Ultravox - Ha! Ha! Ha!

FLICKING IDLY through a rack and coming across an album entitled ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’ you’d expect, if not a comic masterpiece, at least a couple of wry smiles. You certainly won't find anything like that here. This is an album of such unrelenting seriousness (unless, that is, I just failed to discover otherwise) that it makes Van Morrison’s ‘T.B. Sheets’ seem positively flip. I wasn’t looking for, let alone expecting, belly laughs but I was hoping for wit, because humour is necessary, even in the midst of unrelenting seriousness. Not as light relief, but as a necessary correction of perspective. Maybe it’s even an essential gesture of humanity. And humanity is the last thing I you’ll find in Ultravox! What can you expect from someone who tells you, as Ultravox! singer and writer John Foxx did to me, that in all honesty, he'd rather be a machine? As far as I could understand, he said that from a (wildly shared) belief that our civilization is up the creek without a paddle, there’s no hope left, only the possibility of observing things fall apart at the seams and maybe commenting on them. Just the song titles would make his attitude clear. ‘Fear In The Western World’, ‘Artificial Life', ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ (which doesn’t appear to have anything in common with the film of the same title). Simply he's got a common art school type of outlook, compounded of equal parts despair and distaste without the redeeming element of caring. If that seems to laying undue weight on the lyrics, it's unavoidable because not only are the 5 words given prominence but even the music itself is infected with a kind of literariness; where effect is used for its own sake. Hearing the first track in a booth you'd be misled. ‘Rock-work’ is just what you’d expect from the title. Thereafter the songs become an uneven mixture of the adventurous, the orthodox (especially the arthritic drumming) and the wilfully different. Great chunks of it are a case study of the bad affects the mere acquisition of a synthesiser can have on a band. On their first album Ultravox! seemed to be tentatively groping towards their own fusion of simple rock songs with a few sophisticated ideas. Here they’ve mostly rejected the possibilities of the accessible pop song, using only catch phrase choruses (often with infuriating insistence) and relied wholesale on what they probably see as the avant-garde and the more cynical soul might feel were mere noises. If there were ever a band that cried out to be crucified on the discipline of the three minute single, It's Ultravox!

Pete Silverton Sounds 22.10.77

Ripped from the 2006 expanded and remastered yet falling apart at the seams FLAC

Ultravox; Ha! Ha! Ha!

1.      ROckWork

2.      The Frozen Ones

3.      Fear In The Western World

4.      Distant Smile

5.      The Man Who Dies Every Day

6.      Artificial Life

7.      While I’m Still Alive

8.      Hiroshima Mon Amour

9.      Young Savage

10.   The Man Who Dies Every Day (Remixed)

11.   Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alt. Version)

12.   Quirks

13.   The Man Who Dies Every Day (Live)

14.   Young Savage (Live)

Ultravox's debut album is still available here