In recent years, Ultravox’s Vienna, Rage in Eden, Quartet, and Lament albums have been reissued as deluxe editions, and now they are joined by a new edition of their 1984 compilation The Collection. The album brings together 14 singles spanning the years 1980–1984, documenting the classic Ultravox lineup of Midge Ure, Billy Currie, Chris Cross, and Warren Cann. This era followed the earlier John Foxx-fronted incarnation of the band and preceded a brief ’90s version with Currie as the only original member, as well as the 2012 reunion album, Brilliant.
Among the tracks included on The Collection are the iconic “Vienna,” the anti-nuclear war anthem “Dancing With Tears in My Eyes,” synth-driven classics like “All Stood Still,” “Hymn,” and “The Voice,” and “Love’s Great Adventure,” a single recorded specifically for the original compilation. The album showcases Ultravox’s knack for fusing electronics with rock music while always prioritizing strong songwriting. Ure has proven this in solo concerts, where the material still works stripped down to just a guitar, despite the layered production of the original recordings.
“‘All Stood Still’ is a classic example, I think, of what Ultravox was: a rock band who used technology, a rock band who used violins and violas,” Ure said in a past Chaos Control interview. “You get the pulsating running bass synth and some heavy, grungy guitar and driving synthesizer. We were incredibly fortunate to have Billy Currie in the band; he was there from day one. His way of playing a synthesizer solo was more akin to Jimi Hendrix than it was to Kraftwerk. The guitar and the synthesizer could intertwine and pull bits from each other, and it really summed up what Ultravox was all about at that moment in time.”
The new deluxe box set contains a further 14 singles, as well as all of the band’s B-sides, collected together for the first time. It also includes alternative and unreleased versions, along with 10 newly created 1980s-style 12″ extended versions mixed by Midge Ure, Steven Wilson, and Blank & Jones, among others. It also features two Blu-ray discs with over four hours of footage, including all of the band’s promotional videos, alternative versions, and a collection of BBC TV appearances from Top of the Pops and live performances. This material is particularly interesting given Ultravox’s pioneering role in the early development of music videos.
Ure discussed this in an interview I did with him for Please Kill Me.
“I remember going to the label, who insisted on sending you on a plane every weekend to Milan or Berlin or somewhere else in deepest, darkest Europe to do a big Friday or Saturday night television show to plug your record. I remember going to the record company and saying we wanted to make a pop promo. And they said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because we could appear on all those shows at the same time. We control what’s broadcast.’ They didn’t get it.
“So we made a video for the second single I was on, ‘Passing Strangers.’ It was unlike any video that had come before because it was shot on film. With Ultravox, we didn’t stop at just making the music. We designed the sleeves, looked at the adverts in the music papers, and co-directed or found directors for the pop videos. When we made ‘Passing Strangers,’ we shot it on 16-millimeter film, cropped the screen top and bottom to look like CinemaScope, and moved from black and white to color. It was grainy and very film noir, because we knew exactly what it was meant to be.
“At the time, videos for most artists had no relationship to the music at all. They were just shiny presentations of the band performing or acting something out that had nothing to do with the lyrics. We got heavily involved in that side of things. By the time the ‘Vienna’ video was due to be shot, we knew exactly what we wanted. It had to enhance the song’s textual ambience, and that is exactly what it did. Once other artists saw that, they jumped on the bandwagon and quite rightly wanted flashy little mini-movies to help sell their records.”
The Collection deluxe box set is available in several formats and can be purchased at https://ultravox.lnk.to/TCD. The music is also available for digital purchase and streaming.
The Chaos Control archive contains several interviews with Ure. Check it out here.
