Post-Punk Monk

The band went into 1983 with a new album and sound, with famed Beatles producer Geiorge Martin helming “Quartet.” With the clarity that Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick strove for, coupled with the first generation of digital synths and their commensurate glassy, airy sound, “Quartet” was hobbled with a featherlight production sound and a distinct lack of the oomph that their albums had previously had in spades. The songs were fine, but the production let them down. If not for the gravitas of Cross’ bass guitar in the mix, the album might well have floated off of the turntable!

Cross was also keeping busy with his creative cohort, Midge Ure. The two also released an album with poet Maxwell Langdown that year [after a long gestation] called “The Bloodied Sword.” It was an album where Ure and Cross performed all of the music, with the exception of percussion on a few tracks by Midge’s ex-Slik bandmate Kenny Hyslop. And then there was also the soundtrack to the original UK Max Headroom” film and a Levis ad [“Rivets”] and that was all of the Chris Cross extra-curricular activity from Ultravox that I could name.

1983 also featured the live EP from Ultravox called “Monument” which was the soundtrack to a video which was five songs live. Surprisingly modest for the band that never shied away from making a big impact to have made a live EP instead of a full album; possibly of the double live variety. The songs were from their “Quartet” tour and featured their most impressive live arrangement of “The Voice” which ended with a stunning percussive movement where each member was slamming rhythms in various tempos [creating a complex polyrhythm] on a Simmons pad. I nearly burst into flames when I first saw that on MTV one Sunday night! 41 years later and I still forget to breathe when watching it.

The band had enormous success since breaking through with the all-time classic number two song on the British charts: “Vienna” in early 1981. It was year after year of album/tour/album. 1984 was the time that it peaked with lineup’s fourth album, “Lament.” The band produced themselves and pulled in numerous directions with dance-based sampling [“White China”], the return to Rock with the Big Music of the era [“One Small Day”], as well as predicting the Celtic leanings of Midge Ure’s future solo career. [“Man Of Two Worlds”] The big hit was number three UK single for “Dancing With Tears In My Eyes.” Their top 5 peak after “Vienna.”

1984 ended with the band consolidating their success with their best selling triple-platinum greatest hits album called “The Collection.” It reached number 2 on the UK album chart and featured a new single on it, “Love’s Great Adventure.” By 1984 the former New Romantic influencers had scruffy long hair and had ditched the vintage clothing and jodhpurs. The video for “Love’s Great Adventure” captured Chris’ long locks for posterity. It was hard to imagine where the band would travel next.

THE END OF ULTRAVOX

Alas, Ultravox underwent a sea change starting at the end of 1984 when Midge Ure became enmeshed in the Band Aid project as the partner with Bob Geldof for the “Do They Know It’s Christmas” single and ultimately sparking the Live Aid project in 1985. Where this lineup of Ultravox played for the final time on Saturday, July 15 at Wembley Stadium. As Ure was pulled into this world, it was natural for Ultravox to get back burner status. Followed by Midge Ure’s first solo album, the band were on hiatus for a long period. When they attempted to restart the engines in 1986, the balance was lost. Ending with the band cutting drummer Warren Cann free after hearing that he was more interested in maybe playing guitar than drums. The three other members enlisted Mark Brezezicki to play drums on their 1986 album “U-Vox” and the result was a band clearly past its sell-by date. Following a tour of the UK and Europe in late ’86, the band quietly ceased activity with nary a press release.

Following the fadeout of Ultravox by 1987, the remaining members of Ultravox went their separate ways. Midge Ure had made a big splash with his first solo album, but that energy ebbed quickly with subsequent albums to move him out of the spotlight. Warren Cann played drums with Mecano for a little while then moved to Los Angeles to try to start an acting career that all I can find evidence of is the 1988 horror comedy “The American Scream.” Billy Currie began his solo career with a series of solo album beginning with the excellent “Transportation” and going down various nooks and crannies over the years. Chris Cross defied all expectations by retreating to his degree in psychology and having a career as a psychotherapist. Something band life probably gave him infinite insights to.

Then for the next 21 years one didn’t hear a word from Chris Cross, apart from the occasional interview in the pages of the official Ultravox fanzine, “Extreme Voice.” The only musical contribution I can ferret out was the co-writing of a song [“Is It Loud Enough?”] for Brian Kennedy’s 1990 debut album, “The Great War Of Words.” It was then radio silence from Chris Cross until that fateful day in 2008 when Ultravox heard the call to regroup at the advice from their management!

THE REFORMATION ERA

Morrison-O’Donnell Management correctly felt that 2008 might be a great time for Ultravox to reform for commercial reason having nothing to do with the financial crisis of the era I’m sure. But 21 years later there was a lot of honestly pent-up demand to see the band. Some of their fans from the iPod era may have never been born when the group were still active onstage. The group tried touring to find that there was plenty of demand for UK and European tours for a few years. The band finally released the big, splashy double live CD + DVD for the “Return To Eden” tour and it showed the band in fine fettle.

It actually sounded better than any previous live recordings owing to the power Midge Ure now had after years of plying his trade. Seeing the band sweep away all of the water that had collected under the bridge a generation later was fun, and the band sure seemed to be having a great time inhabiting their legacy onstage. The next year, the band issued an elaborate gatefold red vinyl 10″/CD EP [“Moments In Eden”] of four new songs on their next tour’s set list and that was just a stunning package that was in no way priced according to value. Then came the perhaps inevitable reformed band studio album, “Brilliant.” Which fell afoul of my tastes perhaps even moreso than the shaky “U-Vox” album had been 22 years earlier. Leading me to sit out the inevitable “2012 Live” 2xCD that was issued on the tour behind that album.

I should have made the effort to travel overseas for the “Return To Eden” tour. Ultravox were a hugely favorite band for me but the travel costs cowed me at the time. So I missed the chance to experience Ultravox in the same way that around the same time I also missed John Foxx playing an amazing career retrospective show the London Roundhouse, as well as the unbelievable in retrospect Simple Minds “5×5” shows that are all to my eternal regret that I did not even try to attend. Speaking of Simple Minds, they afforded Ultravox their last time onstage in the role of opening act for Simple Minds 2013 UK tour. At the time I had seen Simple Minds give the best concert I’d ever seen in their brief tour of The States but oh, to have seen my two favorite Rock bands on the same bill. What was I thinking not to have at least looked into attending?

And now the line in the sand is drawn on Ultravox. An era has ended, and a member of one of my formative favorite bands has died, and at the relatively young age of 71. The first time such a thing has happened was with the death of Mick Karn of JAPAN in the earliest days of this hoary blog. But with Karn, his cancer diagnosis was public record and his ending was less of a shock. The 2016 deaths of David Bowie and Prince were shocking but they were Rock Stars with all that entailed. Creative powerhouses that helped to define many eras of music. Not really band members as such, and therefore, different from Chris.

With the loss of Chris Cross, the mighty machine that was Ultravox is now tabled as the band was greater than the sum of its [substantial] parts. The drive and ambitious playing of the members through both eras of the group placed them in a select group of musician’s musicians who were in turn an influence on dozens of other favorite bands in the late 70s and early 80s. They took inspiration from Roxy Music but allowed for many other threads of disparate influence such as Krautrock and even Reggae to form their own hybrid strain of modern music that took everything great that the 70s had to offer and made of it their own potent cocktail of high-tech rock music that stood apart from the by then standard Rock clichés of the 60s that had become positively calcified by the 70s.

Nothing has been announced, so the cause of death is not known. As Chris Allen had lived a relatively private life apart from Ultravox, this isn’t surprising and is all the more appropriate. But his passing marks not just the end but the beginning of an era as I can expect to see crucial musicians who informed my world of music fandom take their final bows in the upcoming years. The tag cloud on PPM will have many more obituaries joining the posts. This is inevitable. While I usually have a mosaic of every release by the artist I’m discussing at the end of any obituary posting, this time it would take me a very long time to round up what I’m expecting to be an incomplete picture as my hardly complete Discogs account states I have ~190 releases with Cross accounted for. Our best condolences to his band members, friends, and family during their time of loss.

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I got dreadful news the first thing yesterday morning when commenter and electronic musician Gavin Brick told me that Midge Ure had announced the death of Ultravox bassist Chris [Allen] Cross yesterday. I absolutely could not write yesterday, and so I’d prepared a post ahead of time [this is rare] so that I’d have two in a row for a change. This hurts since Ultravox were perhaps the biggest influence in the development of this Monk when encountering their electro-rock fusion in late 1980 on the release of the “Vienna” album. Sure, Sure. Gary Numan had primed the pump the year prior, but Ultravox were the hard-core, stone-cold, real deal. Numan semed like a pretender next to these guys. Fighting words to some, I know, but for me this was the band realizing the fullest potential of combining the energy of electronic music with the power of rock.

That first encounter was a powerful one. I saw the music video for “Passing Strangers” and I was spellbound. Not only was the shot on 16mm video miles ahead of the competition visually [cough…bowie…cough] but more importantly the berserk electronics of the band were firing on all 16 cylinders. All of the band members seemed to be playing synthesizers and the deep bass was both of the four string and MiniMoog variety. That middle eight is still the best synth riffage I’ve ever heard. So it was imperative that I get the “Vienna” album as quickly as possible.

I had seen the clip in September in September. For whatever reason, “Vienna” was scarce on the ground in Orlando record stores in Q4 of 1980. I looked everywhere but came up empty handed. It wasn’t until I was visiting a Camelot Music in Charleston, South Carolina that Christmas break until I finally found a copy. One single play later and that was it… I had a new favorite band…easily!

In the first three months of 1981 it was all about the Ultravox! I quickly soaked up the first three albums as well as adjacent pleasures such as Visage and John Foxx. Alas, I never got the chance to see Ultravox play, with the exception of video. Their one show in the state of Florida that I knew about was just a few weeks after seeing that video in Tampa, 90 miles away. There was no second chance. The early Ultravox! albums were completely different from the high tech rock of “Vienna” with hints of reggae as on “Dangerous Rhythm” as well as a prefiguring of the deep thug bass that J.J. Burnel would soon favor on “I Want To Be A Machine.”

That violent quality to the music would explode on the intense and hostile “Ha! Ha! Ha!” album issued the same calendar year as the more sedate “Ultravox!” five of the album tracks seemed to be an incredibly violent response to the year’s Punk Rock explosion in Britain, with heavy blocks of searing feedback used to bludgeon the listener into submission. Yet the seed of the next album were obviously sown in incredibly forward-thinking tracks like “The Man Who Dies Every Day” and the classic “Hiroshima Mon Amour.” Which reached full flower on the subsequent “Systems Of Romance” album which had Cross picking up MiniMoog synths for the bass components of tracks like “The Quiet Men” and “Dislocation.”

Then there was the pre-Ultravox! single by Tiger Lily which wasUltravox in all but name, though on that single alone Chris went by the name Chris St. John for reasons known to him alone. This was the band that John Foxx had put together in art college and Chris had been the first recruit. Later, Currie and Cann had come into the collective and their single waxing was a Fats Waller cover for a film soundtrack. In 1981, following Ultravox’s breakthrough, the single was re-issued in this new sleeve making the original B-side the A-side. Which felt right given that it easilty prefigured the Post-Glam/Proto-New Wave of the Ultravox! debut album that would appear two years hence.

By the fall of 1981, I was primed and ready for the next amazing album from this Ultravox MK II, as some called them. Once more they were teamed up with Meisterproducer Conny Plank for the third time in a row for the “Rage In Eden” album and Chris’ muscular bass lines anchored tracks like “The Voice” with power and confidence. At the time, I was enraptured primarily by Billy Currie’s astounding keys and the manner in which drummer Warren Cann seamlessly blended machines and skins for a hybrid, complex sound that was his alone. I’ll admit to not paying as much attention to the bass playing in Ultravox at that time, but now I hear a quartet that’s unbelievably focused on making their sound in the world as powerful as it can be. Hearing the three boxes sets of “Vienna,” “Rage In Eden,” and “Quartet” have helped enormously in this regard as I now must give Chris Cross his due for being as forward thinking in his catholic approach to bass frequencies as much as the free thinking direction by which Cann approached his drumming.

After that iconic one-two punch of Ultravox albums, it became apparent that Cross [neé Allen] had more to offer than just high class bass playing on your choice of instruments. Equally at home on fretted or fretless, or with no strings at all with bass synth, by 1982 he was teaming up with his Ultravox buddy Midge Ure to begin directing the videos of Ultravox as well as for other acts both connected [Visage] and disparate [Fun Boy Three, Bananrama]. His collegiate background in both psychology and art giving him the tools to create iconic music videos that were up to the highest standard of the time. The video for Visage’s “The Damned Don’t Cry” is to this day my favorite New Romantic artifact; sensual and lush yet shot through with the requisite continental ennui that to me was the essence of the movement’s vibe.

Next: …The Second Half Of the Imperial Run