Many people who grew up in the 1980s will have fond memories of the band Ultravox and its charismatic lead singer, Jim Ure. Jim, of course, also joined forces with Bob Geldof to write Do They Know It's Christmas and kickstart the whole Band Aid phenomenon. Wait, you’re thinking, wasn’t Ultravox’s lead singer called Midge? Yes. Yes, he was. The man himself explained how Jim (the name his parents gave him) became Midge to Miriam O’Callaghan:

"When I joined this band at 18, it was run by two brothers, the McGinley brothers, and one of them was Jim and he was older and it was his band and he said, 'We can’t have two Jims, so you’re now Midge,’ which is Jim reversed, Mij, and we just changed the spelling."

That band was called Slick and they had a number one hit, but it wasn’t the triumph that you might imagine for the young band with two Jims, as Midge explained to Miriam:

"We turned up in London to come and make our first record with all our equipment in a great big truck – we'd just driven down from Glasgow, all excited about making our first record – and we walked into the studio, and they’d already recorded it with the session guys. ‘Cause that’s how you did things in those days. And it was soul destroying, to say the least. So, when the record got to number one and we got the phone call, it kinda did nothing for us. It was someone else’s achievement."

That experience gave Midge, he reckons, the tenacity to go out and try to grab his 15 minutes of fame. He went from Slick to The Rich Kids to Ultravox. At the time he joined them, Ultravox were not in rude health. The band had returned from a US tour without their lead singer and without their guitar player. They'd also been dropped by their record label. Despite this, Midge says, when they got together in a rehearsal studio, things clicked straight away:

"The moment we plugged in and made a noise, it was the most fantastic thing I’d ever heard in my life. The power and the atmosphere that that band could create was just immense."

The huge success Ultravox had was life changing for Midge, but he didn’t have to wait very long for another life-changing moment. In 1984, he was talking to Paula Yates on the set of the TV show The Tube when the phone rang. It was Paula’s husband and he asked her who was there with her. She told him it was Mide Ure. He told her to put Midge on the phone.

"So he told me about what he’d just seen on television, which was the Micheal Buerk footage, the first footage that was shown about the famine in Ethiopa. And he said, ‘Look, the Rats aren’t in a position to do anything. I want to do something. Will you help?’ And I hadn’t seen the footage at this point and of course you say yes. Nobody says no to Bob."

You can hear Miriam’s full conversation with Midge – including how he almost joined the Sex Pistols and how he played with Thin Lizzy on a US tour – by clicking above.

Midge Ure plays at the Forever Young Festival at Palmerstown House Estate, Kildare on Sunday 16 July.