Midge Ure: A Man Of Two Worlds

Could soft be the new hard? Sound-wise, Midge Ure’s new album is the gentlest comeback imaginable, but there’s real lyrical bite smuggled in with the meditative vibes. Robert Plummer fans the flame.

Slik, Visage, Ultravox, Band Aid and beyond: Midge Ure has had one of the more admirably wayward careers of a major pop star in our times. For me, though, he remains the youthful Rich Kids frontman who autographed my copy of their debut single alongside Glen Matlock, Rusty Egan and Steve New at Bonaparte Records in Croydon in 1978. That’s a whole vanished world in a nutshell – proof positive of the musical distance the man has covered, from teen beat to power pop to electronica.

Self-indulgent reminiscences aside, however, what else does Ure inspire in us in 2026? Well, since the music industry recently revisited his most successful period with a deluxe reissue of Ultravox’s hits, the stage is set for his first new material in 12 years. And a curious beast it is too: definitely an album of two halves, as its title implies.

The first part, subtitled World One, finds Ure unleashing his inner Erik Satie for a series of eight ambient piano-led instrumentals. The opening numbers initially sound more suited to Classic FM or BBC Radio 3 Unwind than LTW, but the more pastoral side of Krautrock is in evidence too. A Different Side recalls Cluster and Eno at their most bucolic, while Just Below The Surface and The Dimming Light have overtones of Tangerine Dream – we’re talking Berlin, not Vienna.

The meat of the matter comes in World Two, eight songs of stately anguish, despatches from a dark place that somehow we all know far too well. Just Words could have been inspired by some demented small-hours presidential post on Truth Social: “Load up your thoughts, take aim and fire,” sings Ure. “Scream your mindless roar, like you’ve done before,” he adds before concluding: “We only lose from words you use.”

That slides seamlessly into World Away, which resonates like a rebuke to the arrogant authoritarians who run our lives. “We see your fairytale means nothing/Out of luck, out of touch and time,” in Ure’s accusatory words. “But you’re too blind to see/This world you hold is more than just your world,” he admonishes as the synths boom like depth charges in the mix.

Shouting To The Moon coasts on chilled-out piano and sweeping strings, while its message stresses the eternal difficulty of mobilising the masses for the right kind of change. Ure is the solitary sentinel, afraid of dreaming “a dream that dies too soon” and “preaching words that fall on fallow ground” amid the “stupid noise from smart devices”. In the end, he is left with his lament: “If we cannot cry together soon, all that’s left is crying to the moon.”

By now, the mood of eloquent existential despair is well established. Ure is the everyman for our age, “caught in the middle” as one of his song titles has it: “God only knows what keeps me strong/It’s wrong, just wrong.” In another, he is the “ordinary man”, looking for “something more for this man to give/Than just give in”.

Ure’s yearning for a better time and place reaches its apex in Somewhere Out There, a beatless ballad that gives his world-weary voice room to breathe. “Picture yourself in a world where they care/Somewhere out there,” he sighs.

Aggressive guitars and big beats strike an anthemic note in The Man Who Stole Your Soul as Ure issues a rallying cry for action. He bemoans the change “from Motherland to Fatherland, from open hearts to twisted blinkered views”. “Time to take it back,” he exhorts.

The album exits on an elegiac note with Fan The Flame, another song of regret for the state of things. Ure rejects the “cruel selfish game” of his adversaries and turns his back on them. “Close the door and lose the key/It’s over now, baby blue,” are his parting words.

Forty-two years ago, Midge Ure was a utopian who turned dreams into reality, feeding the world by co-writing one trite yet powerful song. But in 2026, Ethiopia has been hit harder than any other African country by Donald Trump’s decision to slash the US humanitarian aid budget. Small wonder that Ure’s latest album comes across as a requiem for decency, the work of a 72-year-old man who has known a more compassionate era and wants it back.

To sum up, it’s a cri de coeur of quiet desperation from an unexpected source that maybe shouldn’t have been so unexpected after all. So many of music’s elder statesmen get accused of going through the motions when they release a new album, but in this case, the cynics can back off. It may not shift the planet on its axis the way Band Aid did, but Midge Ure is using his powers for good again – and it makes a righteous sound.

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You can find Midge Ure’s official website here. He is also on Facebook, Instagram and X.

All words by Robert Plummer. More writing by Robert can be found at his author’s archive. He is also on X as @robertp926.