Richard Evans on Ultravox: “They were almost too far ahead of those curves to receive the credit for what they achieved”

After „Listening To The Music The Machines Make – Inventing Electronic Pop 1978–1983”, Richard Evans returns with a book about one of the most fascinating and difficult-to-categorise bands in British music history.

There is a certain logic to Richard Evans‘ decision to make Ultravox the subject of his second book. His first book, „Listening To The Music The Machines Make”, explored the birth of electronic pop between 1978 and 1983. Ultravox were already there at the beginning of that period – and were still there at the end of it.

But Evans‘ interest goes beyond chronology. What attracted him to Ultravox was precisely the fact that they never made things easy for themselves. They moved between art school, post-punk, electronics, rock and pop without ever comfortably belonging to any of those worlds.
For a reader who mainly knows „Vienna” and „Dancing With Tears In My Eyes”, „Looking Backwards Towards The Future” therefore offers a much larger picture: Tiger Lily and John Foxx, the first Ultravox albums, „Systems Of Romance”, the Midge Ure era, U-Vox, the later line-ups, the reunion and „Brilliant” – but also the people, memories and archival material behind the public story.

Kaput spoke to Richard about why he chose Ultravox, what he discovered while researching the band, the problem of conflicting memories, the limits of an authorised biography, and why he believes Ultravox are still waiting for the recognition they deserve.

How did the idea for the book actually come about? Was Ultravox always somewhere on your list of possible subjects?

Richard Evans: The exact moment was in a pub in London in 2024. I had gone into town to meet Omnibus Press, who had published my previous book, because they had got in touch to ask if I was interested in writing another one for them.
„Listening To The Music The Machines Make” had sold well and they wanted to hear if I had any ideas for something else. I had a small number of ideas, maybe four in total, which I told them about over a beer. They said they liked the sound of the Ultravox one the most and that was basically it. All of a sudden I was writing a book about Ultravox.

What interested me about the band was that they were one of only a small number of artists who were already active in 1978, at the start of Listening To The Music The Machines Make, who were still active in 1983, at the end of that book.
Also, I didn’t actually know that much about them. I had a few of their singles but I didn’t know much about the band beyond that. However, I had listened to a lot of their „music while I was writing „Listening To The Music The Machines Make” and I really liked it, and the idea of finding out more about them was interesting.
Plus, of course, there wasn’t already a book about them. I don’t know why that was the case but it felt like a perfect opportunity.

You have spent so many years working with Erasure and know Vince Clarke and Andy Bell personally. You could obviously have written an Erasure book. Was Ultravox a deliberate choice to move away from territory that was already familiar to you?

Richard Evans: At some point in the future I would love to write a book about Erasure, but at the moment neither Vince or Andy is interested in telling their story so that’s a dream for another time.
There wasn’t a particular question about Ultravox’s history that I wanted to answer. It was all of their history that caught my eye. The fact that they were a rare band who were so often ahead of musical fashions, who were true pioneers, but who were almost too far ahead of those curves to receive the credit for what they achieved.

They also interested me because they never made anything easy for themselves. They were always pushing themselves to explore new areas, often at the expense of easy commercial success, and I admired them for that.

Like many people, I discovered Ultravox through the Midge Ure era first. As far as I know, you also encountered the band around the time of „Vienna”. Did researching the band change your relationship with those two very different versions of Ultravox – the John Foxx years and the Midge Ure years?

Richard Evans: My journey was similar to yours. I first encountered Ultravox around the time of Vienna and it wasn’t until much later that I dipped into their early career. I liked that they had these two very different identities and I definitely felt it was important to tell the band’s entire story.
The book covers their formation as Tiger Lily in the early seventies and runs through all their line-ups and releases until the Brilliant album and their reunion shows.
I guess I just wanted to tell the whole story in the hope that people might appreciate their achievements beyond those huge hits.

The story begins even before Ultravox existed, with John Foxx and his art-school background. How important was that original impulse?

Richard Evans: Incredibly important. Essential actually. John Foxx actually conceived the idea of creating a band in response to a lecture he attended at art school, and in fact the formation of the band was a college project of sorts. That’s where the story starts, and none of the rest could have happened without that initial impetus.

Foxx’s career after Ultravox has become almost a story in itself. How did you approach his legacy without allowing his later work to overwhelm the Ultravox narrative?

Richard Evans: John Foxx is a fascinating character, he deserves a biography dedicated to just him in fact. He is incredibly articulate and innately curious and his career – which covers music, art, design, academia and more – is very interesting. He feels like a true maverick and a genuine innovator, but Ultravox! was the starting point for that. If that hadn’t happened then he might have gone in an entirely different direction. An artist or an illustrator perhaps, or a writer or a teacher.
„Ultravox!” set him on a path to everything he has achieved and explored. It took a while for the world to catch up but I do think that his influence is now being realised and recognised.

Was there a particular album that you found yourself listening to differently after researching the band?

Richard Evans:  They are indeed, and you’re right about „Systems Of Romance” in particular. That album represented a very special moment where creativity and technology were being explored in a new way and Ultravox were among the very first to start exploring that.
My research led me to listen to those records in a different way and they contain lots of idiosyncrasies and pieces of seminal DNA which pointed to everything that came next, not just for the band, but for music in general. That’s quite an achievement isn’t it?

Ultravox are often retrospectively placed firmly inside the New Romantic movement. But the band themselves preferred the term “Futurists”. How useful are these labels when looking back at that period?

Richard Evans: For the individual band members I don’t think the Blitz period was particularly important, but for the success of „Vienna” it was crucial. That period in time, those new electronic sounds, were incredibly new and startling, but it took Blitz and the New Romantics– none of Ultravox liked that name although at the time they said they were more comfortable with being called Futurists – to create a world around that music by adding the dance-floor, the fashions and a compelling post-punk aesthetic to hang everything on to create a scene. That scene in turn allowed all sorts of very diverse artists, Ultravox amongst them, to smuggle themselves into the mainstream under the cover of New Romanticism.

There is an interesting parallel with Depeche Mode here. They too were increasingly uncomfortable with the New Romantic label and tried to escape it.

Richard Evans: It was a very fertile period and lots of bands who previously wouldn’t have been grouped together suddenly found themselves part of a movement, but the smarter artists already knew that fashions fade fast. Even at the time very few bands identified as New Romantics even though they were thrown together under that banner.
Depeche Mode could see that I think and didn’t want to be held back by it. I think Ultravox were the same, but perhaps they played the game a little better!

One of the more remarkable links between the two bands is the story of Depeche Mode being offered an Ultravox support slot as an incentive around the Some Bizzare Album period. Did researching Ultravox give you a different perspective on that episode?

Richard Evans: It is something I touch on in the book. You will be unsurprised to know that I was able to talk to Vince Clarke about Ultravox for Looking Backwards Towards the Future and we talked about exactly that.
It’s absolutely true, but although Stevo offered Depeche Mode a support slot with Ultravox as an incentive to sign with him, I don’t think that he was in a position to actually make that happen. I think Depeche made the right decision!

The arrival of Midge Ure transformed Ultravox, but it didn’t simply turn them into a more commercially successful version of the earlier band. What changed internally?

Richard Evans: I think it was equality. The previous incarnation of Ultravox was John Foxx’s project and he drove it, but with this new line-up everyone was equal and that led to a real creative connection.
Talking to the band about those sessions I get the impression they were having fun both creatively and personally, and they were very driven at that stage in their career which was also an important factor.

The success that followed was enormous. Yet after „Vienna” they chose to make something as unusual as „Rage In Eden”. What does that tell us about the band?

Richard Evans: Initially I think they had fun with success. It’s interesting – and very typical of the band – that following the massive success of „Vienna” they made an album as strange and as eccentric as „Rage In Eden” when the safe option would have been to simply capitalise on their success and do more of the same. But I also think that as they moved forward, and as their success allowed them to explore other areas, internal dynamics did start to change. They got caught in a cycle of recording, releasing and touring album after album which ultimately became unfulfilling and creatively challenging for them.

You draw a distinction between U-Vox and the classic Ultravox story. Where, for you, does that story actually end?

Richard Evans: Warren Cann was already out of the band by the time „U-Vox” was released so I would say that the end of the classic Ultravox story actually comes at the end of the Lament album project. „U-Vox” was a tricky moment in the band’s career though. That said, I always liked the album artwork!

And what about the Tony Fenelle and Sam Blue periods, which are much less familiar to many listeners?

Richard Evans: I write about both of those line-ups but for me, and for a lot of other fans of the band, they aren’t true Ultravox albums. They are interesting Billy Currie projects and there’s some good music to be found from both, but attaching the name Ultravox to them just doesn’t sit right for me looking at them in retrospect. Sorry Billy…

Was the end of Ultravox therefore primarily creative, personal or simply a consequence of the changing musical landscape?

Richard Evans: Definitely a combination of all three!

The book is based on a considerable amount of archival research as well as conversations with the surviving members and people around the band. How did you build that archive?

Richard Evans: I was lucky on the research because I had already gathered a lot of it for „Listening to the Music the Machines Make” so that turned out to be unexpectedly valuable. Once Omnibus Press agreed to the idea of an Ultravox book I approached the surviving band members to see if they would be comfortable with me writing about them, and also to sound them out on whether they might want to become involved.

I had interviewed John Foxx, Billy Currie and Midge Ure previously for other things so I started with them and they all confirmed they were happy for me to write the book, and also that they would make themselves available to answer questions. Billy connected me to Warren, who also agreed to be on board, and John Foxx’s manager introduced me to Robin Simon who also said yes. Nobody was still in touch with Steve Shears though, and tracking him down took some time, and when I did he decided that he didn’t want to be directly involved.

I told the band that I would only ask them about things that they hadn’t previously talked about, rather than making them go over the same things they have been asked a hundred times over the years. I’ve worked in the music industry for long enough that I knew people who had worked with the band, or who could easily connect me with people who worked with the band.

And other people I talked to I just approached out of the blue, like Steve Lillywhite and Moby, or I already knew, like Vince Clarke and Nick Rhodes.

Was there any particular archive source that unexpectedly opened up the story?

Richard Evans: I think the most interesting archive materials were the interviews the band did for the Ultravox fanzine „Extreme Voice”, which eventually became their official fan newsletter. Those interviews were not only very relaxed conversations with the band, but they also delved deeply into unexpected corners in the way that only true fans could have done.
If I had to choose one then it would be the very honest interview that Warren Cann gave to the „In The City” fanzine after being sacked from the band, which wasn’t published at the time but later appeared in „Extreme Voice”.
Aside from that, John Foxx hasn’t really talked about a lot of things I asked him about. In fact he told me he dislikes talking about this part of his history, so there are some very interesting contributions from him and it seems I was lucky to get them.

Writing about a band whose members remember the same events differently must be one of the biggest challenges of this kind of project. How did you deal with contradictions?

Richard Evans: Sometimes it was tricky. As I got to know the various band members a little over the course of the project I got to like them all, and as a result I very much wanted to represent each of them equally. Sometimes their individual recollections didn’t quite match, or were dramatically different, and in those situations I tried to present all views side by side.
Did I leave some things out? Yes I did, but only if I felt that they were unfair, overly personal or unsubstantiated.

Does having the cooperation of the surviving members change the relationship between access and independence?

Richard Evans: Not really. None of the band members asked to see any of the book while I was writing it, and at this exact moment in time they still haven’t. As soon as printed copies are available I will send a copy to each of them and I very much hope they approve of it.
Ultimately it’s my book rather than theirs, but the band were kind enough to trust me to tell their stories so I did feel a responsibility to represent each of them properly and respectfully. I don’t recall not asking a question I wanted the answer to in any of my conversations with them though.

Your previous book had Vince Clarke writing the foreword. This time it is Moby. How did he become involved?

Richard Evans: I didn’t know Moby, although our paths had briefly crossed in the early 90s, but I did know someone who could introduce me to his manager which is what happened.
I knew Moby was a huge fan of Ultravox and when I explained what I was writing he agreed to talk to me. We scheduled a Zoom and we got along really well. His enthusiasm for Ultravox was so infectious and so heartfelt that he seemed to be the perfect person to provide the foreword. He’s another really interesting character with interesting things to say.

The book already has events planned in Swanage and Brighton, with more apparently in the works. What would you like those events to become?

Richard Evans:  „When Listening to the Music the Machines Make” came out I did an event for Sound Affects in Brighton. It was my first ever time doing a book event and although it went well I knew in retrospect that I didn’t do as good a job on it as I should have done. So I asked them if I could come back and do another one for this book, and they very kindly agreed. Swanage is the closest town to where I live and I did an event at the same venue for Listening to the Music the Machines Make which went well, so they asked if I might like to do another one.
Beyond those two I’m also having conversations with a few other people about doing talks and events at the moment. Potentially some of them will be me talking about the book, some will be conversations with other people. It’s all being worked out at the moment.

After spending so much time looking backwards towards the future of Ultravox, what would you ultimately like the book to achieve?

Richard Evans: I think Ultravox are long overdue some proper respect for their achievements, and for always achieving those achievements on their own terms. If the book can help amplify that for the band then I would be very happy. And if reading it makes people discover aspects of Ultravox they weren’t previously aware of then that would be amazing.
If nothing else, reminding people of the breadth and quality of their catalogue and reintroducing them to those songs feels like a successful outcome.

„Looking Backwards Towards the Future: The Story of Ultravox” is published by Omnibus Press on 8 October 2026.

For more information about the book and forthcoming events, visit the official website:
https://ultravoxbook.com