Released on 7 October 1985, "The Gift" was the debut solo studio album by the Scottish musician Midge Ure, it was released while his band Ultravox were taking a break. The album reached No. 2 in the UK Albums Chart partly due to the large attention drawn to it by the single "If I Was" which reached No. 1 on the UK Singles Chart in September 1985. "That Certain Smile" was released as the second single in November 1985, and "Wastelands" was released as the third single in January 1986.
It was 1984 a year that began with Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? at No.1 in the charts, and closed out with a triumphant show at Wembley Arena. Between those festive bookends, the 31-year-old singer, songwriter, musician and producer at the time, had also released his debut solo album, landed a No.1 single and helped pull off “the greatest show on Earth” as one of the architects of Live Aid, at which he also performed as part of his day job fronting Ultravox. Then, Midge’s solo album, The Gift – was equally unplanned and spontaneous, and equally in debt to that garden studio, he just created.
The Gift was never meant to be an album; Ure explained. His truly ambition was to build his own studio, and I was in the middle of trying to figure out how it all worked. He said: Basically, I bought a load of manuals, and some equipment came with it, then started dabbling – doing some instrumental bits, and whatever. And when the record company heard it, they said, ‘that’s an album’. So he made an album without actually realising I was making one.
The Gift came together in a relaxed, ad-hoc manner, with the singer recruiting Danny Mitchell, of Scottish new wave duo Messengers, as his songwriting wingman. He had Danny and Colin [King] down from Glasgow, in doing demos while I was playing at being an engineer. And it just kind of morphed into working together on the album.”
With the serendipity that came to define the entire process, one of the demos his house guests left behind was a little number called If I Was. “I’d done some of the instrumental stuff first, because that’s the easy bit for me,” says Midge. “The music just seems to come out, whereas lyrics take a bit more focus and effort. “So, sitting there in my very clean new studio, without an idea in my head, I started going through some tapes, and one of them was this song of Danny's. I took it and rearranged it and kind of turned it inside out, and that became the track we all know.
The song's breezy bassline was provided by Level 42's Mark King, one of several star players – Heaven 17’s Glenn Gregory and Big Country’s Mark Brzezicki also make appearances – recruited by Ure for the album. Mark King ended up playing the most simplistic bassline you could think of – it was incredibly basic for him. He showed great restraint by not slapping all over it.
Released as a single in September 1985, If I Was topped the charts in the UK and Ireland, and breached Top 10s around the world, though not in the United States, which continued its stubborn indifference to all things Ultravox-related.
Daniel Mitchell and Ure wrote the nostalgic"Wastelands" together for the band Modern Man. They started a songwriting partnership that produced five songs on "The Gift", including a reworking of "Wastelands", which was originally from the Midge Ure-produced Modern Man album Concrete Scheme released 1980. "Living In The Past", with its off-beam Oriental production and long instrumental outro, is a delightful highlight; "Wastelands", released as a single and built into a glorious crescendo from an inert, gloomy, opening. "She Cried" is vintage Ure; top-line synth-pop musicianship, jungle drums, Mark King’s trademark slap bass and a terrific echoey flute, galvanise the instrumental "The Chieftain", then "That Certain Smile", was a banal song despite being a hit single, was considered by critics as the sole weak link.
The album eatures three instrumental tracks, which include "Edo", "The Chieftain" and "Antilles". These instrumentals were recorded on the Caribbean island of Montserrat using a Casio CZ-101. On "Edo", Ure played a koto, which he purchased during Ultravox's first tour in Japan. Ure considered the idea of triggering the sound of a koto through a Yamaha DX7 but he decided against it as he wanted to hear the sound of the fingers scraping the strings.
The Gift, was released a month after If I Was made it to No.1, allowed Ure to make arguably the easiest launch of a solo career in history. Following his efforts on Band Aid and Live Aid, he had garnered plenty of goodwill. However, anxious to avoid being labelled “Saint Midge”, he let the music do the talking and released his debut solo album. Finallt, The Gift peaked at No.2 on the album chart and Ure followed it up with a sell-out tour before momentarily returning to Ultravox.
A succesful and quite pleased effort with a fantastic end result that spawned a fantastic hit single "If I Was".
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