To mark his 70th birthday and to celebrate a life in music, Midge Ure will headline an exclusive one-night-only concert at the Royal Albert Hall on October 4, 2023. Subtitled ‘Celebrating 7 Decades: A Life In Music’, the event will see the Scottish singer-songwriter play all the significant songs from a remarkable career now spanning seven decades.
Of the show, Midge Ure said in an official statement, “What do you get as a gift on your significant 70th? A birthday celebration show at the Royal Albert Hall of course. There are prestige venues and globally renowned prestige venues and the RAH falls into the latter. That is the ultimate gift for a musician, one which lasts for the rest of your life.”
Tickets for the show begin with a venue pre-sale on Thursday, June 15 at 9am for Friends & Patrons of the Royal Albert Hall. General sale stars on Friday 16 June at 9am. Visit the venue’s official website for further information.
As a global star who has received multiple Ivor Novello, Grammy and BASCAP awards along with a slew of gold and platinum records, Midge Ure really needs very little introduction. By the time his solo single “If I Was” topped the UK charts in 1985, he had already crammed several musical lifetimes into a 10 year professional career speaks volumes. Silk, The Rich Kids, Thin Lizzy, Visage, Ultravox and arguably the most famous one-off group in musical history, Band Aid, had by then all had the guiding hand of his musical navigation.
Ure first came to prominence with 70’s teen band Silk, whose signature hit “Forever And Ever” took over at number one from ABBA’s “Mamma Mia” on Valentine’s Day 1976. Midge was snapped up by ex-Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock the following year for his new outfit, The Rich Kids, who charted amid an avalanche of press with a self-titled EMI single early in 1978.
By 1979, after a brief spell replacing Gary Moore in Thin Lizzy, Ure become the new frontman in Ultravox, replacing John Foxx. The band was a major influence on the new romantic and electro-pop movements of the early ’80s, tracks like “Reap the Wild Wind,” “Dancing With Tears in My Eyes,” “The Voice” and 1981’s timeless “Vienna” were all massive hits the world over. The band also chalked up seven consecutive top ten albums in just six years.
Ure also wrote and produced “Fade to Grey” for Visage in 1980, then hit the top 10 in the summer of 1982 with his first release under his own name, “No Regrets.” Then came November 25, 1984, a historic day for Midge and all of pop music, as 36 artists by the collective name Band Aid gathered at SARM Studios in west London under Ure’s production. They recorded “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” a song he had just written with Bob Geldof as the industry’s heartfelt and eloquent contribution to Ethiopian famine relief and the unstoppable emotion engendered by the project led to Live Aid, the summer 1985 global concert that spoke for a generation.
Listen to the best of Ultravox on Apple Music and Spotify.
