Hiroshima Mon Amour by Ultravox!

John Foxx, who was the lead singer, front-man, and main song-writer for Ultravox before he ditched the band, left it in the hands of Midge Ure (who took it to considerable commercial succes) has said of "Hiroshima Mon Amour" on their 1977 album Ha! Ha! Ha!, that it was the first synthpop song in history and that he thought nobody else had done a song like that before.  Of course, Foxx was a strange guy.  A former hippy and mod kid, he decided and declared his intention to live a life without any emotion in the mid-70s.  He wrote that sentiment into the track "I Want to Be A Machine" on Ultravox!'s first album.  A huge fan of J.G. Ballard, and grandiosely imaging himself as the "Marcel Duchamp" of electronic music (at a time when Kraftwerk was about the only game in electronic music town) he is known for being rather influential, even as he was never actually very popular.

I'm a fan, of course, of some of his early Ultravox work and especially his first solo album, Metamatic from very early 1980 (literally just squeeks into the 80s by less than three weeks) and I've talked about both here before.  Ironically some of his imitators (like Gary Numan) who were very upfront about citing the John Foxx era Ultravox as one of their main inspirations, went on to not only precede Metamatic, making it sound almost like a copy-cat (ironically) as well as achieving considerably more mainstream success and attention.  Foxx's declaration might have been a bit self-serving; synthpop certainly evolved out of a collage of experimental electronic music experimentation going on all over the place in the 70s.  Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Tomita and Giorgio Moroder had been kicking around for years making pop music with minimoogs and other early synthesizers that are not really very distinguishable from synthpop.  OMD ditched their guitars in 1975 (although they didn't release anything early enough to beat Foxx, I suppose.) When exactly did some early pioneering electronic pop music cross some arbitrary line to become synthpop?  I dunno, but according to Foxx, and many in the music press accept this, "Hiroshima Mon Amour" was when this happened.

If so, it's probably a little bit belated of me to actually put this one up.  Sure, it came out before the 80s, but it was the root of the 80s sound in many ways.  It's actually a bit poppier than even stuff that came out later and was more popular—Gary Numan's work in particular (as well as Metamatic and some early Human League, for example) was really cold, distant, and cyper-punk-like.

Dancing With Tears In My Eyes by Ultravox

Like many bands of the early 80s who didn't have a stream of mainstream hits that I would have heard on the radio, I discovered Ultravox in the later 80s after they were past their prime, and indeed after they had broken up. For many long years, the only Ultravox I had was Collection, a greatest hits cassette tape that compiled the output of the four albums that the had done with the "classic" line-up with frontman Midge Ure, synth-guru Billy Currie, drummer Warren Cann and bass player Chris Cross. After this, they canned Cann (no pun intended) and released the thoroughly disappointing album U-vox (which I once briefly owned) before calling it a day.

So, a lot of my Ultravox info was out of context, since I never heard the original albums. More recently I have---you can now buy digital remaster double CD versions where the CD of bonus material (alternates, demos, remixes, live versions and b-sides) are actually longer than the original material. "Dancing With Tears In My Eyes" was Ultravox's second biggest hit; it hit no. 3 on the UK charts. It's from their 1984 album Lament, and it was the first track on Collection, and as such, always struck me as one of the most iconic (if not the most iconic) of the classic line-up Ultravox's output.

Although it actually has a pretty cool music video, I decided to mix things up and put out the "Special Remix" version instead. The Special Remix is mostly notable for being really long, but it's also nice because it separates out most of the elements of the song at at least one point instead of burying it under all the other elements, so you can really hear everything that the song does.

Touch and Go by John Foxx and Mr. X by Ultravox

I'm doing something a little bit different with this post, and actually talking about two songs in the same post. There's a reason I'm doing this, though, and hopefully after you've heard them both back to back that reason will be obvious.

As I've said before, Ultravox is often credited by the music press, fans, and wikipedia with having the first true synthpop song ever recorded, "Hiroshima Mon Amour" in 1977 and the first true synthpop album ever recorded, Systems of Romance in 1978. After that happened, John Foxx, frontman and one of the leading creative sides to the band, left to pursue his solo career, starting with 1980's release Metamatic, 1981's The Garden, etc. Ultravox, after recruiting Midge Ure, whom band member Billy Currie had met on the Visage project back in '78 and '79 (it took a little while to sign to Polydor and release Visage, which also came out in 1980) released Vienna in 1980 as well.

This weird nepotistic relationship between Foxx, Ultravox and Visage was kind of odd in that both Foxx and Ure have sung tracks that they worked on from some of those other groups, especially in live sets. Foxx wrote a song called "Systems of Romance" that was originally intended to slate onto the Ultravox album of the same name, but which didn't get recorded until his 1982 solo album The Garden. He also used some tracks that were performed with Ultravox (while he was still a member of that band) but never recorded by them, "He's a Liquid" and "Touch and Go." In one interview in the late '90s, Warren Cann, drummer for Ultravox up until 1985 or so, noted that he considered those songs Ultravox songs, not Foxx solo songs, and remarked that Ultravox was not credited when they were included on Foxx's Metamatic.

That said, have a listen to Ultravox's "Mr. X" after you've listened to "Touch and Go." Foxx wasn't credited on that one either. So, who wrote that main synth line, I wonder?

The Thin Wall by Ultravox

I almost posted another German synthpop song, since I was on a roll, but I figured I better save some for later. Besides, I have a lot of bands that still haven't even gotten on the scoreboard yet, but which I've got a lot of songs I want to post, so let me start there.

Off and on as I've blogged, I've mentioned Ultravox quite a bit, and since that part of the Propaganda video with the arms reaching through the wall reminded me sharply of this video, I thought I'd start here. This is part of the Midge Ure era. Midge and Billie Currie, already of Ultravox, met on the Visage side project (oh, man! Do I ever need to talk about Visage!) so perhaps unsurprisingly, this period of Ultravox, the "classic line-up", is famously New Romantic in sound and approach. "The Thin Wall" was one of only two singles that were released from 1981's Rage in Eden.

I'm not going to talk about Ultravox too much now, because they'll figure many more times yet before I'm done, but it was always surprising to me how obscure they were in the US compared to the UK, where they had several top ten singles, and a run of success that was comparable to that of fellow New Romantics operating at the same time, Duran Duran. I think it had to be promotion; after all, Duran Duran were huge in the US, and the sound of Ultravox and Duran Duran in the earliest years of the 80s was really quite similar in most respects.


Ultravox-The Thin Wall
Uploaded by adiis. - Explore more music videos.