Gig review: Midge Ure at Leeds Grand Theatre

“This is a look back across this weird musical journey I’ve had, Leeds,” Midge Ure tells his audience half-a-dozen songs into his performance at the Grand Theatre and Opera House.

As Storm Darragh rages across the west of the country, its creeping tendrils have snuck across the Pennines to West Yorkshire, not that it appears to have dampened the spirits of the storied singer-songwriter.

“I was on Top of the Pops,” he continues. “Just after it turned over to colour, you know.”

Ure has led quite the musical existence – a member of, at one juncture or another, four charting bands alongside a successful solo career, a position of pop-culture influence through charitable endeavours with Band Aid and Live Aid to boot.

This tour celebrates five decades in the game; at 71, sharply suited in black with pate glistening beneath the retro-pomp new wave lights, the former Ultravox frontman has slipped into the keen role of elder statesman with seeming ease and comfort.

Backed by a three-piece group that have already pulled double duty as support act India Electric Co., and arranged over a succession of geometric, monolithic pillars that seem to approximate a space-age slice of the Giant’s Causeway, this tightly constructed dive back into the Glaswegian star’s past is not as wholly all-encompassing as perhaps billed – there is no love for his time with glam-rock outfit Silk, though there is a nod of the hat to his brief stint in Thin Lizzy – but proves a rewarding journey in its own right, even if its obvious highlights generate the biggest responses.

Early highlights include solo success If I Was, backed up with surprisingly chunky power chords, while May Your Good Lord builds to a Gaelic stadium crescendo with aplomb. He plays Lament to big cheers and grins ruefully. “So you like miserable songs,” he quips. “There’s more where that came from.”

That ultimately manifests in the home straight, triggered by the magnificent noir-ish moodiness of Vienna and a throbbing take on Visage’s Fade to Grey. A cavalcade of bangers – Hymn, The Boys Are Back in Town, One Small Day – concludes with Dancing With Tears in My Eyes before Ure brings his band to the front, lined up Kraftwerk-style, for an encore of The Voice.

“I’m just pleased I’ve kept your significant other happy,” he quips. There are little, if any, leaving disappointed.