Midge Ure today (photo: Nathan Roach)

Midge Ure is currently on his self-contained, two-man Band in a Box tour of America, playing selections from his vast catalog using various loops, samples, and programmed drums. One song that the Ultravox/Visage legend probably won’t be playing is Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” which he co-wrote in 1984 with Bob Geldof and for which he played almost all the instruments (listen to his original one-man demo at the very bottom of this article). But fans will soon get to hear a Trevor Horn-produced mashup of all four versions of that perennial holiday charity single, Ure exclusively tells Lyndsanity.

“In the process now. They’ve been delving around trying to find footage. We didn’t have the luxury of having a film crew… so we’ve desperately been trying to find all the footage from Band Aid, Band Aid 20, Band Aid 30,” says Ure when asked if a documentary, similar to Netflix’s Greatest Night in Pop doc about USA for Africa and the making of “We Are the World,” is in the works for Band Aid’s upcoming 40th anniversary.

“There’s a big megamix about to come out, done by Trevor Horn [whose Sarm West Studios was the location for the 1984 all-star recording session], utilizing all of the different mixes and a bunch of new stuff, so you can have various vocalists. It’s technology. You can have various vocalists together,” Ure reveals. “He’s done his magic. He’s created kind of this slightly symphonic, mega-extra-long thing, which was just wonderful. It’s great. It’s a great way of celebrating the 40 years, really. That’s all happening this year. You’re the first person I’ve told.”

So, will even Dizzy Rascal’s rap interlude from the 2004 version make it into the new Trevor Horn mix? “There’s a bit of that in there as well, yeah,” Ure chucklingly confirms .

Ure appreciates the historic significance “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” — “There’s something about that ominous beginning that makes the hair on your arms stand up every time you hear the multi-track vocals,” he muses — but he has stated in at least one of our previous interviews that he doesn’t think “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” is a great song. And even now he shrugs, “It’s OK. It’s a song with no chorus.” He certainly doesn’t think it’s the best song he’s ever written… and a strong case for that, actually, is his Band in a Box setlist, which is packed with synthpop classics like Visage’s “Fade to Grey” and Ultravox’s “Vienna,” “Reap the Wild Wind,” and “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes.”

At age 70, Ure is currently simultaneously working on three albums, with no signs of slowing down, but he’s also happy to revisit his past, both onstage and in interviews. For casual music fans aren’t fully aware of this self-described “invisible man of rock’s” many artistic achievements, the fascinating video interview above and Q&A below serves as a crash course in all things Ure — covering his stint in the Rich Kids and how the advent of synthesizers split that band in half; why he turned down an offer to join the Sex Pistols; how he managed to be in Ultravox, Visage, and Thin Lizzy (yes, that Thin Lizzy) at the same time; how Phil Lynott became a one-man unofficial publicist for Ultravox at a crucial point in that band’s career; recording with Sir George Martin; memories of Live Aid and being the musical director for the Prince’s Trust concerts; and other “pinch-me moments” from his brilliant career.

LYNDSANITY: We’ve discusses “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” but there’s a lot of other stuff to cover, because your Band in a Box tour is an overview of your entire career and catalog. What’s the concept for this semi-self-contained show?

MIDGE URE: It was born out of necessity, really. My old friend Howard Jones came to me a couple of years ago and wanted to do a tour that was kind of electronic-heavy, and he wanted me to go out there with a full-blown band. I had to explain to him the fiscal problems of doing something like that; Howard was commercially successful in America, much more so than I was or Ultravox was. So, we came up with this hybrid where I would use his keyboard player as the main keyboard player and I would program some drums and synthesized bass and play keys and guitar. I was reticent about doing it because it felt a bit, I don’t know, is it karaoke or is it live? I’m not sure. It’s not something that sat well with me — until we did it. The response from the audience was spectacular. They got to hear something that was as close as they were ever going to hear to what Ultravox would’ve sounded like, or Visage might’ve sounded like had we performed live. So, the response was great, and it waylaid any fears that I had of doing it.

Does it feel full-circle to do this? You were one of the early adopters of synthesizers. I imagine around the time you started doing electronic music, there were people who said, “What’s this flash in the pan?” or “That’s not real music.” You were at the forefront of being able to do it DIY-style, and this is sort of a return to that.

It is kind of gone ‘round, yeah, full-circle. That’s the way life tends to be, isn’t it? I bought a synthesizer in 1978 and introduced it to the Rich Kids with a view to utilizing this new instrument that was only as limited as your imagination… and it immediately broke the band in half! Half the band liked it. So, the drummer, Rusty Egan, and myself took the synthesizer and created Visage. We put together a studio concept of working with our favorite musicians, one of whom happened to be the keyboard player in Ultravox [Billy Currie]. And during the Visage recordings in the dying throes of the Rich Kids, we saw Ultravox come to America, do a tour and come back half a band — the singer [John Foxx] left, the guitarist left, they’d been dropped by the record label. And I jumped at the chance of joining.

Obviously real synthheads know about the John Foxx era of Ultravox, but when you joined Ultravox, just as MTV was about to happen here in America, my impression is that’s what catapulted the band. I know you say they weren’t that big here, but growing up with MTV and KROQ in L.A., Ultravox were a big band to me. And it was your era of Ultravox.

Yeah, the coasts were great for us. The big bit in the middle wasn’t so welcoming! You’ve got to imagine, you’ve got to remember, 1979 or 1980 was the first time I came to America with Ultravox, and you still had stations that played “Stairway to Heaven” 24/7 and Styx and Boston and American corporate poodle rock stuff. Nothing wrong with it, absolutely fine. But for us to expect that kind of audience to adapt and listen to what we were doing, it must’ve been like we had just arrived from Mars. It was so alien.

That’s what made it exciting to me!

It made it exciting for me as well. … It was an exciting period not just musically, but technologically as well. You had these instruments that could do just about anything. They were just difficult to tour with! It was a bit of a nightmare. Our soundchecks used to take five hours.

Those old synthesizers were really heavy.

And we adapted everything we had to make them do what we needed to do, which meant we had to carry two of everything, in case one broke. You couldn’t just rent one, because it was altered. So, it was a technological nightmare. But the noise we made, the sound we made, was fantastic.

You were saying your adaptation of the synthesizer fragmented the Rich Kids. When you decided to explore this new technology, what made you want to do that? It was a risk, but you must have had some vision that it was the future.

You have to remember that when the saxophone came out at first, the people in orchestras and big bands thought it was a joke. They thought it wasn’t a real brass instrument. So, yes, they synthesizer did divide people. It was seen as a novelty instrument. It was a funny noise you put on your record. But because of the clubs that we were associated with in London… Rusty Egan ran a little club called Billy’s, which was the forerunner to the Blitz Club, so he was responsible for a lot of the music coming out of Europe getting played in those little clubs. He would play early Ultravox, early Gary Numan, early Depeche Mode or Heaven 17 or Human League or whatever, amongst Kraftwerk and Neu! and Can and Roxy Music and David Bowie. It was a “Bowie Night,” as they called it, but it had all this electronic stuff. … The sonic element of it coming out those sound systems was immense. It was amazing. So, we were very influenced by that and wanted to generate music to play in clubs. That was it. Not to make music that was going to be revolutionary or groundbreaking. We wanted to make music that we could play in Billy’s and eventually the Blitz, and that was it. Then of course, the fashions became high-street fashions, and then everyone dropped the guitars and bought synthesizers. It was a revolution with technology and fashion and music, all at the same time, kind of a little social explosion.

So, did [Rich Kids bassist and original Sex Pistols member] Glen Matlock ever later tell you anything like, “Hey, you were onto something there. You knew what you were doing”?

He did. It’s just understandable. It was such a divisional thing if you weren’t interested in it. Glen’s very much a plug-in-and-rock-and-roll guy, plug in and just hammer it out. The Rich Kids were a great band, and it was great fun playing with them, but it seemed, again, for him, quite an alien thing. And Steve [New], the guitar player, didn’t like the idea of it at all. But no one’s got foresight. We did what we felt was interesting at the time, not expecting it to tilt the world on its axis.

Didn’t you have an opportunity to join the Sex Pistols at one point?

Yeah, back in 1976, I think it was. I was stopped in the streets of Glasgow, my hometown, by Bernie Rhodes, who went on to manage the Clash. I didn’t know who he was. He was English, and he was stopping me in the streets, and I thought it was something to do with borrowing equipment. … Anyway, he took me around the corner to meet his friend, Malcolm McClaren, and [McClaren] proceeded to tell me about his association with the New York Dolls, Vivienne Westwood, his fashion, the clothes, the design. … Then he said he was putting this band together, and would I join the band? But he hadn’t asked if I was a musician! I have no idea whether he wanted me to be the singer or the drummer or the guitarist or whatever. So, I just said, “No, I’ve got my own band. Thanks very much.” It just seemed he was looking for something to probably help sell Vivienne’s clothes. So, I declined it, but then later on realized it was the Sex Pistols he was putting together.

Did you ever have a chance to ask Malcolm about this? You must have crossed paths with Malcolm again over the years.

Oh, no, I didn’t! But I did “Jonesy’s Jukebox,” [Sex Pistols guitarist] Steve Jones’s [radio show] a few years ago, and that was hysterical. I told him his stories about it. I told him that I turned down the Pistols. He said why [McClaren] was there in Glasgow was that he had slightly hot equipment that he was selling from the trunk of his car, and I turned down the Pistols, but I bought an amplifier. And Jonesy was so incensed: He said, “I stole that amplifier, and he sold it and kept the money!” [laughs]

Oh my God, that’s an amazing story. Well, I’ve got to ask, since [Rhodes] stopped you on the street not even knowing if you played anything, and you seemed like a good posterboy for the Vivienne Westwood look, what were you wearing that day? What was it about you that made him go, “That looks like a rock star?”

I had a kind of James Dean quiff and was wearing ‘50s clothes, at a time when everyone else was wearing flared trousers. I think they just liked the look rather than any technical ability. I think maybe they thought that would come later.

I mean, it obviously did! So, you mentioned the Blitz Club. I have often said if I could ever time-travel, in a time machine, to anywhere, I would go to the Blitz Club. It just seems so exciting, and I don’t think [Visage singer and Blitz Club promoter] Steve Strange] gets enough credit here for what he inspired. What was that era like? Take me back to the Blitz Club. Put me in the time machine.

All right. Well, you had to be in the know to be allowed in. Steve had a very strong door policy that if you didn’t look the part, you weren’t coming in. So, kids with absolutely nothing… they had no money, nothing. It was a very dismal time in U.K. social history, a three-day working week. It was very tough. But these kids would go and raid their grandmother’s wardrobes and put on a ball gown or a dress and just push the boundaries, and go down to this club and dance to that type of music, the electronics and stuff. They were the kids who had started the whole punk scene, and because their younger siblings were getting into the new wave/punk thing, they didn’t want to be associated with what their younger brother or sister wanted. So, they reverted back to the first love, which would’ve been T. Rex, David Bowie, Roxy Music.

So they went to these clubs, dolled up, looking fabulous. All the guys all looked great with slicked-back hair. Everyone was there posing, voguing before voguing became a thing, I suppose. And it was a tiny little club, a wine bar in Covent Garden in London, but it was a themed 1940s. … If you think of the Blitz as like the original Blade Runner, was it in the past or was it in the future? Because there was a foot in both camps. People looked like they were dressed in 1940s and 1950s clothes, but they were listening to music that was coming from the future and dancing to it. It was this weird hybrid, and I think maybe that’s what made it kind of unique.

These people were just so incredibly cool listening to this fabulous music dancing and just having a great time, with the minimal amount of spend that you could have. You’d buy a little can of beer and you’d hold it all night and make it last the evening. It was incredibly basic, but those environments are inviting to a certain type of person. Saint Martin’s School of Art kids, the graphic designers, the fashion designers would all be there. You could look around the room and you’d see a future film director, or someone who’s going to design hats, or someone who does brilliant graphics. It was just this little boiling pot of creativity. And it was all very cool until the night that David Bowie walked in and these kids just turned into headless chickens! They were all running around because the master had turned up, and it was just glorious. The whole thing was great. It was a fantastic little period in time, but only lasted a couple of years.

Is that how some of the Blitz Kids ended up in David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” video? Was he talent-scouting to cast that?

I think so. Bowie’s ear to the ground was amazing. He knew about what was going on and he wanted to check it out for himself. And that evening, Steve and a couple of others were dragged off to Beachy Head somewhere down near Brighton to shoot the video dressed as they were in the club that night, these weird Greek priests outfits or whatever. It got completely OTT. But yes, Bowie saw something happening there and wanted to be a magpie and just take some of that for himself, which is brilliant. That’s the way it should be.

What was the process in which Steve Strange became the face and voice of Visage?

Rusty just said, “Steve’s my flatmate. I’m sure he’d love to do it.” At this point, Steve and Rusty were running the Blitz, so they were the face of that. Steve had already become the kind of the figurehead of this little movement that was happening, and because we were all in different bands, all still touring at the time, someone had to be the face, the nucleus, the middle person, the middleman. And Steve was more than happy to do that. We used to send Steve off with the dancers, two backing vocalists, and they’d go and do the television shows and whatever, and I would do all the work in the studio producing the music.

But it took a long time to put it together because of trying to get three different bands, still active bands in the country together at the same time. To grab a couple of hours or a couple of days to go and write and record for the Visage album took over a year. It was a year before the first Visage album was complete, begging and borrowing and stealing studio time to do this. And it was over that year of putting the Visage thing together that I went on tour with Thin Lizzy. I had just joined Ultravox. Billy, the keyboard player, went on tour with Gary Numan. And that gave us the wherewithal to come back and put the money into Ultravox, to buy the equipment we needed for this to happen. But by that point, “Fade to Grey” was in its infancy. Billy came back from the Gary Numan tour with this piece of music that he’d been jamming at soundcheck, and he’d recorded it with one of Gary’s keyboard players. I had pointed out that we were short of a track on the first Visage album, and if he gave me that piece of music, I’d alter it and write a melody and some lyrics for it. And when we recorded that tune, we knew that something magical had happened. We had just created something that was kind of seismic. And it still stands the test of time, which is quite incredible.

You mentioned Thin Lizzy. There are probably a lot of people that don’t know you were ever in that band, or wouldn’t associate you with a classic rock band like that. But obviously it worked very well and you had a collaborative relationship with Phil Lynott — you did the Top of the Pops theme song with him too. How did that come about? Because if I’m understanding the timeline, at one point you were in Visage, Ultravox, and Thin Lizzy at the same time.

Yeah, it’s crazy, isn’t it? It’s a bizarre one. I mean, music people evolve. I bought the synthesizer in ‘79 in the Rich Kids, and that grew into Visage. And out of Visage, over that year period, I ended up joining Ultravox, which I was desperate to do. I mean, Ultravox had just been dropped by the record label. John [Foxx] wasn’t there. The guitarist wasn’t there. It looked as though it was finished, wiped out, never going to happen. And I leapt at the chance of joining the band. In fact, it was Rusty Egan who suggested to Billy that I was the guy that they needed. So, I had just joined Ultravox and was really enthusiastic about it, and all of a sudden, the shackles were off. I wasn’t thinking of writing three-minute pop songs. I was creating music that had no limits at all. Then I got the phone call from Phil Lynott when I was in the studio putting the finishing touches to “Fade to Grey” for Visage. I was part of Ultravox, and he phoned up and said, “We’re on tour with special guests. Gary Moore has left the band. Can you fly over tomorrow and do the tour?” And I’d never been to America, so I thought, “This is a great, wonderful thing to do.” I tied up my loose ends amd I went off to America. I learned the [Thin Lizzy] set on the plane and in the hotel room the night before doing the first show, and then played to 30,000 people.

But the wonderful thing was that Philip was a friend. When he would go and do interviews, he’d take me with him and he’d sit and talk about his new album and about Thin Lizzy, and he’d talk about the tour, but then he’d say, “You should speak to Midge about Ultravox!” Which was quite lovely, beautiful thing to do. So, you’d have me talking about Ultravox, explaining that they weren’t finished and I had joined the band. So, it worked on many, many different levels, but [the Lizzy tour] was only a three-week thing. I had no intention of ever staying within Lizzy. My heart was with Ultravox. Even though Visage were high on the agenda when it came to popularity and Ultravox were deemed finished, Ultravox was an exciting thing to be part of.

What made you so excited to join Ultravox at that time? Most people thought they were has-beens, as you say, but obviously you viewed this as the opportunity of a lifetime.

They had been using technology that I couldn’t attain, couldn’t afford. Ultravox had been using drum machines and synthesizers since I think Brian Eno introduced a synthesizer to them on the first album in mid-’70s. They had knowledge that I wasn’t accessing. So, to be in with those guys who are so creative, at a time when I was like a sponge, I was soaking up all of their influences. And as I said, the shackles were off, the doors had been thrown open, and there was a world there where I thought, “I don’t have to sit down and try and write commercial singles.” That was my attitude at the time. This world enabled me to go in and expand. I mean, “Vienna” was never a radio record. It was never meant to be a radio record.

And then it was.

And it changed everything. But to me, it was like, “Wow, I can experiment here. I’m not held by any constraints.” As a musician, I’d found my home.

It’s very interesting in that you were excited about not being commercial and not writing singles, and the Ultravox had a No. 2 single in the U.K. with “Vienna” — after you joined.

It’s a mixture, isn’t it? You change the ingredients of one ingredient in a recipe in a meal, and it tastes different. And for some reason, the three of them and me coming in as the new boy, there were pop sensibilities, but there were also experimental sensibilities that just gelled. All of a sudden, it all kind of made sense, way before there was any commercial success. “Vienna” was the third track from the album or something. The album had done what it was going to do, and it was quite successful at that level. And then, by some quirk of fate, “Vienna” started getting played on the radio and it changed everything. All of a sudden, instead of selling 30,000 albums in total, we were selling 30,000 albums a day. It was unheard-of. And we hadn’t backtracked. We hadn’t changed anything. It’s weird that in hindsight, you can look back and go, “Obviously ‘Vienna’ was going to be a successful record.” But if that person who played it the first time on the radio had chosen not to play it, it would never have been heard.

If only that DJ hadn’t played Joe Dolce’s “Shaddap You Face” too!

If only the great British record-buying public hadn’t bought it! [laughs]

It’s one of those weird trivia factoid that Joe Dolce’s novelty song “Shaddap You Face” made “Vienna” stall at No. 2 instead of going to No. 1. What a strange time, that those songs would occupy the two top chart spots.

It reflected the U.K. charts at the time. There was space for everything, and everything got out there. It was a very mixed-up time!

Were you like, “What the hell? Why is this novelty song at No. 1 while we’re at No. 2”?

No, no. You’ve got to think that we put out this four-minute, long, slow, electronic ballad that speeds up in the middle, with a viola solo. What was the chance of getting that to No. 2? And maybe because of the ridiculous scenario with us being kept off the No. 1 spot, people felt it in their hearts. They still talk about it today, that it was some weird anomaly that happened, the timeline continuum that this thing happened. So, they kind of feel sorry for us. For us, we were ecstatic. It elevated Ultravox way beyond the club band that we were at the time, and it changed everything and enabled us to do the follow-up album [Rage in Eden] the way we wanted to do it. We had three weeks to record and mix [Vienna], whereas the follow-up album, we spent three months creating at the studio — very experimental, a very difficult and interesting record to make. So, we have to thank Joe Dolce for keeping us at No. 2.

I did want to ask about the album after that, Quartet, because you worked with George Martin on that. I’ve interviewed George’s son Giles, and he told me he was in the studio with Ultravox at the time when he started being his “father’s ears,” because George’s hearing was failing. What are your memories of recording Quartet with George?

It was amazing. Ultravox weren’t the easiest band in the world to get along with, us as musicians. We stuck with what we thought was interesting, what we wanted to do. So, when we decided we wanted to work with a producer, it had to be someone that commanded huge respect. And George was that. When George would say, “OK, guys, I think you’ve said what you need to say here. You’re just doing these escalating chord changes and making it a six-minute song instead of a four minute song. Maybe you should rethink that” — well, we would take that. There were not many people we’d respect and admire enough to take that. But when George suggested something, you said, “Yes sir and thank you.” It was an amazing experience working with him and his engineer, Geoff Emrick, who was the guy who did Sgt. Pepper with him. That’s the dream team. Why would you even question what these guys are telling you.

George’s hearing was going and he wasn’t going to make an album — he wasn’t going to [produce] another record. He initially turned Ultravox down. It was Giles and his sister Lucy — Lucy happened to be a big Ultravox fan and talked George into doing it. So, we owe a huge debt and gratitude. Although his hearing was going, he had people around him who he trusted — Geoff and Giles. And although Giles was young, he was obviously very musical; the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree. So, it was a fantastic period and a wonderful man to even be associated with. There are what I call “pinch-me moments” in your life, in your career, and they don’t necessarily have to be the big bits that people see on television or whatever. They tend to happen behind-the-scenes: doing a duet with Kate Bush, sitting in a studio with Mick Karn, having George Martin knowing your name. Those are magnificent moments.

I do remember Giles telling me a story about how someone said to George, “How’s it going in there? How’s the recording going?” and he answered, “Two hard-boiled eggs,” or something like that. Because he couldn’t hear well.

That was me. Yes, it was in Montserrat. The mixing facility in Montserrat and Air Studios was manual. It was pre-computerized and whatever, and you had to move all the fades with you your fingers. Five of us at the desk, 10 faders, each having to remember to pan and do the EQs and pull the faders up and down at the right time. Old-school mixing. And when you would do that, it would usually be the end of the evening, and you would leave the mix set up. You wouldn’t dismantle it — you’d leave it set up and listen to it again the next morning, before you stripped it all down to start doing the next mix, so that if the vocals weren’t loud enough or there was a mistake or something, you could redo it first thing in the morning. And I was in the swimming pool just outside the studio door, and George said, “I’m just going to check the mix.” And as he walked out [later] with his tray, I shouted, “How’s it sound, George?” And he said, “Ah, two boiled eggs.” It was his breakfast tray.  And I thought, “OK…”

Oh my God, it’s so crazy that I brought that up. Were you aware of George’s hearing loss at the time?

We were aware of it, but we weren’t worried about it because it’s not just about the hearing things. His musical abilities were a major thing. His knowledge of not just musical structure, but technology as well… my big worry was, “What if he’s not kept up with modern tech stuff and drum machines?” But he knew exactly what he was doing. He’d tested it all out, he’d checked it all. He was working out how to make it sound more human, what kind of delay you’d have to put on the snare to make it sound like a drummer. He was way ahead of the curve.

You mentioned “pinch-me moments.” You must have a very long list of such moments, with everything you’ve done in your career. What are some other ones?

Well, as a kid growing up trying to be a guitar player, the idea of sitting playing guitar with Eric Clapton, one-on-one in Montserrat, would’ve been completely off the radar. That was one. Working with Kate. Being onstage with David Bowie at one of the Prince’s Trust concerts. Bowie and Jagger had just put out a version of “Dancing in the Street” and all the money was going to go to the African fund [for Live Aid], and they decided to turn up at the last minute at the Prince’s Trust concert to do “Dancing in the Street” live. And of course, none of us knew it, so we had to go and learn it in the dressing room very quickly. To be onstage with him was just wonderful. People forget that artists are fans. We all get into this industry because we’re fans of someone else. And if that fandom ever wanes, it’s time to hang up your guitar. You should be standing in the same room as someone else that you admire and be a gibbering wreck! You can talk to them, but in the back of your mind, you’re thinking, “I’m not worthy. This is just incredible.” It’s all those little moments that happen when you think, “Yeah, this is great. I never ever saw this coming.”

And what about Live Aid? I mean, talk about a pinch-me moment, in terms of being around so many your heroes.

It was too large to contemplate. Even though I’d been in all the meetings and all this stuff, three months of buildup to doing Live Aid as a Band Aid trustee, overseeing the whole thing, it still didn’t feel as though it was going to be real. The only way you could get to Wembley Stadium at that point on the day was by helicopter from Battersea Heliport. So, you’re flying in over an empty Wembley Stadium with thousands and thousands of people standing outside just completely encompassing this thing, waiting to go in. And at that moment, it felt like, “Oh, this is really going to happen,” because in the back of your mind, it’s too big. You think, “How are we going to pull this off?” And then you get there, and everybody you’ve ever seen or heard in your life is all there.

It was crazy, irrespective of what genre of music you thought you belonged to. Because there is a divide, a self-inflicted divide. You’d look around the kind of holding area, the green room, and you’d have the rock guys over there, Paul Weller over there, your New Romantic synth guys in the corner. But the moment the thing kicked off with Status Quo doing “Rockin’ All Over the World,” you look around and everybody’s got an inane grin and the heads are all bopping. You think, “OK, the library tag has gone. We’re just a bunch of musicians. Status Quo are playing this rock ‘n’ roll three-chord song. Here we go. Yes, this is real. This is fabulous.”

One of the outstanding moments for me was stupid. I was talking to Harvey Goldsmith, who was the guy who put it together with the Band Aid trustees. He’s still a Band Aid trustee. He was in a real tizzy, and he was on the phone, and I said, “What’s the problem, Harvey?” He said, “I’ve lost the shuttle.” I thought he meant the shuttle that took you back and forth between the stadium and the dressing room areas. And he pointed up and said, “No, the Space Shuttle!” One of the astronauts flying overhead was going to announce one of the bands [but the signal had been lost]. And I thought, “It just doesn’t get bigger than that, does it?” Crazy.

Do you know who the shuttle was supposed to introduce?

No, but it didn’t matter. The fact that they were going to link up to Shuttle that was flying around the Earth to do this, it was just ludicrous.

We’ve been talking about all of your achievements. I feel like you’ve flown under the radar a bit. Lots of people know about Ultravox, everybody of course knows “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” but a lot of people probably don’t know about the rest of your CV and discography. You’re sort of a Zelig of pop. How do you feel about your legacy?

You know what? Legacy-wise, the only thing you can hope that happens once you’re gone is that your family, my four daughters, can listen to what I’ve done and think, “He did the best he could at that moment in time.” I’ve never done anything 50 percent. I go at things and I do them to standard that I’m happy with. That’s it. And it might not be everyone else’s standard, but it’s my standard, and I’m content with that. The Zelig part, yes, it has bonuses. You can be “the invisible man of rock,” which is perfectly OK with me. I got a life in music, a career. I’ve gotten what I wished for. I go back home when I’m in Glasgow, and if I’m back there and have a few hours, I go back to the streets that I used to walk around as a kid, wishing for what I eventually got. And that keeps my feet on the ground. I get to do what I love. So, when people say to me, “Are thinking of retiring?” I say, “Retiring from what?” You retire from something you don’t like doing, to do something you do like. And I can’t find anything better than what I’ve got.

The cast of Band Aid in 1984. (Photo: Polydor)

Thirty-four years ago, on Nov. 25, 1984, new wave’s elite came together to record “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” a now-legendary holiday benefit single for Ethiopian famine relief. Most people remember that the Boomtown Rats’ Bob Geldof, who was inspired to do the project after watching an October 1984 BBC report about the crisis in Ethiopia, was at the helm, and that the famous song was belted by superstars like Simon Le Bon, Boy George, Sting and Bono. But not everyone realizes that Band Aid would not have existed without Midge Ure of Ultravox, who co-wrote and produced the track and even played almost all of the instruments on the final recording.

But strangely, Ure doesn’t think “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” is that great a song.

“I’ve been misquoted many times as saying it’s the worst song I’ve ever written, and it’s certainly not — I’ve written much worse! — but as a song, it’s OK,” Ure tells Yahoo Entertainment with a shrug. “As a record, it’s exceptional; as a moment in time, it’s phenomenal for what it was. But as a song, meh. It’s no ‘White Christmas.’ … I still think of it as an OK song that became something much better than it actually was.”

Whether Ure’s surprisingly unenthusiastic assessment of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” is correct, and even if the song has since been criticized for being patronizing and self-righteous, there’s no denying that it made a cultural impact at the time. Rush-released just days after it was recorded in a whirlwind all-nighter session at Trevor Horn’s SARM Studios in London (Horn donated the studio time, free of charge), the single shot straight to No. 1 in Britain and stayed there for five weeks — becoming the biggest-selling single in U.K. chart history at the time. It went on to sell 3.8. million copies in the United Kingdom alone, and 12 million worldwide.

The song has since been re-recorded by three other “Band Aids,” in 1989, 2004 and 2014 — but Ure confirmed last year that there will never be another be another remake, out of respect for two of the original recording’s participants, George Michael and Status Quo’s Rick Parfitt, who recently passed away. However, Ure confesses, “I’m not denying that every time I hear the opening bars of that [1984] song as I’m walking around the supermarket or wherever, that opening clang still sends shivers up my spine. So, as a record, it really did achieve its goals.” The original “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” eventually raised over $24 million, and inspired other well-meaning pop-music charity efforts of the ’80s, like USA for Africa’s “We Are the World” and Geldof’s global Live Aid concerts.

Read on for Yahoo Entertainment’s interview with the man who was behind the mixing board for the legendary Band Aid session, for the inside scoop on Boy George’s near no-show, Duran Duran’s “shenanigans,” Bono’s big breakout moment, that unauthorized Tears for Fears sample, and more.

Yahoo Entertainment: Surely you must have realized you were doing something historical with Band Aid, right?

Midge Ure: I think there’s a power in naiveté, and there was an awful lot of naiveté in putting Band Aid together. Our goal at the time was simply to try and get a No. 1 record in the U.K., which would have raised in the region of 100,000 pounds. We couldn’t see beyond that. But I recall as I was driving home from the studio at 8 o’clock in the morning the next day [after the one-day recording session], Bob took a cassette to the BBC. I heard them on the radio playing the cassette, and I thought, “This is something special. The BBC don’t play cassettes!” And the moment the song finished, they played it again. And then they played it every hour on the hour — from a cassette — while the master tapes went straight to the factory to get pressed up. So, at that moment, I knew something odd had happened, something that had never happened before.

So, let’s talk about that recording session from the night before. How did you recruit all this A-list talent?

Well, when Bob gets a bit between his teeth, he doesn’t take no for an answer. So he wouldn’t speak to a manager or a record label or an agent — he would find the phone number for the artist and he’d speak to the artist himself, which was brilliant. He just cut through the red tape. While I was in the studio twiddling knobs and layering up keyboards and writing drum parts, he was on my telephone, running up huge telephone bills, because he was calling these guys all around the world! Duran Duran were on tour, Spandau Ballet were on tour, and Sting’s always on tour, so it was really difficult to nail them down. But he spoke to them directly — which in itself is exceptionally dangerous, simply because if you don’t speak to a manager, if you speak directly to an artist, there’s a very good chance that the artist is not going to write anything down. He’ll just go, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll be there!” — and then have no idea what it was he just agreed to do. Artists are a little bit flaky. So there was a moment when Bob and I were standing outside SARM Studios in London with camera lenses stuck in our noses, just a sea of media, and we hadn’t a clue who was going to show up. Nobody had confirmed. We’d given the date and given them the time, and kind of just hoped that they’d remember. But they all turned up! I don’t think there was one person who said they’d be there who wasn’t.

A Christmas miracle! But I heard Boy George almost didn’t make it.

George was the closest person to missing it. He was still in New York. He forgot all about it. He was sleeping in his hotel room in New York and Bob called him and said, “Where are you, you’re meant to be here!” And George said, “Oh, is it today? Who else is there?” And Bob said, “Every f***er in music is here but you. Get up and get on a plane and get here!” And George did. He turned up at 7 or 8 o’clock at night, and walked straight in and sang his vocal brilliantly.

So, who sang first?

You’ve got to remember that all these people turned up not having heard one note of the song. It wasn’t like these days, where you’d be able to email someone the track and they’d be able to listen to it in advance. So there was no vying for first position. Nobody wanted to go first, which was totally understandable; they were about to sing a song they didn’t know in front of all their peers, and they’ve got a film camera in front of them. It’s the worst possible scenario for any musician. Tony Hadley from Spandau Ballet was the first person to get up there and do his thing, and he did it brilliantly and that broke the ice. After that, it was easy.

Were there any ego battles over who got to sing what?

As I said, not a lot of this was planned. We hadn’t even thought who was going to sing each line! There weren’t even enough lines in the song for all the vocalists to have a go. I mean, I don’t have a line, and neither does Bob. It was more important getting really distinctive global voices on there. Paul Young was huge at the time, George was huge, Sting was huge. Interestingly enough, the guy who kind of stole the moment was Bono, who was at that time still kind of a college-rock artist; U2 hadn’t really attained the massive heights they were going to eventually attain. Bono came in and just went for it. When I assigned that original line on the guide vocal, it was an octave lower. It was almost a throwaway line. And he just jumped the octave and belted this thing out. It was incredible. It was a serious turning point in the record. When he did that, it kicked the song off. It went into another gear at that point.

So, there were no ego clashes? Everyone got along?

I think initially it was a little awkward, because there’d be people there that had slighted other artists in various interviews, ripping someone else’s record to shreds a couple weeks before in NME or something. But you get over that; it’s not a reason to sulk in the corner or not talk to anyone. It was actually a very jovial atmosphere in the studio. I think the really great thing was there was no record company behind us; there was no label, no management, no one was laying on drinks, no one was laying on food. If you wanted a sandwich, you had to go to the shop ’round the corner and go buy one. Boy George came in after flying in on the Concorde and kind of snapped his fingers and said, “Someone get me a brandy!” And I pressed the button on the intercom and said, “You’ll have to get it yourself, there’s no flunkies here!”

Was there a lot of partying going on in the studio?

I think there was some shenanigans going on with, I think, Status Quo and Duran Duran, and possibly some forms of illicit substances flying around. But I was sitting behind a mixing desk for 24 hours, so I didn’t really get a chance to indulge in anything other than sitting there, making a record. By 8 o’clock Sunday evening we had to throw everyone out because we had to start mixing the record; it had to be in the pressing plant the next morning, otherwise we’d not get the thing finished and in the stores for Christmas. So we had to throw everyone out, and no one wanted to leave! All these rich, famous rock stars, all in one of the most vibrant cities in the world, and they didn’t want to go anywhere! They were having such a good time just hanging out, just being part of this thing. It was quite incredible.

How did you become involved with Band Aid in the first place?

I think like most things, there was no real plan. I happened to be in the right place, or the wrong place, at the right time. I was doing a TV show in the north of England which [Bob Geldof’s] girlfriend at the time, Paula Yates, co-hosted, when Bob called Paula. He said, “Let me speak to Midge,” and he told me about the footage he’d just seen on BBC News about the famine in Ethiopia. He said how disgusted he was and he wanted to do something, but didn’t know what. … We came up with the obvious conclusion that the only thing we were kind of semicapable of doing was writing a song. So Bob had half an idea kicking around; I went home and worked on another idea, and then proceeded to spend the next three or four days trying to put these totally incompatible ideas together.

Bob Geldof and Midge Ure outside SARM Studios during the recording of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (Photo: Larry Ellis/Express Newspapers/Getty Images)

You really wrote the song that quickly?

Yeah, three or four days. I sent Bob a cassette of me playing on a little Casio keyboard. He hated it! Then he came to my house with a guitar; he plays a right-handed guitar, but left-handed, so he played this thing upside-down, and it was missing a lot of strings as well. He sang what he had, and every time he sang it, it was different. So he was obviously just kind of shooting from the hip. I recorded his part on a cassette and started gluing these ideas together in my studio, trying to do some kind of arrangement on this very, very shaky idea.

I think the part people most remember from that song is the “Feed the World” refrain…

Well, that was the last thing to come, believe it or not! That was the last thing we did. If you listen to the song, it’s a song with no real pop sensibilities. There’s no real structure to it. Most songs have an intro and a verse and then a chorus, but this is just a thing that started and kind of grew. It didn’t really have anything you could sing along with. It was very obvious to Bob and I that it needed something at the end, so between the two of us we came up with the “Feed the World” hook. It’s a very strange thing, putting a hook of a song at the very end. In many ways it was such an alien, unusual arrangement. I do still think to this day that having all these artists added strength to the record. It otherwise would have been a dreadful flop as a commercial record. It wasn’t overtly commercial.

Is it true that you played almost all of the instruments on the song?

Yes, all of them, except for Phil Collins’s drums.

But we see people like John Taylor of Duran Duran playing bass in the music video…

Kind of, yeah. John played the bass, but it just didn’t sound right playing an electric bass amongst all this electronic stuff. So John put a bassline down, but it’s mixed way, way, way quiet. A few other people put guitars down as well, which again we just decided not to use, because it just kind of jarred against the version that we had. I spent four days in my studio doing all the instruments, so everything we had on the record except the vocals and Phil’s drums are mine.

I know Tears for Fears didn’t participate in the recording session itself, but isn’t there a Tears for Fears sample on there?

Yeah, there is! I didn’t ask them, I just did it! Samples were quite new at the time, and I was a big Tears for Fears fan. I thought their productions were wonderful — great songwriters, great band. I lifted the drum sound at the beginning of “The Hurting” because there’s one single tom sound, and I sampled that tom and started layering it up and playing drum patterns with it, and mixed it in with all my multitrack vocals at the front of the record, so it was drones and noises and things — a mixture of Tears for Fears’ drums and my voice.

Were they upset about this?

Weirdly enough, when they found out about it, I think they were actually quite pleased to learn they had contributed to the record, even though they didn’t know much about it at the time. I think they felt quite pleased that something of theirs was on it.

Would you say “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was your career highlight?

Well, I think it was very much a product of the arrangement at the time, very much a product of something that Bob and I put together as a one-off. We’ve never written together since, and I can’t imagine we’ll ever write together again. We’re very, very different musical characters as well as emotional characters. … People always ask me what the highlights of my career are, and they always expect me to say Band Aid. I say, well, it’s not necessarily my career highlight, but it was a highlight in my life. None of this was done for favor, none of this was done to get a pat on the back, none of this was done to get a knighthood. It was done in a very basic way, on gut instinct, as an absolute reaction to something that shouldn’t have been happening in our world at the time. I happened to be there and luckily, because Bob and I are chalk and cheese, we managed to pull this thing off. I’ll just say it was quite a magnificent thing. And who would have thought, 30 years later, it would still be getting played — and that it might still be getting played 30 more years down the line?

This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.