Ultravox’s Midge Ure has shared the real reason he turned down the Sex Pistols, speaking in an interview with Guitar Player. He said he was asked to join the group in 1975, when manager Malcolm McLaren was forming the punk band.
Ure described how he first met McLaren outside a music shop in Glasgow. He also explained how the conversation led to the offer.
“They were selling some slightly hot equipment from the back of the car. They’d driven from London and stopped off at cities all the way up to Glasgow,” Ure said. “Bernie Rhodes saw me coming out of the music shop and approached me and asked that I speak to his friend Malcolm McLaren who was around the corner. Malcolm told me about the New York Dolls, about his fashions with Vivienne Westwood, all of which meant nothing.”
Ure then described how McLaren made the offer and why he said no.
“And then about 20 minutes into the conversation, he says, ‘I’m putting a band together. Would you join?’” Ure said. “And I said, ’Well, no, because you haven’t asked me what I do. You don’t know if I’m a guitarist or a drummer or a singer or a musician at all. I just happen to be coming out of a music shop.’”
Ure also reflected on what he thought McLaren was looking for.
“I must have looked the part rather than sounded the part,” he continued. “It seemed that was what he was looking for. He was looking for a band that he could dress up in Vivienne’s clothes to sell some bondage trousers. I have to say, he chose the right guys. I would have been the wrong guy.”
Ure’s refusal did not slow his career. His path led somewhere very different from the Pistols’ world of provocation and shock.
McLaren was already building the Sex Pistols around image as much as sound. His work with Vivienne Westwood in London’s fashion scene shaped the look that later defined the band. That focus on clothing and attitude is what Ure says he picked up on during their meeting.
Ure found his own success a few years later. He joined Ultravox in 1979 and took over as lead vocalist and guitarist after the departure of John Foxx. The change gave the band its best-known lineup.
That lineup produced “Vienna,” the title track of the group’s 1980 album. The single was released on January 9, 1981, and features Ure on lead vocals. The new wave ballad is still regarded as a staple of the synth-pop era and the band’s signature song.
Ure’s biggest project came in 1984, when he co-wrote Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” with Bob Geldof. A BBC News report on the famine in Ethiopia inspired the charity single. A supergroup of leading British and Irish musicians recorded it in a single day at Sarm West Studios in Notting Hill. The song raised money for famine relief.
