Speaking of videos, Ultravox was certainly a major part of the early 80s music video revolution.
Watch Ultravoxs performance of Dancing with Tears in my Eyes at Live Aid.
Are there any contemporaries of Ultravox, whose social media campaigns really impress you?
In the 90s, a lot of people criticized 80s electronic music as being disposable. What are your thoughts on that?
Download.com caught up with Ure about mobile recording and touring, taking pictures on his phone, the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of social media -- and most importantly, whether he downloaded Visages recent reunion album. Do you ever use mobile apps to create music?
What is your studio setup like?
Watch Midge Ures recent performance of Visages Fade to Grey.
Youve chosen not to take part in the recent Visage reunion. Have you downloaded the bands new album?
You post a lot of photos on your pages. Which is your preferred app?
In the studio, even before Mac purchased it, it was Logic for recording and sequencing and theres a software that comes with Mac called MainStage, which is a live version of the studio with the ability to use sounds you made during the actual of the records, so you can have them split across your keyboards, which eliminate the 26 keyboards we used the last time we toured in 1985 or 86.
With Mick Social Networking, we found out reading our iPads. It was tweeted and that was it. But thats how you find out everything these days. But I dont think theres a good way to find out that theres been a death, but its always better to find out on a personal level rather than in a cold and calculated way. Finding out that someone you know or someone you worked with, or someone you respect and admire died over an electronic message thats just been thrown out there, is just a little cold and calculated.
An electro-pop pioneer, singer-guitarist Midge Ure called early-80s club-goers to the dance floor with Visages Fade to Grey and Ultravoxs Vienna, Reap the Wild Wind, and Dancing With Tears in My Eyes. He later morphed into a philanthropic powerhouse who raised millions for mine relief, co-producing Band Aids Do They Know Its Christmas? single and mega-concerts Live Aid and Live8. After scoring solo hits No Regrets, If I Was, Dear God, and Breathe, Ure reformed Ultravox in 2009 for the release of 2012s Brilliant album.
I spoke to a friend a year ago who had an idea about doing an app for charity, where you make it like a game. You buy bits of pieces to enhance the game and the bits are donations and I thought that was an interesting take on it, bearing in mind that we used the medium that people understood back in 1984, which was the record.
Josh RotterJosh Rotter is a staff writer for Download.com. Outside of fine-tuning copy, Josh enjoys viewing classic films, attending live music events, taking marathon walks, and preparing Cordon Bleu-caliber cuisine.
We used MainStage when we did the tour of America, recently, and on the Live in Chicago album. We used it on both sets of keyboards and its instant and really quick and very easy to change. Its not a problem saying, I dont like that string sound, lets do this. And as long as you have the software, its really easy to use.
Im guilty of helping to create the monster. The moment that pop videos came along, as beneficial as it was to the artist, it made us lazy. It kind of killed that creativity that we all have, the ability to hear one piece of music and have different interpretations of what that songs about. I think weve lost that along the line.
I think Facebook was something I probably avoided for quite some time, meaning I didnt start dabbling in it again until Ultravox got back together again, like four years ago, and I just thought it was a great way of letting them into the back door, if you will, the inner sanctum, but doing it completely painlessly. You could interact with people when you choose to interact with people, so I started tweeting and doing the Facebook thing, so people could see that Ultravox really were back together again and really were going to tour.
Speaking of Japan, I noticed your recent tweet about the bands late bassist Mick Karn. How did you learn of his passing?
I wanted to redress the balance of the scale somewhat. I wanted to build a one-stop shop where ns, artists, and songwriters could go and get a ir deal, where people could come together as a collective, kind of people power in a way, and basically give them the information that they need to find and generate an income from music. It was a good idea and we almost got there and then the recession reared its ugly head and we lacked funding.
I have experimented with that but its too fiddly. Ive always wanted to be in a situation where I could have mobile recording. But the idea of being able to do something on an iPad or on your phone is great, and an app like GarageBand for the iPad is fun, but its more like a toy. The reality is that if you want to create something well, you need to be static. You need keyboards and a microphone in front of you. What I use all the time, thats better than any clever app that I have is iTalk Recorder. So when Im driving and I come up with an idea, I can pick up my phone and hit a button and sing into it. I dont have to do anything else.
Can you describe your touring setup?
So theres some kind of recompense for it, but as it becomes more and more established, people are starting to use Spotify in situations where they normally would have had a radio playing in the background. So maybe artists can make money from it. But I think young people access new music on YouTube more than anywhere else.
The artist behind 80s electronic bands Visage and Ultravox chats about mobile recording and touring, phone pics, and the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of social media.
Will Ultravox tour the U.S. anytime soon?
Ive played with it. When we found ourselves back involved with a major record label again,new york asian escort model and having to work on the reunion album, Live Nation needed to spread the information. They said, How about we do an app for this? But the app was incredibly basic and really didnt give me a lot of information other than tour dates and a little bit of video and some quotes from the band and some Twitter feeds. But I think we purposely kept it light, because rather than focus on that stuff, we decided to focus on music, and telling people it was out there, the traditional way, which is now Facebook and Twitter.
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Were spread all over the place. Warren Cann, our drummer, lives in California; Billy Currie, our keyboard player lives in London, and Chris Cross and I both live on the outskirts of Bath. Ultravox is quite an expensive machine to fire up and carry around, with the technology involved and everything we have to carry with us, so it means were limited by where we can get to play, although Ive been working very hard trying to get the band to the States, on a tour.
Watch the Midge Ure co-produced Do They Know Its Christmas? video, complete with an all-star cast.
These days kids dont understand that, so maybe apps and games are the new way to connect with them and fund these. I think that would have been helpful. Just the ct that people today could download the song, it would have sold more and generated even more income.
Do you think mobile music recording is a d?
The one I use the most is Camera Plus. And its great, because you not only focus on your subject, but can change the aperture and so on, so you have more control than you would with an SLR camera. And you can put app effects on it, and theres this great Ansel Adams setting that puts everything into this beautiful, grainy, misty, black &ut as a tool for an artist, Im not sure if it does you any vors. I think the royalty rate is very small, that I dont see how artists make money from it. As a tool for other people to hear your music, its ntastic. Its definitely a step up from someone stealing your music and then sharing it on the Internet.
I think the person that stands out in this field is Peter Gabriel. The amount of content that they come up with, and not just historic content, is amazing. They have archived everything he did, so sitting next to a video of Peter doing a concert in 1979, youll have a new piece with Peter singing a new song or showing you what hes up to in the studio. Whether he does all this himself, I dont know, but hes certainly engaged with it, and did it much, much earlier than I ever did. Hes always on the cutting-edge of the technological revolution.
You rung in the mid-1980s by co-producing the hugely successful Do They Know Its Christmas? single and Live Aid, along with Bob Geldof. Is there an app that would have made Live Aid a little easier to manage?
Its easy for someone to come around and say that the music of the 80s was cold, distant, electronic, and European, and it was all of those things, but there were also some very good songs. There was ntastic music and very diverse music created in the 80s. Japan was totally different from Heaven 17, which was totally different from Duran Duran, which was totally different from Talk Talk. All those bands used the synths and the drum machines and the austere imagery and photos and videos and all that, but what were left with is a legacy of ntastic mStar Apps Midge Ureusic.
Watch Ultravoxs iconic Vienna video.
It was a valuable tool for information, but an interesting tool for an artist, as well, because these days there is no one fighting in your corner besides you. Its actually an incredible tool for just saying, Hi. So if youre curious about what Im up to, I have webcams in my studio and sometimes I do a little video or write a blog, whereas prior to the Internet we never even saw n mail. There was no way for anyone to actually feel close to an artist.
We came to dance. The piper calls out a different rhyme. He cracks the whip and we step in time. -- Ultravox
If you cant wait for Ures return to the U.S. for another round of solo dates in 2014, you can get your fix by purchasing this years 15-track Live in Chicago album or the eBook of his 90s autobiography If I Was, exclusively on MidgeUre.com.
Why did you launch a music social network, Tunited, back in 2009?
If youve never heard of Midge, Ure in for a thrill.
No, but I heard the first single and thought it was fine.
Youre very active on Twitter and Facebook. Do you consider social media a thrill or a burden?
I dont think its a d. I think its developing. Ive seen more and more people using iPads onstage. Whether theyre using them as music sources, synth sources, backing tracks, or guitar amplifiers, people are using them and there are companies dedicated iPad stands for them. They are slowly but surely slipping into daily use.
When Ultravox goes on tour we have four laptops onstage and even the MacBook Pros are designed for use in your home or office and even the connections are not designed to be toured, so theyre still very flaky things. Theyre stable, but we use those because thats the stability that we need. We need something thats a large screen, something with a keyboard; we need the software thats big enough to do it and an iPad hasnt quite gotten that yet. Although I saw Howard Jones a couple weeks ago and he was using iPads onstage.
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