THE DELUXE REISSUE OF THE ULTRAVOX FRONTMAN’S HIT DEBUT SOLO ALBUM NOW COMES WITH A TREASURY OF EXTRA MATERIAL INCLUDING A WEMBLEY ARENA LIVE SHOW
CHRYSALIS
As Midge Ure explains elsewhere this issue, The Gift wasn’t so much an album as a studio demo disc that got out of hand, turning “a bunch of instrumentals and some pop songs” into an accidental hit record, complete with a No.1 single in If I Was.
Four decades on, the record remains an unusually diverse proposition. For the “pop songs” part of the equation, Ure relished the creative freedom to pen less byzantine music than his day-job fronting Ultravox allowed, leaning heavily on co-writer Danny Mitchell, of Glasgow new wave outfits Modern Man and Messengers.
If I Was, with its effortlessly radio-friendly melody and message, began life as a Mitchell demo, while follow-up That Certain Smile is cut very much from the same cloth.
Not everything is as breezy, though: the stately title track, with its jagged shards of synth and bursts of shortwave radio static, could have slotted seamlessly onto Vienna, while Wastelands – recycled from Modern Man’s Ure-produced 1980 album Concrete Scheme – is hilariously overwrought (“it won’t be long before a martyr’s blood is nourishing the wastelands”.)
Of the three instrumentals, Antilles sounds like the frankly banging theme to a lost 80s cop show. But it’s The Chieftan, a fierce, percussive workout whose primitive sampling includes Ure hammering on his garage door, and Edo, a slight, quasi-classical piece largely plucked on a Japanese koto, that probably tested the patience of Smash Hits readers who’d bought the LP on the strength of its opening single.
As Midge is the first to admit, The Gift is very much a product of its time (Jethro Tull’s 70s folk-jazz classic Living In The Past gets a none-more-80s makeover, complete with orchestral synth stabs) but, for Classic Pop readers, that hardly counts as a deal-breaker.
As ever, the in-house pop archaeologists at Chrysalis have left no stone unturned for this 4CD, 58-track deluxe set, with a treasury of B-sides, demos, instrumentals and extended mixes treated to the same digital scrub-up as the album itself.
Other deep-dive curios include TV spots and tour rehearsal recordings, while the fourth CD is a complete recording of Ure’s December 1985 Wembley Arena show, where he mixed tracks from The Gift with highlights from his eclectic CV, from Visage’s Fade To Grey to Ultravox’s Sleepwalk.
With an acoustic encore of Do They Know It’s Christmas? – complete with children’s choir – segueing into If I Was, it’s the perfect time capsule of a man who, whichever way you sli
