Chris Cross, Ultravox bassist who co-wrote their biggest hit, Vienna – obituary
Chris Cross, who has died aged 71, was the bassist with Ultravox; he also co-wrote their songs – including Vienna, a worldwide hit in 1981 that was famously kept off the top of the UK charts by Joe Dolce’s Shaddap You Face. His colleague Midge Ure described him as “the glue that held the band together”.
Christopher Thomas Allen was born in Tottenham, north London, on July 14 1952. He attended Belmont Secondary Modern and then William Forster Comprehensive, and began playing in bands in his teens, his early and varied enthusiasms being the likes of Arthur Brown, the Small Faces and Desmond Dekker.
Answering a Melody Maker ad, he joined a Preston band, Stoned Rose, on bass, while studying psychology, then two years later went back down to London and enrolled at the Royal College of Art (RCA).
Another music ad drew him in, and he joined a band being formed by a singer and former RCA student, then named Dennis Leigh, whom he had coincidentally known up north. They initially called themselves Tiger Lily, with Allen on bass, Stevie Shears on guitar, Warren Cann on drums and Billy Currie on keyboards and violin, before settling on Ultravox! (the exclamation mark was later dropped); Leigh adopted the stage name John Foxx while Allen began calling himself Chris St John and then Chris Cross.
On the strength of their live act they secured a deal with Island Records, and over three albums in 1977 and 1978 – Ultravox!, Ha!-Ha!-Ha! and Systems of Romance (the last produced by a leading light of Krautrock, Connie Plank) – they evolved from an art-school glam-rock outfit into cutting-edge synthpop pioneers. “Art, film and music were starting to interweave more, the timing was perfect,” Cross recalled. “The modern world was the gunpowder to our sonic plot.”
But Island dropped them when the sonic plot failed to translate into hits, and in 1979 Foxx quit to embark on a solo career, which continues to this day. It looked as if the band had reached a natural end, until Midge Ure came along.
The Glaswegian singer-songwriter had learnt his trade in the bubblegum band Slik and the power-popsters Rich Kids (the latter with the former Sex Pistol Glen Matlock), and had met Billy Currie when they were both working with Steve Strange in Visage. He and the band quickly worked up new material, signed to Chrysalis and in 1980 released the album Vienna, which eventually reached No 3 in the UK.
The title track became an enduring symbol of the electro-pomp that characterised swathes of 1980s pop music, with its “luxuriant synthesisers eddying around a somewhat self-conscious romanticism”, as the Telegraph put it at the time. (The paper was even less enamoured of their October 1981 set at the Hammersmith Odeon, the first hour of which was “a profoundly dull procession of quasi-computer rock which could just as easily have been dispensed by a quartet of C3POs”, though “the final half-hour assumed a much-needed vigour”).
By 1984 Ultravox Mk II were one of Britain’s biggest bands, and when Midge Ure collaborated with Bob Geldof on Do They Know it’s Christmas?, Cross was among the starry crowd that crammed into Trevor Horn’s Sarm West studio in Notting Hill to record the charity single. A few months later the band performed a four-song set, climaxing in Vienna, for the Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium. “I remember walking on and it was really sunny, and everything came together so well,” Cross recalled. “And then you remembered millions of people were watching it on TV, too.”
Ure then went on a solo tour, but when he returned the band was in the throes of breaking up. “It just unfolded, really,” said Cross. “Fell apart. It was like everyone lost interest.”
Cross – described by Midge Ure as “the logic in the madness” – left the industry and became a psychotherapist, a career he interrupted for a few years to join the band’s 2009 reunion.
Chris Cross is survived by his wife Lynne.
Chris Cross, born July 14 1952, died March 25 2024
