Saturday night in the City of the Dead: Ultravox feel the fear in the Western World — dangerousminds.net

Considering how absolutely NUTS I was about the John Foxx-led Ultravox when I was young (the badges I wore on my trenchcoat back then were of them, PiL, Kraftwerk, Nina Hagen, TG and the Psychedelic Furs) it occurred to me over the weekend (while I was blasting their classic Ha! Ha! Ha! album in the car) that we’ve never posted about them on the blog. Then I took a quick look on YouTube and it was obvious why we hadn’t: Slim pickings. Next to nothing and mostly unwatchable quality. Kind of a testament to how unfairly obscure the first incarnation of the band has become over the decades. Most Americans, of course, have probably never heard of either incarnation of Ultravox, but we are not concerned here with the Ultravox fronted by Midge Ure—a fey Scotsman with a John Waters-like moustache—that recorded the Vienna album and had many, many top ten singles and albums in the UK after John Foxx left for an influential but ultimately very culty solo career. I hate that group. They probably should have changed the name, but that version of Ultravox had all the hits and can still play double bills with Simple Minds filling football stadiums across Europe (even if they could barely fill a small club here). Thirty-five plus years later, it’s mostly only going to be rock snobs of a “certain age” who recall the John Foxx era, which is a shame because to my mind, that incarnation of Ultravox made some of the very best music of the late 1970s and it’s still fresh and exciting sounding today. They had a striking, original thing that they did and few groups since have explored the mutant wasteland that their music implied existed.

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