Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
To be able to place your soul in more than one sense of existence, to offer your mind and heart to more than one avenue of belief and thinking is more than extraordinary, it is a truth of being human, of understanding that the yin and the yang are in balance, opposite but operating with satisfaction with stability, insight, and a fearless poise of mental agility; this is the outcome of being A Man Of Two Worlds, of being a person who lives with the glory of symmetry rather than a domination of a one way pattern of life.
Midge Ure’s first studio album in almost a decade could have been delivered as almost an apologetic note, a final recording in the making in which the highly thought of musician and voice of the sensationally adored Ultravox stood his ground and offered insight into his thoughts of the last few years, how his life has seen different challenges affect him and act with melancholy assurance.
Instead what the listener finds is a double album which is arguably amongst the finest of his career, one built on a foundation of reflection to be sure, but one that expands upon the writer’s reasoning for withstanding the darkness of life, of containing heartbreak but allowing it to be seen as a kind of purity and finesse, of reason, of harmony.
Across tracks such as the sonographic like structures of A Different View and The Space Between, the exercise in deftness to be found in Blues And Greys, and the sense of holding onto a virtue of significant belief in Shouting To The Moon, Ordinary Man (Precious Moments), Somewhere Out There, and Fan The Flame, Midge Ure steps out from behind the darkness of recent times and delivers without fear or finality an album of sheer scope and immense weight. It is almost as if he has waited a long time to really let loose and open his immense heart to the world.
Midge Ure returns to his fans and those with admiration for all he has achieved with subtly and fury woven tightly together, the insight and intelligence sparking ideas, and never once relenting. A Man Of Two Worlds in harmony with both spheres of existence.
Ian D. Hall