A single that refused to be one
A drum machine marks a European dusk, sparse and formal, and Midge Ure’s voice arrives with one line already finished, as if the rest of the song had to catch up with a sentence he could not lose.
Ultravox wrote Vienna in a cold rehearsal room in 1980, not long after Ure had replaced John Foxx and the band had been dropped and had to scrape for studio time. Billy Currie wanted something with the weight of the late Romantics, Grieg and Elgar in the blood of his keyboard lines. Warren Cann set a rhythm. Chris Cross found a bass on a synthesiser. Ure came in with almost nothing except the phrase about the feeling being gone, this means nothing to me. Conny Plank produced the album at RAK in London and at his own studio near Cologne, and the track grew a viola solo, a grand piano, and a middle section that swells like a film for which no picture exists. Chrysalis thought it was too slow, too long, the opposite of a single. The band refused the edit. It came out in January 1981.
It stopped at No. 2 in Britain, held off the top by Joe Dolce’s novelty record, a joke the song has never quite escaped and never needed. The video, black and white, moves between Covent Garden and the city in the title, directed with the pomp the middle section asks for. Ure has said he lied to the papers at the time, dressing a darker, more private idea as a holiday romance. The music does the honest work. It is pompous on purpose in the centre, bare before and after, and it ends with a classical flourish that would have embarrassed a band less sure of its nerve. Plank, who had recorded Kraftwerk, understood space. He lets the emptiness be part of the hook.
The label didn’t want to put Vienna out. It was too slow, too long and there was a violin solo, the antithesis of a commercial single.
(Midge Ure, The Guardian, 2017)
Live, the song is a ceremony. The crowd sings the denial, this means nothing, and means the opposite. Currie’s viola, or its keyboard ghost, still divides the room. Ultravox spent years being asked for Berlin, for Paris, for another city with the same coat. They could not write the same accident twice. The track remains the one people who do not know the catalogue know, and the one the band, who had been written off, used to walk back into daylight. A rejected single, kept at full length, outsold the sensible choices.
What remains is the pleasure of scale. Four minutes that behave like a short opera, a synthesiser band remembering that a piano can still break your heart, a chorus that shrugs and then builds a cathedral around the shrug. Ure’s line is small. The arrangement refuses to be. Between them they made the rare pop record that is both a mood and a piece of architecture, and that still, when the viola enters, makes a room hold its breath as if the city outside had gone quiet on purpose.
