Ultravox on the formation of the New Romantic movement: “We wanted something else”
The transition from the 1970s to the new decade was a fruitful but strange time for music. While the spectre of punk and its ethos were still very much alive in the repackaged post-punk innovations, other musical movements sprung up during this era, including the New Romantics. One band that has always been closely tied to this genre, albeit controversially, is Ultravox. Naturally, they have a lot to say about that cultural juncture.
Like every act of the era, Ultravox were acutely aware of the sea change that punk enacted. At its peak, they had been derided in the media for playing synthesisers, but by the start of the 1980s, things had changed markedly for them. Now, the technological and sonic inventions that synthesisers represented were all the rage, as artists at the forefront of culture sought to break from tradition and build new sonic structures on top of the ashes of the old order that the Sex Pistols and their ilk brought tumbling down.
However, Ultravox were always outliers. They might have played synthesisers and brought a refined edge to the musical environment of the early 1980s. Still, they were not New Romantics in the overtly aesthetic and musical sense like its most prominent acts, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and Culture Club. There was always a minimalist edge to their music, which set them apart from the indulgent bombast of those they were lumped in with.
This is something the band has always maintained. During a 2009 interview with This Is Not Retro, Ultravox reflected on the period they found fame in and noted how the New Romantics emerged and why they differed from them.
According to drummer Warren Cann, the New Romantics was actually a reaction to punk, not a by-product of it. He explained: “There were a lot of people who wanted something more than punk. Just as the punk thing formed as a reaction to other stuff, so to – for lack of a better phrase – the New Romantic period formed as a reaction to punk. People were tired of it. We wanted something else.”
It was muti-instrumentalist Billy Currie who noted the differences between Ultravox and the rest of the New Romantics: “We had to be careful with that, though. You could embrace it and go a little bit nuts because, for the first time, from my point of view, everyone was interested in keyboards, whereas the previous year, playing keyboards was a bit of an uncool thing to do in the middle of the punk period. I thought it was great that the New Romantic period embraced music from the heart, but it was extreme, so you had to be careful.”
According to vocalist Midge Ure, “We didn’t fit in aesthetically, we didn’t fit in musically”. He maintained that the reason they were connected to bands like Duran Duran was because he and Currie had also been in Visage, one of the scene’s key acts, featuring Steve Strange. However, Ure added: “You look back at the old photographs – there weren’t any frilly shirts or anything like that!”
Listen to Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’ below.
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