'We gave the world a megaphone'

I'T'S QUITE a journey from growing up in a family of five scraping by in a one-bedroom Glasgow flat to organising and performing at Live Aid in front of almost two billion people. And if that wasn’t enough, being part of Ultravox and Visage, co-writing the Top of the Pops theme and having a huge solo career... Yet Midge Ure struggles with acclaim.

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“It’s very uncomfortable,” he says. “Music was my saviour. Long before I could pick up a guitar, I could sing and it was free.

“Listening to something in that tenement slum flat and being instantly taken somewhere else was magical.

“So being told I also did that for someone else, soundtracked something seismic like having a baby, or conceiving it, is amazing.

“But I have people in my head and heart that I think are icons and have made huge differences to the planet.”

The Scottish star is best known for co-writing Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas and organising the era-defining Live Aid concert the following summer with Bob Geldof.

But he insists: “It’s not something we created. Music transcends, it goes through barbed wire and over walls.

“It was about injustice - there was something in the air and we gave the world a megaphone.”

Boomtown Rats singer Geldof, like millions of us, had seen Michael Buerk’s BBC reports from the famine in Ethiopia in October 1984 and had felt helpless.

Inspired to raise money with a charity single, he repurposed an unused song and, on November 2, asked Midge to write the melody and produce. They reached out to everyone they knew and booked a studio for November 25. Everyone came, from Boy George to George Michael.

"It's not the Bob and Midge story...

“It was seat of your pants stuff,” Midge says. “We hadn't spoken to a proper adult, just musicians.

“No managers involved, no record label. We had no idea who was coming, so I'm sitting there with a sheet of lyrics going, ‘We haven't got enough to give everyone a line....”

In contrast, the US spin-off We Are The World was gleamingly precision-tooled, but, as so often, musically Britain leads the way.

“We seem to be a little part of this massive ship sailing through a musical sea,” Midge nods.

“But we are the front end, the icebreakers, the creators. We push the boundaries.