Festival Records | OZ | 12″ EP | 1981 | L 20003

Ultravox!: Mini LP OZ EP [1981]

1. The Wild, The Beautiful, & The Damned [live @ The Rainbow]
2. My Sex [live @ Huddersfield Poly]
3. Quirks
4. Young Savage [live @ The Marquee]
5. The Man Who Dies Every Day [live @ Huddersfield Poly]
6. Modern Love

Here’s another 1981 EP that rocked my world, while I’m on the thread. This was a delight I found at the Altamonte Springs Peaches at a point where it was the first time I had any of the material that it collects in a deluxe, Australian only package. The live recordings are ’77 vintage material with the band at their ferocious peak, just before casting off the chrysalis of punk to become Krautrock-inspired butterflies; inventing New Romanticism in the process.

Not so with these live tracks. “The Wild, The Beautiful, & The Damned” is a violin driven number redolent of Doctors Of Madness. “My Sex” is still every inch the visionary slice of pre-post-punk that defined the far horizons of their debut album [recorded in 1976] to map out uncharted miles of virgin territory that Foxx would spend the rest of his career investigating. “The Man Who Dies Every Day” is the great single that never was; my favorite track from the largely abrasive “Ha! Ha! Ha!” And then there’s “Young Savage.” Never faster or more vehement as it is in this live recording. Drummer Warren Cann compared playing this number to starting up a powerful motorbike and holding on for dear life while it sped away, oblivious to you on its “back.”

These lovely live recordings were originally issued years earlier in 1978 on the 7″ 4-track EP “Live Retro” as issued by their label at the time, Island Records. The covers are similar. Both sport high contrast images of singer John Foxx looking every inch the spitting cobra of intellecto-punk. It was several years later when I finally found a copy of the original 7″ on Island of the “Live Retro” EP but by that time it was strictly the collector in me acting, since I’d been spoiled with the superior fidelity of the Australian 12″ version with perhaps ten minutes of wide grooves per side. But superior sound wasn’t the only thing that the Australian “Live” EP had going for it.

The Australian EP also had two rare Ultravox! cuts [“Quirks” and “Modern Love”] that appeared originally as a free 7″ single included with the first 10,000 copies of “Ha! Ha! Ha!” as “bonus tracks.” Quirks is a brisk 1:27 number that ends before you even have a chance to notice and “Modern Love” is a thunderous live recording of a track that never perhaps got laid down in the studio. Getting these on the 12″ EP was a real coup since I thought that I would never get the original 7″ of these tracks at that time. Of course, perseverance over the years brought me that single eventually [twice, even], but until 2006, when Island issued DLX RMs of “Ultravox!” and “Ha! Ha! Ha!” with the contents of this EP spread [unevenly] across both discs as bonus material, this was the best sounding way to experience these lost tracks from the early, pre-fame period of Ultravox!

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