Midge Ure helped shape British synth-pop in the 1980s and is revisiting his Chrysalis-era solo catalog with the new multi-disc release Chapters: The Best Of.. (out November 13). The collection brings together solo hits, collaborations, and a new version of Visage’s “Fade To Grey.” The expanded editions pair the new stereo mixes with instrumental mixes and ten commissioned remixes. Those remixes take the songs in different directions, from light electronic pop to choral and orchestral arrangements, and sometimes bring forgotten details from the original recordings to the foreground.
Chapters: The Best Of follows the release earlier this year of A Man Of Two Worlds, Ure’s first solo album in 12 years. That double album pairs the vocal-driven songs he is known for with instrumental pieces he developed during lockdown. With that material out, Ure has turned his attention back to performing live.
Over Zoom, Ure discusses what the remixers brought out in the original recordings, how studio technology has changed, and his mixed feelings about looking back.
How did the idea of Chapters come about, and how did the project develop?
Midge Ure: It’s something that the old label asked us about, quite a few years ago now. They wanted to repackage, remix, re-release Ultravox stuff. We were a bit reticent at first until we started thinking about it because sonically things haven’t changed a massive amount between recordings from the 1960s and the recordings today. Sonically, it hasn’t gotten much brighter or better or clearer. But there are tools that you can use now in computers, software, where you can clean up a lot of the gaps in between the notes so that everything becomes more vibrant. And we started thinking about that and thought it’d be quite interesting. So we’ve done a series of these beautifully packaged box sets with half speed masters and vinyls and whatever. And when it came to doing this, I thought, okay, well, how can I make it even more interesting? The real interesting thing for me was not just digging out all the old stuff and collecting all the periphery, maybe not just the album stuff, but the stuff that was recorded in and around that time period. It was to get various people that had been associated with me over the years, either as musicians or producers or whatever, to choose a track and remix it and put their stamp on it and see what they came back with.
And it’s a really interesting combination of talents that have done this. The guys from the band Japan, Craig Armstrong, who’s a soundtrack guy, Wolfgang Flür from Kraftwerk. And what you end up getting, whether I like it or not, is their interpretation of you. Some of them come back, Craig Armstrong came back with this thing, it sounded very, very light and electronic, very 80s pop electronic, whereas Steve Jansen from Japan came back with this fantastic choral, orchestral thing. It was just wonderful. I found their interpretations of what I did and who I was infinitely more interesting, along with the Atmos things and the remixes themselves. That’s what made it interesting for me.
What was the process like in terms of arranging the remixes? Did you give people a choice of what track to do? Was it obvious who you wanted each one?
Midge Ure: Some of them were kind of predetermined when you think about it. “Wastelands,” Danny Mitchell co-wrote the song, so it made more sense for him to do the mix. Craig Armstrong chose something from when he was in my band, when I was touring America, opening up for Howard Jones way back in the 80s. Craig was part of my band at the time. He said ‘we used to play this song and it was one of my favorites.’ So he wanted to do his interpretation of that. Whereas other ones, the record label and I would sit down and go, okay, well, it seems to make perfect sense that this particular track, because it maybe had Mick Karn on the track, ‘after a fashion,’ that we’d give it to one of the guys in Japan because they knew Mick, they grew up with Mick, he was part of their childhood, their youth, give it to them and see what they came up with.
So it was kind of a bit of everything really. We didn’t force anyone to say, “No, you’ve only got that one left. You have to do something on that one.” If they didn’t want to do it, they didn’t do it and that’s fine.
A Man of Two Worlds also has an instrumental disc. Could you speak about the decision to do an instrumental CD on this as well?
Midge Ure: Well, again, it’s kind of a peek behind the scenes that people would never normally get the opportunity to see or hear. So back in the day when we were working with analog tape.
And analog mixing desks, it used to take so long to get a mix set up. You couldn’t recall it, not like today, you can’t just press a button and it all just goes back to how it was the day before or three months ago or 10 years ago. It took forever to get it to that point. Once you got the mix that you thought was right with the vocal levels and all of that, you would always do one with the vocal levels up, the main vocal levels up, and one with the main vocal levels down simply because if you said, “Okay, that’s great,” and you stripped the desk and you got ready for the next mix, and then you listened to it in the cold light of day and thought, “Oh, I can’t hear that vocal line. I’m not hearing that.” You’ve now got something that you can go to and cut in the slightly louder vocal line. Everything else stays the same, but the vocals are slightly louder. So it was just a trick that we used to do back in the day, and we learned that from George Martin about how to do that. But we also did, for every song that you would do, you would do a vocal-less version, not an instrumental version, a vocal-less version. Because a lot of television shows in Europe, when they used to send you off on a Friday or a Saturday to deepest, darkest Germany to go and do the big pop show with your latest single, a lot of them wanted you to sing live, but they didn’t have the facilities for you to perform live. So you would have to have a track that was just a backing track that you could turn up with and then sing the song live for their TV show.
So all of those things were done for a reason, but very, very, very rarely used. So that was why we thought, “Okay, this could be interesting. Let people hear the song almost like karaoke, you could sing along with it instead.” In fact, I’d be surprised if we don’t get many karaoke versions of it up on the internet now, of a favorite song.
You mentioned being able to clean up the old recordings with modern technology. To what degree do you feel you need to hold back to avoid changing the character of the old recordings?
Midge Ure: Well, I think when you’re doing remixes, there is no holding back. That said, it’s a recording. These days, again, with modern technology, you don’t have to record in a linear sense. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. You can record in sections. So you can think, okay, well, I want to start this with the chorus or I want to start this with the end or I want to start this with a midsection or a link or something. And you can do that on a computer. But back in the day, you had to have the arrangement absolutely right before you committed to tape. You could change things slightly, but that meant cutting up master tapes and all of that stuff. It was a mess. It never worked properly. So the idea that you can manipulate this stuff beyond what we could have done back in the day is quite exciting.
And you can end up screwing things up. You can make them so far removed from the original song that you can’t actually recognize what it is. So I think everyone was aware that that’s an element that a lot of the dance guys do. They take a song, they say, “I’m going to do a remix,” and they take one line of your vocal and then they put an entire new track behind it and it’s totally unrecognizable. It’s a different beast. Someone once said to me, “Having a remix done by a DJ is like taking your dog out for a walk and coming back with a cat.” It’s a different thing completely. So I think everyone was aware that that wasn’t what was wanted. Make it interesting by all means. Set a little puzzle there for people to think, “Okay, what is this? I recognize that melody, but I’m not sure what it’s from.” Hint at the things.
But what I found interesting was stuff that I would use, there’s no point in me doing this stuff because I would end up making it exactly as it was because that’s how I was satisfied with those mixes. So what people have done is to find something that’s appealed to them that maybe was in the background in the original mixes that we did and brought them to the forefront. So I hear things in there that I’ve completely forgotten we had done. So they’ve taken it and constructed it how they saw fit. And that’s what was really interesting about the whole thing.
Beyond the remixes, were there any tracks particularly shaped by the technology available at the time? How did those limitations influence the way you worked compared with today?
Midge Ure: I don’t think there’s anything. I mean, going back, it’s a weird thing. It’s like jumping in a time machine and going back and changing your mistakes. Your mistakes lead to other things. They lead to something happening that you would never have dreamed of doing. So I wouldn’t go back and change anything because that’s a knock on effect. But what I did realize was that a lot of these recordings, certainly things like “After a Fashion” or things like that, around that period, was the start of sampling. I had a sampler, we had to build it because you couldn’t really buy them at the time. You bought a kit and you’d assemble this kit and make a sampler where you could sample two seconds of a sound and use that. I did that with the Band Aid recording, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” That whole intro section is me sampling Tears for Fears drums from the beginning of “The Hurting” and sampling my vocal two octaves down from what it would normally be, slowing it right down.
So it was the use of what was then cutting edge technology that I could go back and hear because it was all in its infancy. Now sampling’s just gone crazy. Everyone does it. Everyone samples stuff. But back then it was banging garage doors. It was hitting biscuit tins. It was creating the sounds. You didn’t have a library. So you still had to be incredibly creative in your outlook, even with the new cutting edge technology. There was no shortcuts, but that was what going back and hearing some of this stuff brought back to me. I’m not sure I would’ve approached or I could think of any other way of approaching things that I’ve done now in hindsight. Certain things I’d try and change, but I think the approach at the time was the only way you could actually do it.
When I interviewed you a few years ago, I think it might have been around the Vienna reissue, you said something about how you didn’t really like looking back at the past or you were hesitant to do so. Has your relationship with your musical past changed over the years?
Midge Ure: Well, it does change. It changes every minute because you’re getting further away from it. And the old problem I always had with it was sometimes you’re pleasantly surprised by what you did and what you achieved, and other times you’re just completely horrified because you were young and you were naive and you can’t get your head back into the same place that it was when you created those things. So I suppose my love-hate relationship with delving into the past is still there and it maybe gets slightly more aggressive as you get older. I don’t want to have to sift through all the old stuff. I really honestly only listen to the old stuff if I’m searching for something new to play live or relearn something, go back there and listen to write the lyrics down again because I’ve forgotten them. So as a tool, the past is great.
As a learning curve, it’s even better, because you learn what you don’t want to do again. And hopefully you don’t want to tread the same path. So you don’t try and repeat what you’ve done back then, but you’ve learned from that already. So that takes you onto the next thing. So it’s always a progressive move. It’s a great thing to reflect on now and again, but not to delve into.
Could you speak about “Fade to Grey”? I know that’s been a staple of your live shows and you did a new studio recording of it.
Midge Ure: Well, it’s a bit of a con, really. It’s not actually a studio recording at all. I think the label said, “Oh yeah, yeah. Well, it’s a studio recording because we finished it in the studio.” I’m thinking, well, when they did it, they said they wanted to do this. And when they did it, I had to ask them how they’d done this because we hadn’t recorded it. We hadn’t been in a studio. Because I’ve been doing this thing live where I don’t use any amplifiers on stage, so there’s no spill, there’s no sound on stage. So everything is like a recording studio. All the instruments on stage go through the processes and the electronic drums go through the processes, all go through the front of house system. That’s it. We hear what we hear in our ears, everything else comes out of the system the way you would do a mix in a studio. And what they had done was they’d taken “Fade to Grey” from one of the live recordings, taken out all the ambient mics.
So it’s just the signal from the keyboards, the electronic drums and the vocal, got rid of all the ambience and it sounds like a studio recording. So when they played it to me, which I loved because it had an edge to it. I’ll never hear what I sound like live. I can hear it. I can see it on television. I can watch it on the screen. I can hear a mix of it and stuff, but I will never get that sensation of standing out front listening to what’s coming out those speakers because I hear something different. So when I heard it, I was completely blown away at the edge that this had. It was punchier. It had more attack to it and more aggression to it or something. So I absolutely loved the fact they’d done it, but I didn’t go into the studio and say, ” I’m going to rerecord that song.” I’m not very good at re-recording things. I’m okay playing them live, but the idea of going in and trying to do a carbon copy of something you did 40 years ago is abhorrent to me.
One track that really stood out to me that I kind of had forgotten about was the collaboration with Kate Bush.
Midge Ure: “Sister and Brother.” Yeah. It was one of those tracks where had it lined up to be a single and there was some hoo-ha with the record label at the time and it was never released. Kate was all up for doing it. She was quite happy that we were going to put it out. And it was one of those oddities. I’d been working on material on my own and I bumped into Kate after one of the Prince’s Trust events or during a Prince’s Trust event. So Prince Charles, as he was then, now King Charles, has a charity, the Prince’s Trust, and he did a series of rock concerts, which I MD’d quite a few of them. And he was giving a little thank you to the artist who’d given the time to generate the money for his charity. And it was at Kensington Palace. It all sounds very posh.
And Kate was there and I was there and we were chatting away about this stuff. And she asked me what I was up to and I said, “Well, I’m in the middle of an album.” So she was in the middle of the “Hounds of Love.” I said, “I’m in the middle of an album, and I’ve written a song that I think is a duet. I’d love you to do it.” And she said, “Well, send me the tapes.” So I sent her the master tapes and she was in the middle of her album. And I honestly thought I wouldn’t hear from her again or at least for months because when do you feel like putting someone else’s song on your multi-track and start to try and sing that? I only asked her to sing one of the verses and a couple of choruses with me. And she called up a few days later and said, “Would you like to come over to my studio and hear it?”
And my one regret is that I wasn’t there. I didn’t see her doing it. I went to her studio and she said, “Okay, here we go.” And she pressed the play button and out came this Kate choir. She’d obviously spent hours doing this and then doing this choral thing at the end of it with multitracked vocals. And it was just astounding. I stood there like a kid in a candy shop. It was the best thing I’d ever heard, Kate singing something that I’d written. So yeah, it never made it as a single, unfortunately, but they’ve done a great job with the extended remix of this track. So I’m really pleased with how that one’s turned out.
Chapters follows A Man of Two Worlds, your first album in 12 years. Do you feel that there’s a relationship between the two?
Midge Ure: Not really. I think Chapters takes you up to the end of the Chrysalis years, when I was on Chrysalis. There are many albums since then that I don’t know whether we’ll go back and look at again or not. But for me, A Man of Two Worlds kind of sums up what I was doing. 12 years is a ridiculous amount of time. It sums up what I was doing at that moment in time. I was very slow, mainly because I’ve been touring an awful lot, which you know could have spoken to you about all of…
So I tour a lot more now than I ever did back in the day. So when I’m not touring is the only time I’m in the studio and the only time I can really write. I’ve tried writing when I’m touring and it doesn’t work. The only time I can really write is when I’m static with my tools around me, with my instruments and I can focus on this. So I’d been working on songs when COVID kicked in and I was fortunate I had my studio, but I had no one around me to play the new material to. Because you have to bounce back. You have to get this feedback from someone. You’re working in a totally insular way, you’re engineering this stuff, you’re doing the recording, you’re playing the instrument. And the only way I could find to discern whether what you were doing was good or not was to walk away from it.
And of course during lockdown, you can’t walk away anywhere. Normally I would go out and do a few shows somewhere, come back a couple weeks later, walk into the studio, play the tune and go, “Right, okay. Now I know what I need to do.” I couldn’t do that. So my solution for that was you can’t leave, you’re in the studio, you’ve got your family here, you’ve got to keep yourself sane, was to start working on some instrumental material, which I’ve always worked on, but I’ve never worked on a complete body of instrumental stuff. So I’d go away from the song, start working on an instrumental track.
Finish that possibly, go back to the song, fix the song, do what I was going to try and do anyway, start another song, go and do another instrumental track. That gave me the space, the gaps that I needed, but keeping the whole creative flow running all the way through. I thought I had two separate albums, two completely separate albums until I played it to Ty Unwin, an engineer and producer I’ve worked with. And he said, “No. It’s one album. It’s one album. They are related. They’re brother and sister. They should be side by side. They have the same essence, the same feel. They were recorded in the same period. It was the same thought process. They need to be together.” And that for me was really exciting. I’d never released a double album before. I’d never released an album of totally instrumental material and songs. So to me, that was quite novel and a nice way to let people hear some of the instrumental work that I do.
There was a long gap between new studio albums. Are you looking to avoid that in the future? Have you been working on new material?
Midge Ure: Well, this year since Man of Two Worlds came out, I’ve toured the UK, done an extensive tour of the UK, done festivals and stuff throughout the summer. This weekend I’m heading off to Australia, New Zealand to tour down there. I have more UK dates back in November just before the end of the year. So I’ve been concentrating more on the live stuff. If you spent 12 years on and off in the studio creating something, the last thing you want to do is go straight back into the studio. I need to satisfy the other side of my creativity and that’s the live side. So I’m concentrating on that and immersing myself in the one thing you can’t do when you’re in the studio. And that is the camaraderie of touring with a band and a crew and that club that you end up in for a few weeks.
And sometimes you need that and that enables you to go back into the studio fresh, ready to go in there on your own and start coming up with something new.
For more info and the latest tour dates, visit www.midgeure.co.uk.
Chapters: The Best Of is available on a Double LP Black Vinyl, a CD Standard Edition, a 3 CD Deluxe Edition, and Super Deluxe Edition is exclusively releasing a Blu-Ray Atmos Mix of the compilation and a hand-pressed edition of the 2 LP on Splatter Vinyl.
CD One The Songs [2026 Stereo Mixes]
01 Yellow Pearl 2.27
02 Fade To Grey 3.56
03 No Regrets 4.04
04 The Man Who Sold The World 6.00
05 After A Fashion [Midge Ure & Mick Karn] 4.12
06 Living In The Past 5.44
07 The Gift 5.07
08 If I Was 6.15
09 That Certain Smile 4.10
10 Wasteland 4.52
11 When The Wind Blows 4.11 *
12 Call of The Wild 4.24
13 Hell To Heaven 4.05 *
14 Answers To Nothing 5.01
15 Sister & Brother [Midge Ure & Kate Bush] 5.47
16 Dear God 5.02
17 Remembrance Day 4.30
* Deluxe Edition bonus track
CD Two CONNECTIONS
01 Fade To Grey – Chris Payne Mix 5.13
02 After A Fashion – Richard Barbieri Remix 5.15
03 The Man Who Sold The World – Midge Ure 2026 Remix 7.46
04 That Certain Smile – Craig Armstrong Remodel 4.44
05 Call of The Wild – Ty Unwin Reconstructed 4.55
06 If I Was – Blank & Jones so8os Reconstruction 6.45
07 Sister and Brother – Steve Jansen Remix 4.35
08 Wastelands – Danny Mitchell’s Remix 8.04
09 Answers To Nothing – 2026 Rework 5.15
10 Dear God – Flür/Duggal Remix 5.05
CD Three The Music [2026 Instrumental Versions]
01 Yellow Pearl 2.27
02 Fade To Grey 3.56
03 No Regrets 4.04
04 The Man Who Sold The World 6.00
05 After A Fashion [Midge Ure & Mick Karn] 4.12
06 Living In The Past 5.44
07 The Gift 5.07
08 If I Was 6.15
09 That Certain Smile 4.10
10 Wasteland 4.52
11 When The Wind Blows 4.11
12 Call of The Wild 4.24
13 Hell To Heaven 4.05
14 Answers To Nothing 5.01
15 Sister & Brother [Midge Ure & Kate Bush] 5.47
16 Dear God 5.02
17 Remembrance Day 4.30
