And the Hello and welcome to Soda Jaker on song rating 179. Brian O'Connor here, accompanied as ever by my co-host Simon

Barber. And joining us today is an Ivanovello winning Scottish singer, songwriter, musician and

producer who's storied five-decade career has seen

him traverse the worlds of post-punk, synth pop and hard rock, as well as help spearhead

the early 80s new romantic movement.

Last month saw the release of a deluxe 40th anniversary reissue of Ultra Rocks's

seminal 1980 album Vienna and he joins us from his home studio to talk about that and much more besides. We are thrilled to welcome the

magnificent Mid-Your OBE to the show. We were long overdue a chat with Mage, weren't we?

Yeah, we were. He's had such a fascinating journey, hasn't he as a musician and songwriter?

He has, yeah. In fact, until we started our research, for this episode, I hadn't realized just how much he'd done.

I know it's crazy, isn't it? For a time in the the 80s he basically just straddled UK pop didn't he like a Colossus

he was everywhere wasn't he he was you might say he was your ubiquitous.

Oh, grown.

Our guest was born James Jure in 1953 in Glasgow, Scotland and grew up in a tenement

slum in the canvasang district of the city.

He wasn't from a musical family, but he was interested in music and singing from a young

age and listened to a lot of radio which exposed him to many different styles.

He received the secondhand guitar when he was 10

and began teaching himself to play,

his parents later taking out a loan to buy him his first friend as Stratacaster.

Upon leaving school at the tail end of the 60s,

he trained to be an engineer whilst playing in bands and starting to write his own songs.

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