Friday, July 10, 2020

Ultravox ushers in The New Romantic sound with Vienna


Ultravox : New Europeans


On July 11, 1980 Ultravox released its best known album, Vienna, ushering in a new Eurosynth sound that would be called New Romantic. For Vienna, the new line-up of Ultravox returned to Germany to record with Systems Of Romance producer Conny Plank. The album cover would be shot by Dutchman Anton Corbijn.  Now featuring Kraftwerk fanatic Midge Ure as its new singer, the band made its artistic statement on the song "New Europeans": 

On a crowded beach washed by the sun, he puts his headphones on. 
His modern world revolves around the synthesizer's song. 
Full of future thoughts and thrills, his senses slip away. 
He's a European legacy, a culture for today 



By looking to Germany for inspiration, as Bowie had done earlier, Ultravox tapped into a vein. With the music of Gary Numan, Bowie, Ultravox frontman turned solo artist John Foxx, Human League, up and comers Spandau Ballet and Visage (another band Ure and Ultravox's Billie Currie were members of), a new scene developed where androgyny, a spoiled kind of artistocracy and loads of synthesizers all intersected. These were the Blitz Kids, named for a London music venue where electropop bands performed. 

This was filmed in November, 1980. Steve Strange appears 5:00 in. Spandau Ballet at 7:00.



The music had nothing to do with American-based blues and it worked on almost every level.

The instrumental opener "Astradyne" sounds like the birth of the movement that would eventually give us Duran Duran. Chrysalis Records, however moved the song to the end of the A side for the US release , preferring to start things off the first single from the album, "Sleepwalk". 

The next track is "New Europeans", the first song to really pop off the album for me. 


The album's most famous song is its title track, described in this way by Rip It Up And Start Again author Simon Reynolds:

Ultravox...plunged into full-blown Teutonica with the quasi-classical "Vienna". Wreathed in the sonic equivalent of dry ice, this ludicrously portentous ballad --inspired by a vague notion of a past-its-prime Hapsburg Empire sliding into decadence--reached number two in the U.K. charts in the first weeks of  1981 and hovered there for what seemed like an eternity.

Fun fact: the song that held "Vienna" from the top spot was "Shaddup Your Face" by Joe Dolce.



From Robert Christgau a grade of C:

First they wanted to be machines, now they want to have roots--it's new, it's different. "A European legacy, a culture for today," sings former Rich Kid Midge Ure through a signifying synthesizer, and he's not being ironic--new Europeans may be jaded, but they avoid irony except in totally frivolous contexts. So they buy electronic instruments, rendezvous in Köln with Conny Plank, and manufacture dance music for the locked pelvis. One strange thing, though--sounds like "Western Promise" should be called "Algiers."

From Smash Hits:


On both "Mr. X" and the apocalyptic "All Stood Still", the synths run the show. I was still playing the latter on my college radio show when "Dancing With Tears In My Eyes" was climbing the charts in the U.K.




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