Ultravox’s “Vienna”: the back story

About Ultravox’s “Vienna”: the back story

By the ULTIMATE Vienna Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Ultravox’s “Vienna” reached No. 2 in the UK in January 1981. The Official Charts Company records it as the band’s highest-charting single, kept from the top for three weeks by Joe Dolce’s “Shaddap You Face”.

The song

Ultravox released “Vienna” on Chrysalis in January 1981, the title track of their 1980 album. It moves from a slow, spare verse to a soaring chorus, with Billy Currie’s viola solo at its heart. Midge Ure has described it as a love song to an imaginary girl: you go somewhere beautiful, meet someone and promise it will last.

The chart

The single entered the Official Singles Chart on 17 January 1981, spent 18 weeks on it and peaked at No. 2, kept off the top for three weeks by Joe Dolce’s “Shaddap You Face”. The band’s official video notes say it sold over half a million copies in the UK. In 2012 BBC Radio 2 listeners voted it the nation’s favourite No. 2 single, and the Official Charts Company named it an honorary No. 1.

Cold air, a piercing violin and a gravestone in the Zentralfriedhof: four minutes that still make people want to see Vienna.

The video in Vienna

The video was directed by Russell Mulcahy, who would soon film Duran Duran in Sri Lanka. In the band’s own words it was “filmed on location on a day trip to Vienna” and in London, at Covent Garden and the Kilburn State Theatre. In Vienna the band walk out of the Hofburg onto the Michaelerplatz, Ure sings before St Stephen’s, and the camera lingers in the Zentralfriedhof, the Central Cemetery: the gravestone on the record sleeve belongs to the grave of the piano maker Carl Schweighofer. Its black-and-white mood and the cemetery recall The Third Man, the 1949 film made in Vienna, whose final scenes are also set in the Zentralfriedhof.

Trace the footsteps

Start at the Michaelerplatz gate of the Hofburg, walk to St Stephen’s, then take tram 71 out to the Zentralfriedhof and walk to the domed Karl Borromäus church, which the band walk towards at the end of the video.

Our advice: go on a cold, clear winter afternoon, when the light is low and the city looks most like the video. Play it on the tram.

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