The last section of the film shows a melancholic Midge, singing - appropriately enough - by the unmistakable gothic spires of Vienna's St. The video also saw some lightning improvisation. It all clicked in a few hours, and we ironed out the rough spots the next day - a hit a day keeps the dole away!" To paraphrase myself, I said something like, "What about this, then?" and began the "Vienna" rhythm. "I had a drum machine pattern in mind that I'd wanted to do something with and played that. However, in the superbly collated Ultravox: The Story, percussionist Warren Cann reveals that the first mix came out rather quicker than some of us might imagine: Some of the lyrics do appear to reflect this. The most commonly accepted line is that inspiration came from Carol Reed's noirish film classic, The Third Man. But - and perhaps this is unsurprising in the weird and wonderful world of pop - things were not always as they seemed.įor starters, there's a lot of speculation about the genesis of 'Vienna'. Then there was the video, with it's fantastically weird ballroom shenanigans - the vampiric femmes fatales, the mischievous tarantulas, and Monsieur Midge wandering about with his tuxedo and flaming side-burns, every inch the fin-de-siecle poet.īoth the song and the video have rightly gone down as classics. But posterity has favoured Ultravox, and even as early as 1981, 'Vienna' was voted British single of the year. Vienna was one of the biggest global hits of the 1980's - cruelly kept from the UK top-spot by dastardly Joe Dolce and his one-hit wonder 'Shaddap you Face' (a painful blow to bear for Midge and his musketeers). Dum dum dum dum: 'Walked in the cold air.' A moustachioed Midge Ure steps out across a misty cobbled plaza, and that gloriously retro bass-line kicks in: Bum bum. The haunting synth intro, the icy drum that cuts like a druid's sickle - it couldn't really get much better. It was a curious age - the age of those mysterious fellows, 'The New Romantics'. And what a cake.! In this online tribute, we're going to take you back to a time when it was perfectly normal for blokes to wear streaks of mascara and for girls to sport militant shoulder pads. The track alone was a masterpiece - the video was the icing on the cake. Besides attempting to ride his grandparents dog Cosmo like a horse, our resident pop pundit counts Ultravox's 'Vienna' as amongst his most vivid childhood memories.
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