2014 has seen Ure contribute to the orchestrated great adventure of ‘International Blue’, an album celebrating the art of the crooner. Assembled by Dutch composer Stephen Emmer, the album also features Ure’s old pal Glenn Gregory from Heaven 17.
With the release of Ure’s song ‘Taking Back My Time’ as a single Midge Ure kindly chatted to The Electricity Club at the world famous Abbey Road Studios.
TEC : How dit it feel to be working with an orchestra again on ‘Taking Back My Time’, having done se previously on ‘All In One Day’ and at the ‘Night Of The Proms’ concerts in Germany?
MU : This is slightly different. Stephen Emmer did all the arrangements for the ‘International Blue’ album so I was presented with a backing track that he’d fine honed and worked on. He thought my voice and style of melody and lyric writing would suit his project. This is very grown up stuff, it’s really complicated, beautiful music arrangements… so to sing a track like that, it was an absolute joy because I didn’t do it the same way I would normally approach one of my songs; it was a different key for me, I sing much lower so it’s a different vocal range and you can hear that.
TEC : Where there any particular classic reference points you used for ‘Taking Back My Time’?
MU : Not really… I mean the chord structure and arrangement that Stephen already had were reminiscent of the Burt Bacharach school of songwriting, that whole Scott Walker thing, the melody instantly came into place so my process of writing for this took maybe two or three days so it wasn’t a huge amount of time to sit there and do it. My big worry was that I wasn’t going to do Stephen’s backing track justice. So I had to make sure I was singing something that was solid and informative plus had interesting plays on words and subject matter. But the melody itself had to embellish and compliment what he’d already put there.
[The Electricity Club - 23-06-14]
