“If I Was” by Midge Ure

"If I Was" opened the Scottish musician Midge Ure's solo account: the first single from his debut solo album, The Gift, it spent a week at number one in the UK in September 1985 and topped the Irish chart too.

It started as somebody else's leftover. Ure had engineered a Glasgow session for Messengers, the band opening for Ultravox on tour, and put up Danny Mitchell and Colin King at his house; after they left, digging through tapes for material, he found a demo Mitchell had left behind. Ure reworked it, shares the writing credit with Mitchell, and produced and arranged it himself. For bass he called in Mark King of Level 42, whom he'd met at a Radio One road show at the Swansea Top Rank, and King, Ure recalled, played about the plainest line imaginable, resisting any urge to slap all over it.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.