“New Europeans”: Ultravox, Anachronism, and Germany as the Future

Below is part one of my four-part undergraduate thesis, “Fade to Grey: Post-Punk and Lost Modernist Futures.”

Given the visual and sonic nature of this material, I have created an audiovisual piece to accompany the written thesis. It contains the music and music videos discussed in the text, as well as found footage that complements the atmosphere, aesthetics, or themes of the music it accompanies. 

Password: Caron

“New Europeans”: Ultravox, Anachronism, and Germany as the Future

“Vienna” - 1980

Of all the retro, stylish, and wistful music videos belonging to the appropriately-named New Romantic scene in late-1970s, early-‘80s London, “Vienna” epitomizes the nostalgic, historically referential sensibility that actually defined the futuristic aesthetics of New Romantic/New Wave. “Vienna” defies pop-hit conventions—it is rather slow, long, and expansive, building with each verse toward a grandiose final crescendo. Its pace and melody mimics a piece of classical music, which was keyboardist Billy Currie’s intention:

I wanted to use my classical training. I said to the guys I was keen to do something that sounded 

like the late-19th-century romantics, like Grieg and Elgar…We’d been listening to music by this 

old German composer called Max Reger. He’d tried too hard to be successful and deliberately 

overdid it. That was why I did a violin solo that was overly vibrato and romantic. (Sullivan)

Currie’s classical training on piano and viola translated well to creating flowing, expressive synthesizer melodies and electric violin components, contributing what vocalist Midge Ure called “influences that reeked of Berlin and Prague” and conveyed a vague Central or Eastern European sensibility (Ure 84). Appropriately, the “Vienna” music video mimics the song’s odes to Europe and its indiscriminate mixing of visuals from eras past, ranging from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s—the modernist period. The music video for “Vienna” serves as perhaps the best example within the New Romantic oeuvre of anachronism, which cultural theorist Mark Fisher defines as “the slippage of discrete time periods into one another” to achieve a sort of temporal flattening, an ambiguous moment in time.

The video’s visual aesthetic was based—unconsciously, Ure recalls—on the iconic postwar British film noir, The Third Man (1949), directed by Carol Reed and shot in bombed-out, rubbled postwar Vienna (Ure 92) (Figures 1, 2). Like The Third Man, the first part of the “Vienna” music video abounds with shadows cast on buildings, beams of light reflecting off cobblestone streets, half-hidden figures crouched behind imposing columns or statues, and men wrapped up in long trench coats, their smoky breath twirling in the frigid winter air. The opening sequence evokes both aching and indifference, and its images are simultaneously 1940s-period and 1980s-contemporary. In the next sequence, we notice further temporal layering in the clothing of these partygoers—there are women wearing flapper dresses, long strands of pearls, and intricate hats reminiscent of the 1920s; some men are dressed in tuxedos, others in what look like prewar military suits decorated with badges and medals. Yet there is something off about this at-first-glance “period” image—the period being invoked is imprecise and deliberately anachronistic, spanning prewar Vienna towards the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1920s Weimar-era cabaret, and 1940s-‘50s film noir. There are even moments when a distinctly ‘80s style glimmers through the women’s dramatic, colorful makeup or Ure’s characteristic pointed sideburns. In particular, the grotesque, nightmarish elements throughout (the tarantula; the man with the bandaged face) interrupt our encounter with this fashionable party and its opulent setting. These jumbled period details—like Ure’s presence throughout as a removed observer, almost like a classic film noir detective character slinking around dark street corners—detach the video from any immediately recognizable or real time period. 

The cinematic quality of the “Vienna” music video demonstrates an engagement with iconic cultural objects from an earlier generation—in this case, films made forty years earlier and several years before Midge Ure, Billy Currie, Chris Cross, and Warren Cann were born. Even in Ultravox’s early years in the late ‘70s, before Midge Ure had replaced John Foxx (who went on to have a solo career) as vocalist, the band made a point of referencing canonized postwar European films remembered for their cinematic accomplishments—for example, one of the better-known songs off of their 1977 album is entitled “Hiroshima Mon Amour” after the 1959 French New Wave film directed by Alain Resnais. The band’s fascination with the World War II and postwar periods also extended to fashion—Ultravox wore clothing from the 1940s, recognizing its visual connotations with the war and the mood of European countries left in rubble afterwards, particularly Germany and formerly occupied countries attempting to rebuild their cities and societies after the trauma of the  war. Ure reflects on Ultravox’s style in the early ‘80s: “We had a definite, distinct look: we were into dead men’s clothes; we bought old 1940s double-breasted suits from second-hand shops, wore shirts with a pair of braces. It was a film noir look, based on that mean and moody, mid-European imagery that complemented our music” (Ure 121). Not only did they strive to look straight out of a film noir in their trench coats, pleated trousers, and double-breasted suit jackets, but they intentionally bought these inexpensive and abundant articles of secondhand clothing that appeared dated and old fashioned by the standards of their time (Figure 3). In Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics, journalist and author Dylan Jones suggests why there was an abundance of ‘40s-style suits in secondhand stores back then: “Of course, many of these suits had been owned by men who hadn’t come back from the war, and whose wives and girlfriends—and boyfriends, perhaps—had had to eventually divest themselves of their wardrobes” (Jones 184). These literal “dead men’s clothes” that Ultravox in particular, and the New Romantics more broadly, repurposed soon resembled a retro-modern style more futuristic than antiquated when juxtaposed with a distinctly new, electronic form of music centered around the synthesizer. 

In his 2011 book, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, music journalist Simon Reynolds defines “retro” using four main identifiers: 1) retro refers to the past within living memory, 2) the rediscovery and reproduction of retro styles is largely reliant upon “the ready availability of archived documentation (photographic, video, music recordings, the internet),” 3) retro is synonymous with pop cultural artifacts, particularly the “lowbrow” ones, and most importantly, 4) “retro is actually more about the present than the past it appears to revere and revive. It uses the past as an archive of materials from which to extract subcultural capital (hipness, in other words) through recycling and recombining” (Retromania xxx-xxxi). Part of retro’s appeal, according to Reynolds, is its relative proximity to the present era—the rediscovered retro must be within “living memory,” while also being long enough ago to hold an an imagined allure, a charming quaintness. For Ultravox, the period of the 1920s through the ‘40s struck this balance—it was fascinating and aesthetically rich because it was just out of reach, part of recent collective memory, but beyond the band members’ own living memory. These were the cultural objects of their parents’ generation, those who lived through World War II and watched newly-released film noirs in movie theaters. Finally, Reynolds posits that retro operates as a sort of aesthetic well from which “subcultural capital” is “extracted” for contemporary uses. The success of Ultravox’s visual style, then, also functions on this level—they utilized modernist artifacts and styles as aesthetic tools to reinvigorate their sonically futuristic music, which centered synthesizers, the newly-accessible electronic instruments of their time. 

“Herr X”- 1980

References to Germany abound on Ultravox’s 1980 Vienna album—there are two German-language track titles, “Herr X” and “Alles Klar,” and the music video for their single, “Passing Strangers,” recreates the high-contrast, expressionistic visual features of Weimar cinema. Also consistent throughout Vienna is a Kraftwerk-informed use of the synthesizer—long, drawn out, minor synths that enhance Ultravox’s ambiguous, even menacing, lyrics, which are delivered with much the same cadence as a voiceover narration from a classic film noir. The narrator is usually an outsider or a detective, someone who enters into a circle or world with shady characters, moral ambiguity, and secrets, and then recounts the story in first-person past-tense, punctuated by if-only-I’d-known-then statements. The classic Orson Welles Noir The Lady from Shanghai (1947), in which a seaman (Welles) takes a job as a yacht driver for a beautiful woman (Rita Hayworth) and her husband and finds himself framed for a falsified murder, is a perfect example. Welles’s character tells the story in a grave tone throughout, still haunted by memories of this surreal encounter. “Herr X” is the German recording of “Mr. X,” the English version included on the original release, and both versions (but especially the German one) serve as an homage to Kraftwerk, whose elongated analog synth melodies are known for their minimalist quality (Kraftwerk’s sound was initially described by critics as “cold” and “mechanical”). The lyrics to “Mr. X” are particularly cinematic, again demonstrating a fascination with the aesthetic qualities of 1940s film noir—in this case, its characteristic voiceover narration (even spoken with an American accent) as a stylistic element:

  I found the perfect picture of a perfect stranger

It looked as if it were taken in the forties sometime

Judging by the style (…)

I almost thought I saw him, standing, whistling on a bridge

I asked him the time, but when he turned around

I saw it wasn't him at all

I'm still searching. (Vienna (Deluxe Edition: 40th Anniversary))

Alongside their nostalgic use of film noir conventions, Ultravox draws from more contemporary German influences—Kraftwerk, in terms of sonic possibilities of the synthesizer, and German producer Conny Plank, who produced Kraftwerk’s Autobahn in 1975 and three Ultravox albums, 1979’s Systems of Romance, 1980’s Vienna, and 1981’s Rage in Eden. Plank is best known for his work with ‘60s Krautrock legends Neu!, Cluster, and Harmonia, who are often likened to Kraftwerk, despite using analog synthesizers alongside traditional instruments and tending towards a more prog rock-adjacent aesthetic, in stark contrast with Kraftwerk’s completely electronic music and vaguely old-fashioned style. Around the same time as his work with Ultravox, Plank also produced Düsseldorf-based duo DAF’s 1981 album, Alles Ist Gut. A prolific and influential figure, Plank deeply influenced the trajectory of German experimental and electronic music of the late twentieth century. With “Herr X,” and throughout Vienna more broadly, Ultravox clearly cites Kraftwerk as a musical influence (and, to a certain extent, an aesthetic one—Kraftwerk were some of the first to reject denim and long hair, in favor of crisp suits and slicked-back hair) (Figure 4). These citations can be read as an effort to imitate Kraftwerk’s perceived European-ness, even their German-ness. 

John Foxx, founding member and lead singer of Ultravox before Midge Ure, remarks on the effect of Kraftwerk’s exaggerated, if not caricatured, German aesthetic in David Buckley’s book, Kraftwerk: Publikation: 

Kraftwerk’s aesthetic was a studied rejection of almost everything Anglo-American culture stood 

for, and an often witty take on Germanness: ‘I think they long ago became conscious of the rest of 

the world’s stereotypical view of the efficient, intellectual German, and decided to play up to 

this,’ is John Foxx’s analysis. ‘The suits and haircuts that Florian [Schneider] introduced seem to 

bear this out, and so does their general demeanour—unexcitable yet engaged, dignified, precise, 

detached, analytical, dryly humorous or comically over-earnest—or both.’ (Buckley 65) 

Foxx identifies what it was about Kraftwerk that captured the British New Romantics’ (Ultravox included) imagination: their European-ness and their (from an Anglo-American perspective) German-ness. Like Bowie, another revered figure among the New Romantics, Kraftwerk presented an alternative to dominant Anglo-American rock—which, until punk in the mid-‘70s, had largely become wound up with hippie associations and signifiers—by infusing art and technology into music. In many ways, Kraftwerk’s wide-reaching influence cannot be explained solely by their groundbreaking innovations in electronic music, but rather, owes much to the way they merged aesthetic, conceptual, technological, and sonic realms. Buckley writes,

…leading on from this rejection of the Anglo-American tradition of popular music comes a

rejection of music being conceived of as being purely about music. ‘The ideas reflected in our

work are both internationalism and the mixing of different art forms,’ said Ralf [Hütter] in 2006.

‘[It’s] the idea that you don’t separate dance over here and architecture over there, painting over

there. We do everything, and the marriage of art and technology was Kraftwerk right from the

beginning.’ (Buckley 46)

The ways in which Kraftwerk and Ultravox share a musical philosophy, then, are clear—where Kraftwerk was preoccupied with the technological, Ultravox was concerned with the cinematic. The “mixing of art forms” that Hütter describes actually formed the underlying basis for Ultravox, starting in the band’s late-‘70s John Foxx era. For Simon Reynolds, John Foxx-era Ultravox was unique for its dedication to both vivid imagery and atmospheric music:

What made Ultravox crucial precursors of 1980’s synthpop explosion was their European aura

and singer/lyricist John Foxx’s frigid imagery of dehumanization and decadence. The group’s

style was based on rejecting rock’s standard ‘Americanisms’; Billy Currie, their keyboardist, was

a classically trained viola player and determinedly avoided blues scales. ‘We feel European,’ said

Foxx, when NME asked why they’d recorded Systems [of Romance] with Kraftwerk producer

Conny Plank at his studio near Köln. ‘The sort of background and melodies we tend to come out

with just seemed to be…Germanic even before we came here.’ (Rip It Up and Start Again 325)

In the mid-to-late ‘70s, Ultravox crafted an alternative, European-inspired sound and image to counter the mainstream Anglo-American rock in 1970s Britain contemporaneously to Kraftwerk’s somewhat more radical efforts in West Germany, a country similarly inundated with Anglo-American rock via the Marshall Plan, which in retrospect enabled U.S. consumer goods and entertainment products to find new markets in postwar Germany under the guise of denazification.

Kraftwerk invented the electronic sound that now connotes Germany in response to the dearth of distinctly German music (something not derivative of psychedelia/prog rock) in the postwar period. They were also one of the first bands to reintroduce German-language lyrics and track titles after decades of German popular music recorded in English. Hütter describes the cultural atmosphere in which Germans born after the war grew up:

The only people we could relate to, we had to go back fifty years into the twenties….There was

no current musical movement other than the fifty-year-old musical thing or semi-academic

electronic music, meaning psychologically we had to get ourselves going. And that has only been

possible with our generation. You can see the generation before ours, which is ten years older, and

they could not do it. The only thing they could do was get fat and drink. There was so much

accumulated guilt that it took another generation to be productive. (Jones 54-55)

These tense intergenerational dynamics strongly shaped German postwar culture and had become more blatant by the time Kraftwerk began experimenting with analog synthesizers in the early-to-mid-‘70s, helping to create a new, postwar German popular culture. Kraftwerk and other Krautrock musicians (along with Bowie, of course) are perhaps the most heavily-cited reference points for New Wave/New Romantic musicians, and their music helped to shift perceptions of German contemporary culture globally, but particularly in the UK, where it struck a chord on the level of mood and aesthetic. Foxx’s association of Ultravox’s melodies with a “Germanic” sensibility was largely informed by Kraftwerk and indicates a sort of link in the (post-punk) British imagination between Germany and modernism, as well as Germany and the future. Weimar-era interwar Germany is remembered for its iconic German Expressionist art and cinema, and for cultural representations of its seedy cabarets, while Germany in the late ‘70s was recognized for its advent of the synthesizer, for Krautrock, Kraftwerk, and Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, and for its intriguing symbolic mystique as bridge between Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc. Among post-punk musicians, Germany signified artistic, cinematic, and literary modernism, as well as the future, associated with the postwar Germany of Kraftwerk, the synthesizer, and the German division.

The underlying paradox within New Romantic and New Wave is that a revival of old-fashioned-ness actually generated the vanguard of pop and experimental music in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s. Kraftwerk’s self-conscious adoption of their fathers’ retro suit-and-tie, clean-shaven 1930s demeanor—with an ironic nod to Nazi ambitions of technological innovation and its residual byproducts in contemporary German society (e.g., Kraftwerk’s 1974 album Autobahn)—paired with their revolutionary, futuristic synthesized instrumentation, created the blueprint for New Wave bands and musicians like Ultravox, Gary Numan, and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. In other words, the more intentional New Romantics were, in the tradition of Kraftwerk, intuitively crafting a new wave of culture for the future by picking up on modernism’s early-20th century remnants (whether clothing or cinematic stylistic conventions), extracting their aesthetic capacities, and channelling their moods into retro-futuristic pop-cultural objects. On some level, Ultravox and other New Romantics understood that modernist cultural objects frequently express alienation, distrust, or unease in modern society. Ultravox updated these modernist concerns in their postmodernist, Thatcher-era music—they channeled the German Expressionist mood and the film noir mood into synthesizer melodies that yearn, reminisce, and convey a sense of modernist alienation fitting for early-‘80s Britain.

Works Cited

Buckley, David. Kraftwerk: Publikation. Omnibus Press, 2012.  

Jones, Dylan. Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics. Faber & Faber, 2020. 

Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. Farrar, 2011.

Reynolds, Simon. Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984. Faber & Faber, 2005.

Sullivan, Caroline. “How we made Ultravox’s Vienna.” The Guardian, 18 July 2017, 

www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jul/18/how-we-made-ultravox-vienna-midge-ure-billy-currie.

Ultravox. “Vienna.” 1980. YouTube, Ultravox, 31 October 2017, youtu.be/xJeWySiuq1I.

Ultravox. Vienna (Deluxe Edition: 40th Anniversary). 1980. Chrysalis, 2020, CD.

Ure, Midge. Midge Ure: If I Was…The Autobiography. Virgin Books, 2004.  

Figures

Figure 1: The Third Man. Directed by Carol Reed, performed by Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli, and Orson 

Welles, British Lion Film, 1949. YouTube, youtu.be/WCgDZQSwJEE. www.classicdriver.com/en/

article/classic-life/third-man-look-behind-scenes.

Figure 2: The Third Man. Directed by Carol Reed, performed by Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli, and Orson 

Welles, British Lion Film, 1949. YouTube, youtu.be/WCgDZQSwJEE. www2.bfi.org.uk/news-

opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/women-on-film-entrants-inspirations-part-four-

other-collaborators-crew-critics. 

Figure 3: Brian Griffin. Image of Ultravox for Rage In Eden booklet. 1981. “I Blame Ultravox,” by 

Mathew Keller, Spring 2016. In Retrospect Magazine, inretrospectmagazine.com/article/i-blame-

ultravox/.

Figure 4: Image of Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express album cover. “CULT ‘70s: Kraftwerk - ‘Trans-

Europe Express,’ by Ed Biggs, 2 April 2017. The Student Playlist, www.thestudentplaylist.com/

kraftwerk-trans-europe-express/.