and melancholy lyrics, such as