8/14/2023 0 Comments Youtube ultravox vienna![]() There’s a lot of instinct involved in music, isn’t there? You can’t really determine if it’s logical, or else it’d get awfully dull. And oddly enough, things turned out well. Maybe I was, but you just have to do what seems right at the time. I thought: maybe I’m on the wrong track completely. The whole thing seemed quite normal and I couldn’t understand why other people didn’t get it. “But it wasn’t surprising to me at the time. Everyone should own the first three Ultravox albums.”ĭoes John Foxx hear this music from the distant past and wonder how it was so prescient? Does he hear its obsession with sex and machines and artificiality and living deaths and fear of apocalypse in the western world and ever think: how did I know that then? How did I see the future? Nick Rhodes (even a stopped clock, etc) has said, “Ultravox were the link between punk and what came next. ![]() Forty years on they sound impossibly, romantically, futuristic. At the time they seemed impossibly, romantically, futuristic. Island released their self-titled debut in February 1977, the follow-up Ha! Ha! Ha! in October. Their first two albums arrived with indecent, hungry, eagerly creative haste, within eight months of each other. But the original, Foxx-led, Ultravox!, with that overzealous exclamation adopted as a homage to Neu! before Neu! were fashionable, were a very different beast. And that band’s albums contain some mighty Euro-synth salvos. They’re a little harshly sneered at, thanks to Ure’s uncool Band Aid associations, even though the Scot was at the heart of many prime Eighties things, from 'Vienna' to Visage. We tend to think of the later Ultravox, without the exclamation mark and with Midge Ure vocalising in windswept, homage-to-Leni-Riefenstahl videos, as New Romantics more than anything else. We don’t think of Ultravox! as a punk band. But punk broke barriers, and they needed to be broken.” We were listening to Roxy Music, Bowie, Krautrock… we had a wider palette. “Things moved quickly back then.” If you put it to Foxx that the problem early Ultravox! faced was that they were post punk before punk had finished saying its piece, he laughs, “We were “pre-punk” before punk had started too! People weren’t ready. “Being ahead of your time is worse than being behind your time if you want people to have some context for it”, John Foxx has told me.
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