The 1979 transition

On 31 December 1978, Island Records dropped the band, three months after releasing Systems of Romance. Early in 1979 Ultravox paid for their own tour of the United States. John Foxx left in March 1979, after the last date of that tour, near San Francisco. Robin Simon, who had joined in 1978, also left in 1979.

Late in 1979 Midge Ure joined as singer, guitarist and keyboard player, and the new line-up toured the US again at the end of the year. It signed to Chrysalis, which released Vienna on 11 July 1980.

Meanwhile the past kept appearing in the shops: Foxx’s first solo album, Metamatic, came out in January 1980, and Island compiled Three into One from the Foxx-era albums, released on 6 June 1980.

What is not yet documented

The exact date and venue of Foxx’s last concert with the band, the dates of the early-1979 US tour, how Ure came to join, and the dates and venues of the late-1979 US tour are not established by any source this archive has examined. These are the months most often retold from memory, and so the ones where a dated contemporary source matters most.

Drafting note: the wording of this essay was drafted with the help of an AI language model from the sources listed below. Every fact in it comes from those sources, and it is published only after an editor has checked each statement against them.