Midge Ure speaks about Barrowlands, Ultravox and Glasgow audiences

“If I really thought about it, it’s a long, long time ago but everything to me seems like last year or the year before, I’m absolutely useless with dates,” he says.

Midge Ure and Band Electronica will perform at the Barrowlands next month with the Voice and Visions tour, celebrating 40 years since the release of the two albums, transporting fans back to the decade of electronics, experimentation, synthesizers and great songwriting, alongside his incredible back catalogue of work.

Ahead of the tour, Midge had to delve back into the albums which were released in 1981 and 1982, and says although it’s been a “strange journey” - he had to relearn a lot of the songs and found many didn’t resonate with him as much as he thought they would - it took him back to “great times” the band shared.

He said: “I can’t quite remember who I was back then, or some of the songs.

“I thought initially I’d just do both albums, and of course you go back, and you listen to it and just through the passage of time or maturity or getting old, whatever you want to call it, you don’t quite relate to some of it anymore so I’ve kind of cherry picked the songs.

“Weirdly I had to go and download both albums, I didn’t own either of them, which is really sad, but going back, I think in equal measure I found nuggets that I’d forgotten we done that really stood the test of time and made the transition to performing now.

“But equally so, I found other ones that I just would have felt a bit of an imposter standing there singing, not feeling comfortable about it.”

He continued: “Music’s a wonderful thing, like smells, you hear something, or you smell something and it instantly takes you back.

“With music from the past it instantly takes you back to who you were hanging about with and what you were wearing and who you thought you wanted to be when you were a kid, and it’s one of the few things that can actually do that.

“So, my little journey going back 40 years to basically relearn a lot of these songs, took me back to a lot of the great times we had.

“Ultravox was a great band to be in, it was a great time to be in a band.”

The Voice and Visions tour will be Midge’s first since 2019 when he and Band Electronica embarked on The 1980 Tour.

Recalling how his dad used to dance there and remembering Glasgow’s music scene when he was a young artist, he says performing on the Barrowlands stage is an experience like no other for musicians.

“My dad used to dance in the Barrowlands when he was a young man, so you enter that building and you can feel the years and years and years of music and love and madness and everything that that building has ever hosted, it’s there and when the audience go for it they really go for it,” he says.

“On that spring dance floor, it’s really quite frightening to see how much they move.”

He continued: “I was fortunate enough in my spotty youth that my management company in Glasgow owned the Green’s Playhouse and I saw it transform into the Glasgow Apollo, so I saw every band that you could ever imagine on a nightly basis, everything from T Rex to Led Zeppelin, and it was a musical upbringing so I know what an audience in Glasgow can be like.

“And everyone who ever played the Apollo would come back and say they’d never experienced anything like it and the Barrowlands is exactly the same.”

And while Midge says he loves performing in front of a Glasgow audience, they always make sure to keep him grounded.

He explained: “I think it’s quite easy for artists to don their on-stage persona and become this other-worldly being for a moment – but not in Glasgow.

“You get ‘hey Jim, sing us Forever and Ever’, so there’s no getting away from it, you’re one of them, you’re one of the locals when you walk on that stage, and it’s great, they embrace you and they’ve adopted you, you’re one of theirs.

“Whether you know them or not, they know you.”

Midge Ure and Band Electronica will be at the Barrowland Ballroom on Thursday, May 18.