Mad World

by Lori Majewski

  The moment we got into the rehearsal room and started making a noise, we turned into a rock band, and I’m not saying that to blow my own trumpet. Something happened, something gelled between the electronics that they had and the guitar playing that I brought to it, and this thing just became incredibly powerful. It went from being a bit lost and despondent to incredibly excited and very, very vibrant.

  “Vienna” is pure fantasy. I’d never been there. I didn’t know an awful lot about it other than the fact that it had, in its day, been a cultural center. It just seemed to me to be a fairly beautiful, fantastic place to write about, steeped in this mid-European mysticism, this ancient, crumbling facade.

  The idea is very basic: Boy meets girl. You’re there, and you feel a certain way when you’re there, and you vow this wonderful feeling will carry on. But when you come back to your cold, gray miserable life, it just disappears. Like all holidays, you come back home, and it’s gone. It was that wrapped up in Billy’s fabulous melodies and chord structures.

  It started with an idea. I was out to dinner with my old Rich Kids manager and his wife, who was a bit pissed [inebriated]. She said, “You know what you need to do? You need to write a song like that ‘Vienna.’” And I was like, “What song ‘Vienna’?” She said, “You know, that Fleetwood Mac song: Vieennnnna.” She was singing “Rhiannon.”

  The image of Vienna—the name, the title, singing about the city—that sparked the whole thing. I went into the rehearsal room with Billy later on, and I said, “I’ve got this thing that I keep singing over and over in my head, “This means nothing to me / Oh, Vienna.” And that was the start it. “Vienna” is one classic example of all four members of the band contributing something that’s unique to them. “Vienna” wouldn’t be “Vienna” without the drumbeat, Warren [Cann] making those ca-cow noises with his syndrums. It wouldn’t be “Vienna” without Chris [Cross]’s echoey bass thing, that dug-dugga-dugga. It’s certainly not “Vienna” without Billy’s piano part and viola solo. And my contribution is the vocal melody and the lyrics. I can’t say that every song we ever did together came equally that way, but that one certainly did.

  Naïveté is a wonderful, wonderful thing. When you’re young, you’re doing what you absolutely feel is right. You think you can do anything. The reality is that “Vienna” is an extralong, atmospheric, empty-sounding electronic ballad that speeds up in the middle with a viola solo—and it could have gone absolutely nowhere. Luck played a huge part. The record company saw it as a hit…if we edited it. This was still the time of the three-minute single. We’d already released “Sleepwalk” [highest U.K. chart position: 29] and “Passing Strangers” [highest U.K. chart position: 57]. We were playing Hammersmith Odeon, and the record company were there. The moment we played “Vienna,” which was an album track, the place erupted. So there were three-and-half thousand people proving the record company wrong. I’ll give Chris Wright, the head of the record company, his due: We’d been arguing about the edit for six months, and he came up to us and said, “Put it out the way it is.”

  It was an instant hit. It came out in January [1981]. The charts freeze over the Christmas period, so people were desperate to hear something new because they’ve had enough of Christmas songs. “Vienna” came out and just captured people’s imaginations. Professional songwriters would love to know what the right combination is, what’s the combination that makes something quality and interesting to a very wide spectrum of people. I think that’s what happened here.

  “Vienna” was kept off the number-one spot for a couple of weeks by the comedy record, the Joe Dolce thing [the immortal “Shaddup You Face”]. Only in Britain would people buy tripe like that. Then, of course, John Lennon was shot, and [“(Just Like) Starting Over”] went straight to number one. We sat at number two for five weeks. But in the end, “Vienna” outsold both of them.

  It doesn’t take a genius to look out at an audience and figure out that it’s the “Whiter Shade of Pale” of our career. It’s something that captures people’s imaginations. It still gets played throughout the world today. It still sounds as fresh as it did when we made it. It hasn’t really dated. It’s got its own kind of peculiar time, kind of like Blade Runner—you don’t know what century it’s set in. It’s kind of classical, it’s kind of electronic, it’s kind of atmospheric. It’s just this mishmash of ideas, but it’s all Ultravox.

  MIXTAPE: 5 More Songs About Cities 1. “Moskow Disco,” Telex 2. “Drowning in Berlin,” The Mobiles 3. “The Paris Match,” Style Council 4. “Get Out of London,” Intaferon 5. “Walking in L.A.,” Missing Persons

  THAT WAS THEN

  BUT THIS IS NOW

  Midge Ure—sorry, Midge Ure OBE—co-wrote and produced the Band Aid single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (see this page) and helped organize the Live Aid concert. His plaintive 1985 solo single “If I Was” went to number one in the U.K. and his album The Gift was a number two. Ultravox disbanded in 1987. Ure continued to release solo records with decreasing impact. He got back into the world leader–shaming business when he and Bob Geldof put together 2005’s Live 8 concerts. Ultravox re-formed in 2008 and have been sporadically touring and recording since.

  URE: I’d been extremely reluctant to reunite in the past. It was a bit like getting back together with your ex from 30 years ago. It happened because somebody said to us, “It’s 30 years since you wrote ‘Vienna’—don’t you think you should go out and celebrate all the work you made together?” And, weirdly, we all felt that it would be fun. It would be interesting to go out one more time and play all those songs. We went back and looked at them and we, not re-created, but we recaptured the essence of what it was we did and that led to the inevitable new album [Brilliant, 2012].

  I think we probably are an electronic Spinal Tap. There’s no escaping that. There’s always the danger of becoming a substandard caricature of yourselves. People saw Ultravox as a bunch of po-faced scientists as opposed to a bunch of musicians, but we do have a very good sense of humor.

  [The eighties] was a different planet. It was a planet where people cared about music. Music was a be-all and end-all to young people. It was our lifeblood. You waited for the next album you were into, you saved up your pennies, and you waved it around proudly when you bought it, and you played it to death. That world doesn’t exist anymore. There’s only a few old-timers and Luddites who do that these days. There are kids walking around with 20,000 songs on their phones, and they haven’t got a clue what any of them are called because they’ve been downloaded—they’ve just been passed from person to person. Everyone can afford the same equipment, but not everyone can write a song and make an interesting piece of music. Sometimes when you’re limited to very basic tools, you have to be creative; you have to invent rather than just go to a file in your computer and listen to 2,000 bass drum sounds. You have to create your own with your Minimoog and start bouncing it around with echoes to make a pattern. That’s how we used to do things in the old days.

  “ORIGINAL SIN”

  Like their British counterparts, Australia’s INXS were as influenced by funk as by punk. Unlike their British counterparts, they weren’t afraid of getting their hands dirty. INXS were sweaty, dirty, and sensual, and most of that sweat, dirt, and sensuality emanated from their snake-hipped lead singer. Without Michael Hutchence, INXS would have been a hardworking traditional Australian rock band. Without INXS, Michael Hutchence would have been a tousled, enigmatic singer who fancied himself a bit of an artiste. Together, they were a potent mixture of muscle and mystery, a band of brothers that came from a land Down Under to dish out hit after international hit for more than a decade.

  LM: Watching Michael Hutchence was my sexual awakening. He was a pockmarked ruffian with greasy hair, but I couldn’t deny the fire he lit inside me as I took in my first INXS concert at Manhattan’s Felt Forum. Yet for all that rock-god smolder and swagger, Hutchence had the soul of a poet. My favorite INXS songs reveal a Romeo who yearns for lasting
love and a life partner. Some say that this may have been his undoing. Hutchence’s death was the first time I’d lost one of my idols. The day after, I was in Prague, so I thought it apt to visit the Charles Bridge, the setting for the “Never Tear Us Apart” video. There were already a few dozen fans there. That’s when I realized he was our generation’s Jim Morrison. While interviewing Andrew and Tim Farriss for this chapter, I could tell that they were still dealing with the loss 16 years later. But they weren’t melancholy conversations, because we were talking about the part of Hutchence that will never die: his songs.

  JB: I started wondering about who INXS’s closest modern equivalent might be. A funky rock band proficient at writing pop songs led by a spotlight-hogging singer who makes the ladies itch and drool. The only band anywhere in the vicinity of that description would be Maroon 5. And Maroon 5 don’t even measure up to INXS’s shoelaces. I listen to “Devil Inside,” “What You Need,” and “Never Tell Us Apart,” and I think, Boy, could we use a band like that today.

  ANDREW FARRISS: “Original Sin” was a song that Michael and I wrote. Michael had written a lyric about watching white and black kids playing in a schoolyard, and we both knew we didn’t want it to be some gratuitous holding-hands, love-song thing. We wanted a song that was funky, which is part of the reason we’d approached Nile Rodgers.

  TIM FARRISS: Nile loved the funk in the band, and the fact that we were obviously big fans of his had a lot to do with [his wanting to work with us]. Nile was my hero—that is, Nile Rodgers the producer. I’d heard his stuff with Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, and I was like, “It’s the same guitar player. Who is that guy?” Then it blew me away when Bowie used him, and Madonna. I used to drive the rest of the band crazy playing his solo album [1983’s Adventures in the Land of the Good Groove] on the tour bus. In fact, we used to sing one of the songs, “Yum-Yum,” right before we went onstage every night: “Poontang, poontang, where you want it / Slept all night with my hand on it Give me some of that yum yum Before I sleep tonight.”

  NILE RODGERS: I was in Canada going to check out U2, and INXS were opening. I had never heard a bass drum sound like the bass drum in INXS. I was like “Wow, who is this guy?” I went to their dressing room, and they were huge Nile Rodgers fans. They started singing a song from my solo album in four-part harmony! I was like, “Hey, guys, you want to work together?”

  ANDREW FARRISS: [Having Rodgers produce “Original Sin”] really was a big deal, a defining moment. We knew exactly the importance of what that meant, and we put everything we could think of into that recording. We had never been treated with that kind of respect by that level of musician and producer. He was mixing funk up with jazz and blues. In 1983 these guys were the guys—they were top-line, front-end, on-the-radio-all-the-time people and in the consciousness of music, fashion, everything right-there-and-then. So we were no longer skirting the edges of the scene, we were in it. We couldn’t believe he’d want to work with a bunch of young people from Australia. At first people thought we were British because we had funny accents. People would say to us, “Are you guys from Austria?” And then you had Paul Hogan throwing a shrimp on the barbie … The funny thing is, we don’t call it “shrimp,” we call them “prawns.”

  TIM FARRISS: We were the first young white band to use Nile. I remember seeing John Taylor, and he was saying how much [Duran Duran] would love to work with him: “You used Nile Rodgers, eh? How was he?” I was like, “Awesome, man, but I don’t think he likes bass players.” I was trying to turn him off to the idea. Sure enough, they ended up using him. That trick didn’t work.

  ANDREW FARRISS: When we tracked “Original Sin” in the Power Station [in New York City], I remember Kirk [Pengilly, saxophone], Jon [Farriss, drums], and Michael had done some backing vocals, and Nile said, “Yeah, that’s pretty cool, but you know what? I think we need a different kind of voice on one section of this.” The next minute, Daryl Hall walks through the door, and we’re like, “Daryl Hall’s in the room?!”

  RODGERS: When I walked into the studio, they were intimidated. I said, “I can’t make a record with people who are in awe of me.” They had already done a vocal arrangement of one of my songs that was a flop. That’s some kind of weird hero worship. I picked up the guitar and said, “We’re gonna rehearse the song.” Then I went out and secretly told the engineer to record the rehearsal. This is a true story: “Original Sin” is a one-take record. After we finished rehearsing, I said, “We’re done.” They said, “What do you mean?” I was like, “That’s it, that’s the take.”

  ANDREW FARRISS: The song caused some difficulty for us—not so much everywhere else in the world, mainly in North America. It was virtually banned from U.S. radio, and the record company freaked out. We’d had quite a lot of success with the first two singles, “The One Thing” and “Don’t Change.” Then, when we pulled “Original Sin” out, they were like, “You’re going to do that?” It just wasn’t the kind of song that people would have had on the radio at that particular time. We loved the song. Michael was very proud of his lyrics. We sought our own way of putting an idea of love and peace and humanity into a song. It’s not that the lyrics were crazy, but I think once you get close to identifying something or talking about a subject, it’s like the elephant in the room: No one wants to get into it, so you just don’t go there.

  RODGERS: Michael always thanked me, because I’m the one who changed the lyrics to “Original Sin.” The lyrics were not [originally] “Dream on black boy Dream on white girl.” They had written “Dream on white boy, dream on white girl, wake up to a brand new day Dream on black boy, black girl …” I felt bad, like I was superimposing too much of my own life. I was raised by interracial parents, and I’ve always seen the conflict of interracial relationships. I was like, “Guys, wait a minute. If we talk about original sin, we can make this even more taboo by making it an interracial couple?” What’s really funny is, I get Daryl Hall to sing, and his manager, who was Tommy Mottola at the time, called me up and said, “Nile, are you trying to get my guy killed? What do you mean by all this ‘Dream on black boy, white girl’ stuff?” I said, “Well, you know, Tommy, it’s a better song like that.”

  ANDREW FARRISS: “Original Sin” was the most important song at the early part of our career. It helped us to define what we wanted to do musically. We took it much further with [producer] Chris Thomas. We really developed that funk rock. We were always experimenting and chopping and changing with our big melting pot of music influences. It’s not that we stopped doing that—it’s just that we found something we thought was a magic formula, and it worked.

  TIM FARRISS: Michael and Andrew were a great team. They were like chalk and cheese as people, and that is important, because you’d have yin and yang in the room. Andrew would be pensive and withdrawn and very thoughtful, deep-thinking, whereas Michael was more vivacious and very spontaneous. They started out as close friends. Michael was quite the shy person. I think that some people do that because then they’re the dark horse or the quiet mouse that roared. Once fame and fortune became involved, Michael would prefer to be sitting at the runway at an Yves Saint Laurent thing surrounded by models, where Andrew would rather be at home on his farm putting in fence posts.

  ANDREW FARRISS: Michael and I were unlikely friends. We met in a schoolyard [in Sydney]. He came from Hong Kong, and he didn’t know anybody. I think he was feeling very intimidated, and I helped him through that. I was interested in sports, which Michael was never really interested in. He liked motocross and dirt bikes, and poetry, Hermann Hesse and Siddhartha. We didn’t talk about music much at all when we first met. Then he went to live in Los Angeles for a while. When he came back to Sydney, I realized that his experiences of going to school in Hollywood made him a lot different than a lot of the other young people I was playing with in my high school bands. He’d experienced cultural things that none of us could have dreamed of. He’d already spent some of his childhood growing up in Asia, and that was very unusual.
Also, girls were crazy about the guy.

  Michael probably wasn’t a great singer when he started, and I don’t think he was a particularly good stage guy. But he was always a good lyricist, and later on he became a great lyricist and a great live performer and a fantastic singer. Michael wrote the bulk of the lyrics—he usually came up with all the music and feels and grooves, and sometimes melodies. His lyrics changed [over the years]—they became more and more important to him. Michael felt he could actually talk to people through the lyrics and discuss things without someone judging or misquoting him. One of the most beautiful legacies is a song that millions of people know, because you’re like, “Well, there you go. No one’s going to screw that up, because they all know the lyrics, and they know exactly what I was thinking.”

  MIXTAPE: 5 More Songs from Down Under 1. “Under the Milky Way,” The Church 2. “I Got You,” Split Enz 3. “Down Under,” Men at Work 4. “Send Me an Angel,” Real Life 5. “Streets of Your Town,” The Go-Betweens

  We liked all kinds of music and, as a young INXS, we used to mix it all in together. In Australia, when we grew up, you wouldn’t have different formats of radio stations like you have now. Back then, you would hear every style of music—pop, rock, sometimes even classical—on the same station. So I was a fan of David Bowie, the Sex Pistols, but the other guys in INXS and I, we were also fans of blues-based music, straight rock, and our own Australian pub scene. The scene that we came out of, it’s very much a big pub environment where you have large rooms with working-class men smoking cigarettes and just getting drunk all of the time. If you wanted to play music and make it, you’d have to survive in that environment.