Midge Ure

Cambuslang, and a number one before 23

James Ure was born in Cambuslang, Lanarkshire, on 10 October 1953. The stage name is a phonetic reversal of Jim, and it attached itself to him early: he had a UK number one before his 23rd birthday, with Slik's "Forever and Ever" in 1976, after four years in the band.

What followed looks restless on paper and purposeful in hindsight. He left Slik in 1977 for the Rich Kids alongside the former Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock, a short-lived outfit that nonetheless put him in the room with the people who would define the next few years of British pop. In 1979 and 1980 he played guitar and keyboards with Thin Lizzy on American dates. In parallel he was part of Visage with Steve Strange, co-writing "Fade to Grey" in 1980 — a song he still plays, and which still draws one of the loudest responses of the night.

That spread of work is the reason the later career makes sense. Ure arrived at synthesizers as a guitarist who had already toured hard rock, and the tension between those two instincts has never resolved itself. It is the thing the new record is named after.

Ultravox and the Band Aid years

Ure joined Ultravox in 1979 after John Foxx left, becoming the band's second frontman and its bandleader. "Vienna", released in 1980, is the song most people can still name, and the fact that it was held off the UK top spot by a novelty single is a piece of trivia durable enough that a support act on this year's Australian leg introduced himself as "Joe Dolce Jr" and got a laugh. "Hymn" followed in 1983 and "Dancing With Tears in My Eyes" in 1984. The first run of the band ended in 1986; Ure and his bandmates reformed it in 2009.

The other reason his name carries beyond music fans dates from the same stretch. He co-wrote and produced "Do They Know It's Christmas?" with Bob Geldof for Band Aid in 1984, co-organised Live Aid the following year and Live 8 in 2005. He was appointed OBE in 2005 for services to music and charity, holds two Ivor Novello awards shared with Geldof, and has five honorary doctorates from British universities.

A solo catalogue that kept going

The solo career started at its commercial peak. The Gift reached number two in the UK in 1985 and produced "If I Was", a number one single and still, forty-one years later, the song he tends to place near the end of a set.

Then came Answers to Nothing in 1988, Pure in 1991, Breathe in 1996, Move Me in 2000, 10 in 2008, Fragile in 2014 and Orchestrated in 2017. Fragile was the last set of entirely new material before this year, which makes the gap between new records twelve years — long enough that the 2026 album was received as a return rather than an instalment.

A Man of Two Worlds

A Man of Two Worlds arrived on 8 May 2026 on Chrysalis. It is a double album with a hard internal border. The first half, World One: Music, is eight instrumental pieces — A Different View, The Space In Between, Hearing The Invisible, Just Below The Surface, The Dimming Light, The Other Side, Blues and Greys and The Pictures You Carry With You. The second, World Two: Songs, is eight vocal tracks, among them Just Words, World Away, Shouting To The Moon, Caught In The Middle, Ordinary Man (Precious Moments), The Man Who Stole Your Soul and Fan The Flame.

The split is the point. Ure's explanation is that almost every album he has made across more than forty years has carried at least one instrumental, and that those pieces had never been collected or, for the most part, played in front of an audience. The instrumental half grew partly out of what he listened to during the pandemic and out of presenting THE SPACE on Scala Radio; the vocal half is sparser and more inward, circling human frailty and global discord. The release came as a 2CD media book with a twenty-page booklet, as double vinyl, and as a bone-coloured pressing limited to 300 copies, with Ure's own photography in the packaging.

The year that nearly didn't happen

On 6 August 2025 Ure announced that he had to reschedule every show planned from September onwards — dates in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Europe. A routine medical check-up had found a problem requiring urgent treatment and a period of recovery. He gave no details beyond that, played the shows already booked through August, and insisted the A Man of Two Worlds tour set for May and June 2026 was "very much going ahead".

It did. The UK run opened at Bath Forum on 8 May 2026, the same day the album came out, and closed at Gateshead's Glasshouse on 5 June, taking in roughly twenty cities including Liverpool, Birmingham, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh, London and Nottingham. The postponed Australasian dates were rebuilt as a separate, hits-led tour in October 2026: Perth's Astor Theatre on 8 October, the Palais in Melbourne on 21 October, and a final night at Auckland's Powerstation on 24 October. At 73 he was reviewed in Perth as a performer whose voice the years appear to have left largely alone.

As of early November 2026 the catalogue tour is finished and the next confirmed leg is European, beginning in the Netherlands — PAARD in The Hague on 23 February 2027, doors at 19:30, tickets €45.50 — with further dates following in Germany.

Two different shows, depending on the continent

The UK tour was built as a concept rather than a run of hits, and it asked something of the room. At Portsmouth Guildhall on 3 June the first half was fifty-two minutes and twelve pieces played without a break and without a word spoken, in low light; only after the interval did Ure address the audience at all, opening with a remark about how patient they had been and some dry arithmetic about the average age in the hall. The second half gave up the hits.

The Australasian shows inverted that. Billed around the catalogue, the Perth set ran seventeen songs plus two encores and leaned on guitar far more than synthesizer, pulling from Rich Kids, Visage, Ultravox and the solo records. The Auckland night ran against an 11pm curfew, with the closing songs chosen to land before the lights came up.

Both versions use the same three musicians — Russell Field on drums, Cole Stacey on keyboards and bass, Joseph O'Keefe on keyboards and violin — and the same visual restraint: Ure in black turtleneck and trousers, moving between guitar and keyboards, no costume and no theatre beyond the lighting rig.