Fans rejoiced when Ultravox announced they were re-forming to tour, but while the band are promising a greatest-hits show, lead singer Midge Ure says it is for one year only and an album is not in the pipeline, writes KEVIN COURTNEY

SOME RECKON it’s the video that truly kick-started the 1980s. A moustachioed Midge Ure steps out on to a dark, cobbled courtyard and gazes up into the night sky, his trenchcoat collar turned up against the cold Viennese air. The drum machine splashes out the ominous electro rhythm as the piano plinks like rain on the cobblestones. In a high, ringing voice, Ure belts out the immortal line, “This means nothing to me-e-e-e”, and a pop classic is born.

Okay, the video for Viennawasn't actually made in the Austrian capital. The record company wouldn't stump up the cash because they didn't think the song would be a hit, so Ure and his bandmates had to shoot it on the cheap in London's Covent Garden. But Ultravox's brooding, six-minute synth-pop rhapsody went to number two in the UK charts in January 1981, kept off the top slot by Joe Dolce's novelty song Shaddap You Face.

Thirty years after he joined Ultravox, Midge Ure is, figuratively speaking, stepping back on to the cobblestones, only this time he won’t be sporting the mac or the ronnie. The band’s classic line-up of Ure, Billie Currie, Warren Cann and Chris Cross have reformed for a one-off tour and, to a whole bunch of the band’s diehard fans, this means quite a lot indeed.

“Thirty years since we wrote

who would have thought?” muses a moustache-less Ure, sitting in Dublin’s Westbury Hotel, wearing a parka and short-cropped hair. “So if there was ever anything we were going to do musically, this is the year to do it.”

These days, it seems as if all our favourite bands from the 1980s are coming back to the future, regrowing their mullets and reanimating their classic hits for a new generation. The Police reformed for a lucrative world tour a couple of years ago, while ska heroes The Specials have recently gone back out on the road (minus founder-leader Jerry Dammers). And late last month, Spandau Ballet threw their cummerbunds into the ring and announced they were going for gold once again.

With Ultravox re-entering the crowded arena, we could be heading dangerously close to retro saturation point, but Ure is quick to point out that he’s not doing it for the money, nor is he planning to recreate his younger persona onstage.

“It’s all out there on YouTube – every dodgy outfit,” he laughs.

In fact, Ure has been so busy producing, recording, making radio programmes and doing a million other things (including work for the Band Aid Trust, of which he is still a director), he wasn’t sure if he’d even find the time to participate in this 30th anniversary reunion.

“The key thing for us when we all sat down and started discussing this, the one thing that we all wanted was dignity and grace,” says the singer. “We’re old men. I’m the youngest in the band and I’m 55. So, dignity and grace. It’s got to reflect everything we tried to do in the beginning. The videos, the artwork, the photography, the stage set, the presentation, we were involved in every aspect of everything Ultravox did. And I think that reflects on us. I think maybe that’s why the tickets are selling so well, maybe that’s why people are saying, ‘Ultravox, great’.”

When Midge told his old Band Aid mate, Bob Geldof, about the reunion plans, Geldof enthused: “Brilliant. The Rats couldn’t do that. It’d be crap, it’d be cheesy, it’d be rubbish. But, with Ultravox, I can see it. You guys were cutting-edge, the forefront of stuff. It makes sense. It’s like Pink Floyd getting back together.”

Comparing Ultravox to Floyd is probably stretching it a bit, but it’s not a stretch to say that Ultravox were darker and artier than many of their synth-pop contemporaries. They were also around a lot longer.

URE, BORN INCambuslang, Scotland, joined the band in April 1979, replacing original singer John Foxx. Until then, the London-based group had been experimental New Wavers, heavily influenced by Roxy Music and Krautrock. Ure had already enjoyed chart success as the singer in Slik, a proto-boyband set up to cash in on the success of the Bay City Rollers, but he quickly left that behind to form The Rich Kids with ex-Sex Pistol Glen Matlock. The multi-talented Scot even did a stint as guitarist with Thin Lizzy.

Ure's arrival propelled Ultravox into the forefront of 1980s pop, and brought them chart success with songs such as Reap the Wild Wind, The Voiceand Dancing With Tears in My Eyes. In tandem with Ultravox, Ure also had a solo hit with his version of the Walker Brothers' No Regrets, and soon after the band broke up, he hit number one with If I Was.

But it wasn’t Ure’s solo work that spelled the end for Ultravox, it was a call from Bob Geldof in November 1984, asking Midge to help him write a song for Africa.

“It wasn’t a big break-up,” he says. “It frittered out. The second-last album we did was good, and we had hits and we were still riding high, but then the Band Aid/Live Aid thing came along, and that pulled me away from the band. The band had to sit twiddling its thumbs for awhile.”

When Ultravox reconvened, says Ure, they simply couldn't refocus, and the resulting album, U-Vox,was "all over the place". Their final full-band gig was also their biggest – in front of the Wembley crowd at Live Aid.

Ure reckons that if he hadn't said yes to Geldof, then Ultravox would probably have stayed together, but Do They Know It's Christmas?would never had been written, Live Aid would never have happened, and tens of thousands of lives would not have been saved. For Ure, it was a sacrifice worth making.

“I think once you get embroiled in something like that, once you’re responsible for the money that the record makes – that’s £7 or £8 million you generate from the song – there’s two people responsible for that, the guys who wrote it. That’s Bob and I. So we couldn’t just walk away and hand it over to someone else, because if they screwed up somewhere along the line, or if an aid agency got it wrong . . . We promised people, ‘you give us a pound, we’ll give you a record and that pound would go to Africa’. Nobody was paid.

“We didn’t have any huge infrastructure at Band Aid. No building, no phones. We just did it. We begged, stole and borrowed. So once you’re embroiled in that, you can’t just go, ‘Okay, lads, I’ve done my bit, now I’m gonna go off and go back with my band’. It took a few years before I thought, ‘okay, the music’s starting to take over again’.

“Luckily, I was allowed to go back to the music thing. Bob wasn’t. Bob was seen as someone above and beyond mere music-making. But I was allowed to go out and just carry on doing it. I’m kinda lucky in that respect.”

ALTHOUGH URE'Ssubsequent solo career didn't match the chart success of his time with Ultravox, he wasn't stuck for work. He toured extensively throughout the 1990s, made albums and produced other bands at his studio in Bath, and shared stages with the likes of The Chieftains, Paul McCartney, Elton John and Eric Clapton. Over the past decade, he's also been producing and presenting radio shows for the BBC, including a history of the electric guitar and a tribute to one of his musical heroes, Alex Harvey. Just recently, he made his first trip to South Africa to make a documentary on the rock music of the townships. Along the way, he's collected an Ivor Novello award, honorary doctorates from the universities of Edinburgh and Dundee, and an OBE.

In 2005, Ure became “embroiled” once again in Band Aid, executive producing the Band Aid 20 single and getting roped into working on the Live 8 extravaganza. Although this time around Ure and Geldof had e-mail and mobile phones at their disposal, there was still a sense of déjà vu in the air.

“It was kind of sad in a way because it was still Bob and I doing it; it should have been someone else,” he says. “A lot of the same old faces were there that had done Live Aid. You do get the Chris Martins of the world who stand up and be counted, but it should have been someone young and sprightly like that, as opposed to the old fogeys, to organise.”

Anyone who saw Ultravox live in their heyday might notice a few key differences when the band take to the stage once again. Besides the absence of moustaches and mullets (or even the absence of hair), observant fans may notice a marked reduction in the banks of keyboards onstage.

“We used to tour with 26 synthesisers on stage. Crazy. Five-hour soundchecks, two-hour show. Could never do a festival, because you only got a line check at a festival, 10 minutes to check that it all works and get on,” he says. “So this time around we’re really getting our teeth into the technology. Instead of needing six keyboards to do something, all the sounds will come out of one sound source, which is the computer.”

Fans may also rejoice at the news that the band aren’t plugging a new album, and nor are they planning to outstay their welcome. Once the anniversary year is out, insists Ure, the four band members will be putting Ultravox back in its time capsule. “I’m under no delusion that I’m gonna come out and be a rock star all over again. It’s a celebratory thing. It’s gonna be a little bit like the old days – we’ll be writing cheques at the end to pay for it. It’s gonna be a very expensive holiday. We’re not out there to punt a new album, we’re not out there to play our ‘interesting’ new tracks.”

They will, Ure guarantees, play all the hits, along with selected tracks from their best-known albums, Vienna, Rage in Eden, Monumentand Lament.While Ultravox had their share of cheesy pop moments, says Ure, it was their "very electro, very Kraftwerky, very mid-European" sound that really appealed to their core fanbase.

"And we were awkward," he adds. "The record company wanted Viennapart two, three and four. And we went off to Conny Plank's studio in Germany and made the darkest record you could ever come up with. And sometimes by shaking it up and doing it differently, that's what creates something special.

“Maybe it’s paying back now, that’s why people are interested. Maybe there’s a little quality element there that’s survived through that period, and people respect that and think, ‘okay, if they’re gonna do it again, I’m sure they’re gonna do it well’.”

Ultravox play the Olympia, Dublin, on May 2 and the Waterfront, Belfast, on May 3