Ultravox!

Their debut and subsequent pair of records with John Foxx paved the way for synthpop and the New Romantics

I can't think of another album that caught the moment quite so much as Ultravox's debut record. Titled Ultravox! (the exclamation point was part of the band's name through their second album in tribute to German band Neu!), it presented, visually and musically, a group that had assembled its aesthetic around a compilation of the flotsam and jetsam of seventies culture like none since Roxy Music first hit the scene. Little surprise, then, that Brian Eno turned up to help the band and producer Steve Liliwhite (on his first production job) to tweak the group's studio sound and to add just the right touch of futuristic snick snack.

Ultravox! is a time capsule of everything that happened in the accelerated world of rock music in the last few years of the decade. The band was influenced by Bowie, obviously, but there's punk, smooth R&B funk, glam, florid European Romanticism, a bit of fifties and sixties rock, Mott-ish boogie, reggae, prog, and post punk electro all packed into its nine tracks. Too much of the past and too complex for the emerging punk rock scene, yet too cynical and futuristic for the mainstream, they were birthed at a crucial moment in rock and it might be more accurate to say that they midwifed it into something that was more modern than classic rock, but more sustainable than punk. When the band failed to make a mark with their first three albums and leading force John Foxx left the band, Midge Ure was able to use the futuristic aspect of the group's sound to ease them into the New Romantic movement, a sound that Ultravox had helped to create in the first place.

'Sat'day Night In the City of the Dead' begins with all the energy of punk, opening the door on Foxx's dystopian Thatcher-induced British nightmare. Ultravox! bristles with Diamond Dogs energy, which is perhaps not surprising since Foxx was fond of using writer William S, Burroughs' cut-up writing technique, just as Bowie had been during his glam years. The cover of the album shows the band members dressed in varying outfits that include leather macs, dog collars, ripped suits and makeup, somewhere between punk, glam, and disco dolly. Foxx was also influenced by Kraftwerk, who were exploring a new European identity that superseded their German one. 'The frontiers are falling/it's time to be slipping away' wrote Foxx in the dramatic 'Slip Away,' which betrays a heavy Roxy Music influence, so much so that Eno must have found it amazing.

Sandwiched between these two tracks is a caustic note to the huge rock and roll bands still left from the sixties--chiefly The Rolling Stones--"Life at Rainbow's re (For all the tax exiles on main street)." Ultravox's familiarity with the language of then-mainstream rock and the leftover glamisms made them suspect with the punk crowd as did their prog-like obsession with technology and use of electronics. But it's just this mastery of the language of the past that puts the band's debut at a remarkable crossroads in rock history. Consider that Ultravox! was released eight months before Never Mind the Bollocks by the Sex Pistols. In fact, Ultravox's second album, Ha!-Ha!-Ha! was released only weeks after the Pistols album, and by then they'd moved even further into a brittle electronic post punk sound, effectively rendering punk moot.

Foxx closes out Side One with the seven-plus minute "I Want to Be a Machine," which manages to be a amalgam of the hard sound that Geoff Downes and Trevor Horn would bring to their version of Yes on the album Drama and the folksy myth making balladry of David Bowie on songs like "The Bewlay Brothers":

I stole a cathode face from newscasts

And a crumbling fugue of songs

From the reservoir of video souls

backed initially by acoustic guitar it sounds for all the world like "After All" from The Man Who Sold The World even if the lyrics seem more like Aladdin Sane or Diamond Dogs material. It also fades in, with a reverse piano note, in similar fashion to Yes' "Roundabout". The track also makes excellent use of Billy Currie's violin, which became prominent in the Midge Ure-era Ultravox, featured strongly on the group's Vienna album. More studio wizardry! More witchcraft! No punk creds for you!

Which is fine, because Foxx and company were only taking some of punk's energy and mostly applying it to one or two tracks. But the DIY ethos of the moment allowed the band to launch themselves, and though they received little positive notice at the time, they managed to cast their influence on a lot of artists who came along soon after.

Side Two is a Burroughs/Bowie fantasia of droogy fun and sex. A wide boy is archaic British slang for someone who lives by their wits, synonymous with the term 'spiv,' indicating a petty criminal, fraudster or con artist. Ray Davies used the term in his Preservation Act II album as did Richard Thompson on the song "I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight.' Foxx's wide boys proclaim "We've got the streets of London wrapped in our beds/Nagasaki in our own coats" and revel in being 'delightfully unpleasant with a foxy adolescence-cy". Treatments are used on Foxx's vocals, presumably created and applied by Eno, giving him an amplified 'Big Brother' type sound. It's like an electrified 'Rebel Rebel', a song for Alex and his droogs to sing whilst pummeling a pensioner into submission.

Next it's "Dangerous Rhythm," easily the sexiest track on the album,  with Chris Cross and Warren Cann laying down a pop reggae groove over which Foxx does his very best Bryan Ferry impression. At the time of Ultravox!'s release, Roxy Music was on hiatus after its 1975 album Siren. They wouldn't reappear until 1978, though Ferry was actively recording as a solo artist. 'Dangerous Rhythm' seems to refer to the smoother Roxy Music sound that would become the band (and Ferry's) hallmark in the eighties, but it is also in line with the group's work on Siren. "Lonely Hunter" is a slinky piece of R&B dance vibe that you'd think this band would never pull off, but damned if it's not a standout track.

"The Wild The Beautiful and the Damned" is another major statement song by Foxx with poetic lyrics that land in Mott/Dylan territory. With lyrics like "You tore some more pages/From your old lovers hearts/Then we engineered a wild reunion/In a Berlin Alleyway/While your New York Fuhrer/Tore our universe apart" it is understandable that many critics called the record pretentious, to which Foxx replies "Everything I liked was pretentious!" The story goes that Bowie phoned Eno about coming to Berlin to help with his Low and Heroes records while in the studio for the Ultravox! sessions.

But there was nothing quite like the sound that the group saved for the final cut of their debut, the haunting and starkly beautiful "My Sex." It begins with a classical piano part against which Foxx recites lyrics that are clearly inspired by Jacques Brel's classic song 'My Death' in a voice that is not quite robotic but clearly not that of an average human:

My sex

Waits for me

Like a mongrel waits

Downwind on a tight rope leash

My sex

Is a fragile acrobat

Sometimes I'm a Novocaine shot

Sometimes I'm an automat

My sex

Is often solo

Sometimes it short circuits then

Sometimes it's a golden glow

My sex

Is invested in

Suburban photographs

Skyscraper shadows on a car crash overpass

This is all right before the one minute mark, and after the car crash overpass, a gorgeous synthesizer melody opens up, still supported by the acoustic piano, and it is so easy to hear where Vienna would eventually come from. At the time, though, "‘My Sex’ was the first electro-ballad. When we finished that, I knew it was a direction that no one else was anywhere near at that point."

That mention of a car crash is one of the more obvious signs of the influence of JG Ballard on Foxx. The author was proving to be an influence on quite a few young musicians at the time--only a year later Mute Records founder Daniel Miller would release his single "Warm Leatherette" which was directly inspired by Ballard's novel Crash. In a 2019 piece for The Guardian, author Zadie Smith wrote of Ballard: "In Ballard's work there is always this mix of futuristic dread and excitement, a sweet spot where dystopia and utopia converge. For we cannot say we haven't got precisely what we dreamed of, what we always wanted, so badly."

A sweet spot where dystopia and utopia converge. That seems like the New Romantic dream of a new Europe and the struggle that would be borne in order to get there while looking into the abyss of the collapse of the old order.

The Empires are falling, it's time to be slipping away...

For the recording of their second album the same year, Ultravox purchased an EMS Synthi A, a mini modular analog synthesizer housed in a briefcase. The instrument was widely used in the early seventies by artists seeking a modular synth they could use for performance and recording purposes. Moogs were unwieldy beasts before the advent of the Minimoog, but the EMS Synthi was compact and could be used with a keyboard, making it useful for artists used to using the piano to compose.

The synth was used by Pink Floyd on Dark Side of the Moon, by Brian Eno both in Roxy Music and in his solo recordings, Jean Michel Jarre on Oxygene and Equinoxe, and Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk were using them.

Ha! Ha! Ha!, is surprisingly more brittle than its predecessor with fewer twists and turns. The style turns more towards the aggressiveness of punk, aggressiveness that masks fear of what is happening in the world. It was produced by Steve Lillywhite (without Brian Eno), which may account for some of its brittle quality. I've personally always found Lillywhite's sound to be kind of treble-forward and lacking warmth and depth.

Overall Ha! Ha! Ha! is the work of a band finding itself and choosing to go in a more strident direction even while deepening its investment in electronic sounds, but it simply isn't as interesting a listen as the debut record. The group doubles down on interesting final tracks by ending the album with the fascinating "Hiroshima Mon Amour." Using the title but nothing else of Alain Resnais’ film, the group uses a Roland TR-77 drum machine and the synthesizer to create what has been claimed to be the first synthpop/New Wave song. The track was the B side of the record's single "ROckWrok" just as the groundbreaking "My the Sex" had been the B side of "Dangerous Rhythm."  The song received a great deal of notice from music fans and from critics, even though Ha! Ha! Ha! sank without a trace. The remixed and expanded album contains an alternative take of "Hiroshima Mon Amour" using real drums and a great deal of squalling guitar as well as violin and the synths to achieve a much more raucous sound. It's still a good song, but nowhere near as arresting as the track they used for the album.

Things changed quite a bit by the time of the following year's Systems of Romance. Foxx and the band had grown tired of the constraints of punk. New guitarist Robin Simon added a tougher, more percussive edge as synthesizers and drum machines came to the fore. German producer/engineer Conny Plank, who worked with many leading groups in the Krautrock movement, gave the album a much warmer and, perhaps ironically, more organic sound than Ha!-Ha!-Ha! The record not only lays groundwork for the New Romantics, it sounds a lot like the blueprint that Depeche Mode will start working with on A Broken Frame in four short years.

But in 1978 Systems of Romance made very little impact though it received some praise in the music press. The writing was on the wall, and Island Records dropped the band at the end of the year, which widened the growing rift between Foxx and the rest of the band, especially Currie. Foxx left the group and his first solo release, Metamatic, dispensed with a band entirely, producing instead a synth pop album at a time when that was increasingly the direction in which pop music was flowing—Ultravox had already inspired the likes of Gary Numan. Currie met Midge Ure through club kid Steve Strange and the two collaborated on the debut album by Visage, Strange's musical venture. Recognizing the power of pairing classical/new age austerity with synths and electronic beats, they crafted the Ultravox album Vienna with its stagey title track, pushing the band into a successful run that eclipsed what had happened during the John Foxx years.

Yet Ultravox!, the group's debut, stands as a true Rosetta stone, a record that absolutely everyone should hear.

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