Famous singer Midge Ure is feeling both ‘underprepared’ and ‘resolved’ as he gets ready to go on tour and release his latest album.
A Man of Two Worlds is set for release on May 8, the same day that the Bath area musician’s tour gets underway at Bath Forum.
Though, the Scot has a storied musical career behind him at this stage, the album is an record of firsts, he explained when he spoke to this paper last week.
A Man of Two Worlds is both Ure’s first instrumental and first double album. The process of constructing the album starting during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, and the album reflects the shapeshifting nature of the world. The first side is one of cinematic instrumental work while the second side, meanwhile, is packed full of fiercely political lyrics.
Asked how he is feeling before the double-header, Mr Ure said: “Tour wise, always under-prepared. There’s never enough time to do all the bits you want to do.
"Album-wise, kind of resolved, but a little fearful at the same time. It’s the same with every new thing you release. You don’t know how it’s going to be received, and especially something like this where it’s a double album and taking form it’s taken.
“I think as you get older, you don’t care quite as much what the critics think.
"You’re doing it for yourself and hopefully that will resonate with other people. It’s not like I’m in the charts trying to compete with Harry Styles and K-Pop…those days are gone.”
Asked who the struggling man at the centre of the album is, Mr Ure immediately said: “It’s me. You write about what worries you, what affects you, good or bad. You write about emotions you’ve got from other people’s work…you cannot deny we’re a fair old state.
“I’ve been around quite a while now and I’ve seen a few messes we’ve got ourselves into, but never quite the extent that we have right now.
"There seems to be some kind of a massive seismic shift going on. That would be remiss not to note.”
Ure, who lives in the Bath area, also said however, that part of the inspiration for the album comes from spending his lockdowns gazing out over the West Country.
“The landscape certainly does [feature in the music], because that’s what I was doing every day during lockdown, I was looking out the window, wondering if it would ever come back, if normality would ever come back.
“Being in the West Country was important to me because that landscape was what sparked the emotional ideas for the instrumental stuff.”
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As much as this is an album of the moment, though, the artist also says that it is also rooted in his youth, when he and his classmates were "forced" to listen to traditional Scottish music. This would probably now be called “child abuse”, Mr Ure jokes, but it played a formative role in the development of his musical sensibility, one he is “forever grateful for” .
“I think the instrumental stuff is something very sad about it. It harks back to my sense of melody which comes from traditional Scottish music. It comes from laments we used to hear as kids, with their wonderous sense of melody and distance…there’s a loneliness to it.”
Despite the personal importance he attaches to melody, and the drama of music, however, he adds that “music is like a diary”.
“I just write about what I see, and I say it from my perspective. I don’t need to create a scenario, or a scene, or an extract from a book…it’s what I’m doing, and it’s what affects me and my family.”
Much of the lyric content of the second side of the album appear to be strong responses to heavy-handed world leaders - one track is titled The Man Who Stole Your Soul - and there is no escaping the main target.
Mr Ure said: “I think it’ll get a lot of grief from some of our American cousins. I’ve already had people saying, ‘why aren’t you writing about the state of the UK?’ Well, everything America does, the impact bounces around the world.”
He also said he has been told that if he had released his latest album in the 1960s, he would have been armed with a guitar and a harmonica. But does he think music has the kind of power to have the social impact it used to?
“I think the power of people can make a change. There’s a track on the album called Shouting to the Move and it’s about the power of multiple voices.
“Whether music would be the vehicle for that again…I don’t know. I don’t know if music’s lost its power since 1984, when records were the-be-all- and-end-all.
“Music was the platform for ‘youth’, the platform for the people. Music’s not the be all and end all anymore…Vloggers and bloggers, and media influencers, all these people are probably more important to young people than music itself."
The changing nature of technology and the commercial world has also had a more direct impact on his role as a performer, agreeing that it made it more difficult to connect, not least because of the volume of 'immersive experiences' like ABBA Voyage that have reshaped audiences expectations.
Despite this, Ure explains, he is looking forward to taking his audiences on a different kind of immersive experience: a journey through the landscape of his life, career, and latest album.
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