Music review: Midge Ure, Barrowland, Glasgow

The year was 1980 – time to usher in a new music for a new decade, time to replace the back-to-basics rock’n’roll of punk (it’ll never last) with synthesizer sophistication.One man from Cambuslang was at the forefront of the insurgent New Romantic movement, penning some of its biggest anthems. Forty years on, Midge Ure and his Band Electronica dedicated a set to Vienna, the breakthrough album by his most enduring outfit Ultravox.

Midge Ure rolled out some of his biggest Romantic anthems

Midge Ure, Barrowland, Glasgow ***

Rusty Egan, his old mucker from London’s flamboyant Blitz nightclub, guested on a taster sprinkling of underwhelming tracks written for Steve Strange to front in Visage, with only the synthgeddon of Fade to Grey providing any heft to match the pretentious pomp of the Ultravox compositions.

Mock baroque synthstrumental Astradyne was the electronica equivalent of the fretboard mangling of heavy metal and a reminder that Ultravox were closer to prog rock than punk rock in their overwrought conception.

Still, with Ure at the helm, they knocked out some trim synth pop songs, such as the driving New Europeans, the urgent Sleepwalk and the dystopian All Stood Still. The stealthy spy theme pastiche of Mr X with its quasi-classical violin was a suitable overture for the wonderfully melodramatic Vienna, with its hissing syndrums, portentous keyboards and mournful viola solo. Inevitably, this was the catharsis the audience had been waiting for, and Ure recognised this by encoring with a handful of later Ultravox hits, including Dancing with Tears in My Eyes.

FIONA SHEPHERD