Ultravox! (Album)

Ultravox!
Studio album from Ultravox !
Publication (s)	1977
Label (s)	Island Records
Format (s)	CD, LP
Genre (s)	Rock , new wave , post-punk
Title (number)	9
running time	38:00
occupation	John Foxx : vocals, acoustic guitar Chris Cross: bass, vocals Warren Cann: drums, percussion, vocals Billy Currie : keyboard, violin Stevie Shears: guitar
production	Ultravox, Steve Lillywhite and Brian Eno
Studio (s)	Island Studio, London
chronology - Ultravox! Ha! -Ha! -Ha! (1977)
Single release 4th February 1977 Dangerous rhythm

Ultravox! is the debut album by the British post-punk band Ultravox . The album was released on February 25, 1977 on Island Records .

History of origin

The tracks used on the album were written between the summer of 1974 and the recording session in the fall of 1976. The band initially called themselves Tiger Lily and composed and rehearsed after founding in a room of the Royal College of Art in Kensington, on the singer John Foxx under his civil identity (Dennis Leigh) studied art and a little later in a factory called Modreno for the restoration of mannequins in Albion Yard at King's Cross station . The early compositions are influenced by The Velvet Underground , Roxy Music , Steve Harley and David Bowie . As Tiger Lily, the band initially developed short songs with structures influenced by classic pop from the 1950s and 1960s. These early titles include As Gracefully as You , The Joker , We Walked into the Wilderness , The Day the World Ended , When Dreamers Wake , Waltz me Well , Riccochet, and Monkey Jive, not used for the album . Monkey Jive was used in March 1975 as the b-side of a single released by Gull Records, the Fats Waller cover Aint Misbehavin ' . The single was recorded in the famous Olympic Studios on Church Road in the London borough of Barnes .

The single brought in £ 300, which the band invested in instruments. The name Tiger Lily was given up after the single was released. The compositions and arrangements became more complex and the titles longer: The Wild, the Beautiful and the Damned , Dangerous Rhythm , I Want to be a Machine , Lonely Hunter and Life at Rainbow's End were created during this phase. During the summer of 1976 the band had other pieces in their repertoire not used for the album with TV Orphans , I Came Back Here to Meet You , I Won't Play Your Game and Dark Love , which they shared with the aspiring sound engineer and later music producer Steve Lillywhite recorded demos on unused weekends at Phonogram Studios on Marble Arch . The live presentation of I Want to be a Machine , Lonely Hunter and Life at Rainbow's End in the offices of Island Records gave the band a record deal without a fixed name in the fall of 1976. Sat'day Night in the City of the Dead , Slip Away and Wide Boys were made around this time.

admission

As a producer of the album served next to the band itself of gave for the technical aspects of production with a co-producer credit Steve Lillywhite and Brian Eno , who for his creative contribution to the production also received a co-producer credit for the album. Warren Cann made contact with Lillywhite through a mutual friend. The contact to Eno was made by John Foxx, who has admired Eno since his time at Roxy Music and his solo album Another Green World . He introduced himself to Eno as the singer of an unknown electronic punk band and thus aroused the interest of the artist, who is considered a creative catalyst. Eno began his career as a professional music producer with the band's debut album, although he had previously produced music and ran his own record label with Opal. In particular, the division of labor with Eno as a creative thinker that arose during the recording, supported by an accomplished studio technician, should turn numerous albums into musically influential milestones in the future, including the Talking Heads ( Fear of Music 1979 with the band) and U2 ( The Joshua Tree 1987 - with Daniel Lanois).

The album was recorded in the fall of 1976 over a period of 17 days on a budget at Island Studios on Basing Street in Hammersmith , London . The band shared the studio with the Rolling Stones , who secretly evaluated recordings of the concert in Paris on June 5, 1976 for their live album Love You Live during the night hours , while the formation around Foxx, who formed Ultravox! called, daytime recordings. Eno's contribution spanned four titles; for three titles it essentially consisted of the provision of creativity techniques through its Oblique Strategies cards, the design of the sound execution and the use of Eno's electronic equipment. In particular, the fourth track that Eno was involved in, My Sex , which at the beginning of the recording only existed in a rough version of text and a few chords, was made into Another Green World (especially the one by Enos Moog Minimoog and the use of the multitrack tape) from the recording sessions Drum parts of the track Sky Saw played by Phil Collins ) to an early track dominated by synthesizers. Along with I Want to be a Machine, My Sex set the trend for the band's sound and lyrics with its violin solo. The Island Studio also recorded the songs City Doesn't Care and Car Crash Flashback , which were not used on the album.

Cover design

The band was introduced to the British music press on January 31, 1977 at a live concert at The Nashville Rooms in West Kensington . The date launched by Island Records, at which a neon advertisement with the band's lettering was used, was interpreted by the band as arrogance and hype by the record company. The band was photographed by music photographer Gered Mankowitz standing under the neon advertising. Mankowitz had already taken numerous photographs for the record sleeves of rock bands, including The Yardbirds , The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix . The photo was used for the album cover designed by Bloomfield / Travis. Between 1975 and 1979 Bloomfield / Travis designed numerous album covers by artists who were under contract with Island Records, including the covers for the first three Ultravox albums.

The concept for the record cover comes from designer Dennis Leigh (the civil identity of John Foxx). It is reminiscent of the 1976 cover for the debut album by the American punk band Ramones, which was also titled with the band name . The Ramones had each other at about the same time as Ultravox! founded. From the New Yorker also photographed photographer Roberta Bayley front of a brick wall, with the band name of the Ramones in white letters in bold excellent publication overwritten, is the cover to Ultravox! but not in black and white and much darker.

Publication and chart success

On February 4, 1977 Dangerous Rhythm was released as a single with My Sex on the B-side, the album followed on February 25. No further singles were released. The second single Young Savage was released on May 28, 1977. However, the song was not included on the debut album or on its successor.

The album could not place in the British charts and the hit parades of the German-speaking countries. In June 1977 it reached 25th place in Sverigetopplistan with a stay of six weeks.

Island Records released a CD version in 1992 in the Island Masters series. A version digitally remastered by Dallas Simpson in Nottingham with four bonus tracks (live recordings), the lyrics and liner notes by Steve Malins was released in 2006. Malins is the author of a biography for the band Depeche Mode .

Texts

Foxx describes the 1974 text for Sat'day Night in the City of the Dead as a documentation of his observations on a Saturday night stroll through Tottenham Court Road , a year and a half before the explosion of punk music in London. The sometimes erratic and staccato- like text reveals the cut-up technique used in William S. Burrough's novels as inspiration.

The title Wide Boys is based, but not as a lyrical model, on the novel The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead by William S. Burroughs from 1971; the distortion of Foxx's voice was called "the Burroughs vocal" in the Foxx and Eno production. The novel served as the template for the song The Wild Boys by the British band Duran Duran from 1984, who were influenced by Ultravox. Burrough's novels, along with those of James Graham Ballard, were one of the literary sources of inspiration for some of the lyrics to all written by Foxx.

My Sex and I Want to be a Machine are thematically influenced by James Graham Ballard. I Want To Be A Machine often with the man-machine of power plant linked, although this album was released only 14 months later. The title itself goes back to a 1963 interview with Andy Warhol in Art news magazine Coal industry-influenced northwestern England birthplace Chorley in the text of My Sex . In I Want to be a Machine Foxx processed his emotional world in London:

“I just felt it would be easier to be a machine, so you didn't have to bother with those emotional things. I felt I was divorced from any particular generation, or any particular way of living. "

“I just thought it would be easier to be a machine so that you don't have to deal with the emotional things. I felt divorced from any single generation or lifestyle. "

- John Foxx : about his desire to be a machine

Track list

1. Sat'day Night in the City of the Dead (John Foxx) - 2:34
2. Life at Rainbows's End (For all the Tax Exiles on Main Street) (Foxx) - 3:43
3. Slip Away (Billy Currie, Foxx) - 4:16
4. I Want to be a Machine (Currie, Foxx) - 7:23
5. Wide Boys (Foxx) - 3:15
6. Dangerous Rhythm (Warren Cann, Chris Cross, Currie, Foxx, Stevie Shears) - 4:16
7. The Lonely Hunter (Foxx) - 3:43
8. The Wild, the Beautiful and the Damned (Cross, Currie, Foxx) - 5:50
9. My Sex (Cross, Currie, Foxx) - 3:02

Bonus (Digitally Remastered Edition 2006)

1. Slip Away (Live) (Currie, Foxx) - 4:08
2. Modern Love (Live) (Cann, Cross, Currie, Foxx, Shears) - 2:34
3. The Wild, the Beautiful and the Damned (Live) (Cross, Currie, Foxx) - 5:15
4. My Sex (Live) (Cross, Currie, Foxx) - 2:55

reception

Dave Thompson reviewed the album for the music database Allmusic and rated it with four out of five stars. He sees the texts dealing with alienation, disillusionment and disintegration as a reflection of the decline of British society at the time. The album's lyrics also prophesy a dance on the graves of society and empire in the years of the Thatcher / Reagan government.

The German music magazine Musikexpress selected the album in the May 1977 issue as record of the month and awarded it a rating of five out of six stars. The then reviewer Werner Zeppenfeld: “America's television and England's Ultravox! are (like the Doctors of Madness ) different offspring of one and the same international zeitgeist. ”On the album, Zeppenfeld found a science fiction distorting mirror of social reality.

"This album sounds very much like the early Roxy one, not in terms of sound but in terms of juxtaposition of things that are definitely going somewhere very interesting with things that are the remains of something else."

"This album sounds a lot like the early Roxy , not because of the sound , but in the way that things that clearly lead to something interesting are juxtaposed with things that are leftovers from something else."

- Brian Eno : shortly after working on Ultravox! self-titled debut album

The name of the Mexican band Ritmo Peligroso goes back to the debut single by Ultravox !, which was founded as Dangerous Rhythm in 1978 and is considered the first punk band in Mexico. The band name of the band Mi-Sex , founded in New Zealand in 1977 and named after the title of the B-side of the debut single, can also be traced back to this single . Mi-Sex achieved a number one hit in the Australian singles charts with Computer Games .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i} Malins, Steve: Linernotes for the digitally remastered edition, Island Records, 2006
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Warren Cann and Jonas Wårstad: Ultravox The Story: Warren Cann interviewed by Jonas Wårstad. (PDF: 4.4 MB) In: Ultravox official website. 1997, accessed November 29, 2012 . 
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} David Sheppard: On Some Faraway Beach . The Life and Times of Brian Eno. Paperback edition. Orion Books, London 2009, ISBN 978-0-7528-8463-9 , pp. 234 .
4. ↑ Gered Mankowitz. In: mankowitz.com. Retrieved November 29, 2012 . 
5. ↑ Michael Ochs: 1000 Record Covers . Taschen, Cologne 2005, ISBN 978-3-8228-4085-6 , pp. 393 .
6. ↑ swedishcharts.com - Ultravox! - Ultravox! In: swedishcharts.com. Hung Medien, accessed November 30, 2012 (se). 
7. ↑ Steve Malins: Depeche Mode . Black Celebration: The Biography. Hannibal, Höfen 2007, ISBN 978-3-85445-277-5 .
8. ^ Gene Swanson: Andy Warhol - Interview with Gene Swenson, Art News (1963). (PDF: 0.1 MB) (No longer available online.) In: mariabuszek.com. 1963, archived from the original on January 5, 2012 ; accessed on December 2, 2012 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
9. ↑ Dave Thompson: Ultravox! - Ultravox: Songs, Reviews, Credit, Awards: AllMusic. In: allmusic.com. Rovi Corp., accessed November 29, 2012 . 
10. ↑ Werner Zeppenfeld: Ultravox! - Ultravox! (Iceland 28193 XOT) . In: Ulf Poschardt (ed.): The plates of the month 1973–1989 (=  The ME library ). tape 2 . Axel Springer Mediahouse GmbH, 2012, ISSN  1618-5129 , p. 62 .
11. ↑ Ritmo Peligroso - biography. In: ritmopeligroso.com. Retrieved December 2, 2012 . 
12. ↑ Mi-Sex history. (No longer available online.) In: misex.com. Archived from the original on February 28, 2013 ; accessed on December 2, 2012 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  

Web links

• Ultravox! at Allmusic (English)
• Lyrics by Ultravox! in LyricWiki