Ultravox

When I was at the University of Chicago, I finally crashed and burned. Being thrown into a foreign environment with a roommate I abhorred in a place that cheapened what I most deeply believed in, lost in a dead gray windy city studying the musty words and formulas of dead grey windy white guys finally got to be too much, and I committed academic suicide. This was not easy for me, as my drive to succeed and please is so fundamental, but finally, the circuits overloaded and I just walked out of my classes. I asked why I had to study what I was being made to study and nobody could give me an answer that I believed in, and my brittle, beaten ego finally could hold nobody else’s hopes and dreams, and I let go of everything that was poisoning me and embraced that which made me flourish. I got a room to myself and I dropped all my academics. I picked up an introductory art class, an electronic music workshop, and I tried to get into a photography class, but I couldn’t. So I had to settle for the next best thing, filmmaking.

It was a good class, with time split between watching and discussing films and trying our hand at rudimentary film projects. It was where I really discovered the power and potential of film in a way I never suspected. For my final project, I made a short black-and-white silent film called Solitaire, which was meant to be a portrait of Chicago as it appeared to me. It was greatly therapeutic. I took the relentless, soul-crushing greyness that threatened to drown me and turned it into art. Wandering around the bleak landscape with a camera made everything more abstract and less potent. I could search for imagery that resonated with my lonely soul and capture it on film, turning it into a positive exploration of my emotional state instead of it just being a relentless drain on my energy and psyche. As I wandered the streets, I kept Ultravox’s Just for a Moment firmly in mind (I married the footage to the song years later at Hampshire), trying to capture with abstract imagery that beautifully broken song. Screening the film at the end of the year to the appreciative applause of my classmates and professor, I was flooded with emotion, speechless and swollen with tears. It was the only A I earned during my year at the University of Chicago, and it gave me a thread to follow out of the labyrinth into my life beyond.

Although those songs on Three Into One meant so much to me, nobody else cared. Nobody bought the albums, Island dumped them, and John Foxx left for a solo career, effectively eviscerating the band. The remaining members bravely decided to continue and tapped Midge Ure to be the new vocalist. They approached Chrysalis Records, who were understandably wary of them, as they hardly sold any records when their most defining member was still with them, but they gave them a little money to go into the studio to record some demos. If they liked the demos enough, they’d foot the bill for the album. Ultravox went into the studio and, instead of recording rough demos for a few songs, they put all their eggs in one basket and produced a finished version of just one song, Sleepwalk. Chrysalis was suitably impressed and signed them and they recorded their masterpiece, Vienna.

It’s difficult to overstate the influence Ultravox has had on popular musical development, despite the fact that nobody seems willing to give them their “props”. I believe synthpop and new wave can be traced back directly to them – and especially to Vienna. A stark contrast to punk, Ultravox gave people who couldn’t or wouldn’t pierce their cheeks with safety pins something else to hear, and something else to wear, besides combat boots, ripped t-shirts and red mohawks. They recontextualized the synthesizer and proved that it could be used to create the entire sonic palette for a band, which was a revolutionary concept that would drastically change the sound of popular music during the 1980s. Ah, those were the days.

After the success of Vienna, Ultravox recorded Rage in Eden, which most critics applauded as being the pinnacle of their career, but which I think loses something by their delving fully into the lush synthesizer sounds and keeping the cold, alienating ones largely out of the mix. It is that glorious tension between the two that makes Vienna such a compelling listen. After that they hit their stateside popularity peak with Quartet, an album produced by the legendary George Martin, but I had largely lost interest in them by this point and had moved on to greener pastures – but pastures that had been fertilized by Ultravox (shit jokes notwithstanding).

The death knell for me happened in 1983, when I had the opportunity to see them play live in Chicago, during my year of penance at the U of C. It was one of the worst concerts I had ever seen and I largely gave up on them after that. They were so loud that their songs were indistinguishable – they were halfway through Sleepwalk before I even recognized it. And despite their attempts to enliven the show with a tribal drumming section, in which they stood side by side near the front of the stage and played synthdrums to a backing track, the show was disappointingly boring. Some of that was situational. I was very tired because I had been out all night the night before and then went to classes and then to work before meeting up with my friend Dave who had traveled from Grand Rapids to visit me. And the reason I had stayed out all night the night before was that I had gone with my friend Christian to see Lene Lovich. And that was the best concert I had ever seen. So, really, Ultravox didn’t have a chance.

Still, they kicked off the small New Romantic movement, which was the first movement I really felt a part of, and their influence stretched well into the ‘80s. They revolutionized the use of synthesizers and created some absolutely stunning music in the process, and for that, I shall always be grateful. Fuck Bono, Ultra rules.