(Yes, I’m a good liberal and well aware that there were nice blokes over in England designing ugly clothes whose very jobs were dependent on the idea that we were going to buy them. Unfortunately in the real world, our own jobs hinged on the fact that we would never wear them! Well, we might have, to the clubs at least, but...those haircuts...I’d find an excuse to fire a guy who walked in to work looking like Adam Ant, too. Wouldn’t you? Sure. See?)

So...we can pretty much dismiss Ultravox after Midge joined. (I can, anyway. You can go buy whatever you want!) I never would have heard them at all, except that I was in a band with Cliff!, our bassplayer--who’d been in the Navy, stationed in England in the late 70s. In our very first conversation he mentioned that he’d seen the Sex Pistols live, before Sid joined. What’s more, they sucked. But then, he thought everything going on there sucked. He was incredibly appalled after the Pistols split and the first PiL album came out and the whole of England was plastered with billboards hyping “The New One from Johnny Rotten” which turned out to be a total piece of shit that Rotten only recorded so he’d have money to buy expensive video toys, hahahahahahaha. And Johnny even said as much at the time, or shortly thereafter, so Cliff’s judgment was vindicated and justified, don’t you think?

As for the music scene all around him? Viewing it as it was rather than through the glow of later history and accomplishment and revisionism, he was probably right more often than he was wrong, but he kept going to gigs. A fellow serviceman kept dragging him to whichever flavour of the week was playing nearby.

One day it was Ultravox, and my friend told his buddy, “hey, you finally done good!” This was right around when Gary Numan was emerging; Ultravox had already perfected the thing poor hapless Gary would never be able to do any more than attempt...out on the street (though apparently never at the record company), they were calling it “Electropunk.” New Wave stuff, real heavy on the synth, sci-fi pretensions, robotic rhythms, singing the body electric. Hawkwind for the intelligentsia. Hawkwind themselves followed this trend for a little while, it was a natural for them after all. They made better music than most of the young upstarts who wouldn’t admit to being influenced by them, too.

It was quite the schtick, eh? John Foxx was the leader of Ultravox back then. He wanted to be a machine. He sang those very words on their first album, which found them dressed in geeky vinyl raincoats, co-produced by Brian Eno. (The record, that is. Whoever produced their wardrobe, they certainly won’t be admitting to it now.)

The other notable track was “My Sex,” (or “Mysex,” if you will--it was pronounced as one word) which was the sort of pleasant piano-and-strings instrumental Eno could snore up from beyond the grave. Over that, Foxx recited a little poem, an ode to his own metallic member no less!. (This was some years after Jim Morrison recorded “let’s all lament the death of my cock,” but a couple of years before that one got released, so it was trailblazing all around...) There were no macho posturings here, though...in fact, it was as mournful as a filtered electron can be made to sound. “Mysex is often solo/Short-circuits sometimes then/Sometimes it’s a golden glow...I keep a wanting wardrobe/I still explore/Of all the bodies I’ve known/And those I wish to know/Mysex/Mysex...” Hey, me too, John; y’know you’d be even more poignant if you’d show a little healthy resentment over the fact that there are too many in the latter category. (For all his machinehood, he still had certain qualities in common with the rest of us.)

The tension between the poem and the Enomuzak that accompanies it is the only palpable thing in the entire track. More of an elegy than anything, the poem is delivered in the present tense but the vocal quality is so desolate one is forced to assume it’s in all in the past. This was ’76, so there was no venereal subtext. It’s more as if poor John had blown a microchip some months back, gone on a rampage, and just received word from the State that his willy was going to be burnt off with a laser. It brings a tear, guv’nor, don’t it?

Their second album, Ha! Ha! Ha!, I never heard, because it was import-only all these years. I’m told it’s very “staccato.” The third was the masterwork, Systems of Romance. It sounded like everything Wire would be hyped as being a year later, as if a gaggle of British synthboys had held a seance and channeled the spirit of Syd Barrett. Fine songs permeate this disc, cold and alienated yet melodic and human at the same time. Their keyboardist said in an interview once that they were well aware when they were making it that what they were doing was just about the last thing the kids wanted to hear, that month anyway. Unlike too many of the synthbands who came along a few years later, they said fuck that to the prevailing trends and did precisely what they wanted to do. For this reason alone, they stand head and shoulders above Visage, Depeche Mode, and (urrrrrrrrrp!) Duran Duran. It’s OK, I suppose, that Ultravox went on to achieve some recognition in their own time, but had they done so with John Foxx leading the band we’d all have been the better for it.

Ironically, some of the tunes on Systems of Romance had everything it would take to appeal to the fashion squads of a year or two later (who were still listening to the Pistols and sneering at anything containing anything other than guitars, drums, and Oi! oinks), but Ultravox were just as capable of switching gears from a potential Black Sabbath cover like “Dislocation,” (no guitars, but if there were...), to the euphoria of “When You Walk Through Me,” to the pensive ballad at the end, “listening to the music the machines make, I felt my heart break, just for a moment.” I still do.