January 1981, London: British group Ultravox releases on Chrysalis Records the single “Vienna” - the title track of an album that had come out in July 1980. In the UK Singles Chart the record climbs slowly: first week - #50, a month later - #9, by March - #2. And there it sticks. For seven consecutive weeks “Vienna” holds the second spot, unable to dislodge the #1: “Shaddap You Face” by Joe Dolce, an Italian-Australian novelty. For British audiences the fact that a serious art-pop single couldn't beat a comic Italian joke remains one of the symbols of what's wrong with the UK Singles Chart.
A band's rehabilitation
By 1981 Ultravox had existed for seven years and survived a complete collapse. Original vocalist John Foxx had left in 1979 after three albums that had found no audience. The group should have broken up. But keyboardist Billy Currie and guitarist Chris Cross called in Midge Ure on vocals - a Scotsman who had previously played in Slik and in the British underground project Visage.
Ure brought two things to Ultravox: a European art-sensibility (Visage had just shown that this was marketable) and production skills - Ure produced the very first album of the new formation himself. Vienna, recorded at RAK Studios in London between September and November 1980, was meant to be the group's last shot. It became it - but not immediately.
What's actually in the song
“Vienna” is a synth-pop ballad in D minor, BPM 67 - unusually slow even for a 1980 ballad. The structure is non-standard: a three-part form of verse-chorus-bridge, where the chorus occupies less space than most verses (usually it's the reverse). Total length - 4:39, of which the first 1:45 is an instrumental intro, with no vocal at all.
Ure's lyrics - a stylised melancholy about a failed love in Vienna: “The feeling has gone, only you and I”. No specific details - only images (snowfall, cathedral, street). This is a deliberate art choice: the lyric had to be general enough for every listener to substitute their own memories.
“I had never been to Vienna when I wrote this song. I had only seen the city in photographs. The point wasn't to describe a specific place but to create a mood each person could map onto their own experience”, Ure wrote in his autobiography If I Was… (2004).
Instrumentation
- Yamaha CS-80 - the main synth on the track, warm pads and lead (the same instrument Vangelis used on the Blade Runner soundtrack in 1982)
- ARP Odyssey - bassline
- Roland CR-78 - drum machine (paired with live percussion from drummer Warren Cann)
- Live violin - Billy Currie (the main bridge motif)
- Roland VP-330 Vocoder - the “Vienna” chorus vocal runs through the vocoder
This is the first mainstream song where the vocoder is used not for “futuristic” purposes but as an emotional device. Lennox would do the same thing two years later on “Sweet Dreams”; Peter Gabriel in 1986 on “Sledgehammer”.
The video
The “Vienna” video was directed by Russell Mulcahy - an Australian director who would become one of the most in-demand video auteurs of the 80s (AC/DC, Elton John, later Whitney Houston). Mulcahy shot “Vienna” in London's Soho, stylised as post-war Vienna: black-and-white imagery, narrow streets, fog.
The video is considered in retrospect one of the finest of its time, despite being shot in just three days for £12,000. MTV didn't exist yet (it launched only in August 1981), but the clip got a second life after the channel started - it was rotated in 1982-1983 as a “vintage breakthrough”.
Numbers
- UK: #2, 7 weeks running - the most famous chart hold in UK history
- Netherlands: #3, 13 weeks
- Germany: #8
- Switzerland: #7
- Ireland: #5
- Australia: #5 (where #1 was, ironically, “Shaddap You Face” by Joe Dolce)
- US: did not enter Billboard Hot 100, but reached #9 Modern Rock
- New Zealand: #17
Total sales by the end of 1981 - around 900,000 copies in the UK alone. The album Vienna went four-times platinum in the UK and was Brit Award-nominated for 1982.
Why “Vienna” didn't hit #1
In 1981 the UK Singles Chart ran on weekly sales, which were driven by BBC's Top of the Pops and radio airplay. “Shaddap You Face” played on Top of the Pops every week with comic subtext; “Vienna” played with dramatic weight. For a British audience just emerging from the Thatcher recession of 1979, comic relief sold better than art melancholy.
In 2012, BBC Radio 2 ran a listener poll: which track should have been #1 in March 1981? The answer - “Vienna” (62% versus 23% for “Shaddap You Face”). An industrial irony: 31 years later the audience admitted the charts had been wrong. But historically, Ultravox still sit at #2.
What the song means for the genre
“Vienna” did three fundamental things. First - it legitimised the long synth-pop ballad. Before it, synth-pop was assumed to be short dance tracks. “Vienna” proved that four and a half minutes of slow electronics could be a commercial hit. Second - it set a European art-canon: literary references (Vienna, melancholy, snowy street), serious visual aesthetic, minimal humour. Third - it positioned the vocoder as an emotional, not futuristic, instrument.
These three principles defined the entire line of later ballads - from “Fade to Grey” by Visage (the same Midge Ure), released a month earlier, to “The Never Ending Story” by Limahl in 1984. More on synthesizers of the era lives in its own piece.