Midge Ure can’t praise the Ropetackle Arts Centre in Shoreham enough. The former Ultravox frontman performed there a couple of years ago and it was where he first heard his supporting band the India Electric Company.

“The Ropetackle is a fantastic venue – and venues like it are so important because they give people the chance to experience the arts, like music,” says Midge.

After being impressed by India Electric Company’s two musicians Joseph O’Keefe and Cole Stacey, he went on tour with them last year and is touring with them again this year, returning to the Ropetackle on May 27. The tour is called Something From Everything, which does exactly what it says.

“What people can expect is for us to delve into every album I’ve been associated with since 1978 right up to my latest album Fragile,” explains Midge. “I have given myself a stupidly difficult task because there are so many, with all the bands I’ve been involved in, and all the different instrumentation and arrangements.”

The Scottish-born singer, songwriter, musician and producer, whose stage name is a phonetic reversal of his real name Jim, is, of course, most famous as the singer in early 80s New Wave band Ultravox, their 1981 hit single Vienna spending four weeks at No2 and named Single of the Year at the 1981 Brits.

But before he joined Ultravox in 1979, Midge had already played in a series of bands, including Thin Lizzy and Visage, co-writing Visage’s biggest hit Fade To Grey.

“I was already an Ultravox fan when their singer, John Foxx, left,” says Midge. “And the opportunity to join the band arose.”

He has been credited with turning around the band’s fortunes, but he disputes it. “I don’t think one individual can make a band successful – I suppose I was just the right person who came along at the right time,” he told Simply Worthing. “It was a question of new blood coming in, but it’s also the combination of that new blood and the band’s musicians that has to work.”

Vienna, a ballad that gathers pace and features a viola solo in the middle, was a song that nearly didn’t make in its four-and-a-half-minute entirety. It was the title track of the band’s fourth album, and Ultravox came under pressure from their record company to cut it to three minutes.

“We said no,” says Midge. “It was an oddity that captured imaginations in the same way as Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights or Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, and it was not intended to be a single, so we said no. And we were prepared to stand by that decision, whatever the consequences.”

He adds, “I was fascinated by Vienna – I had never been there but I had read about it – because it was the Paris of its day, a place for musicians, a city of decaying elegance. I wrote the lyrics about a place that is out of your ordinary situation, like when you’re on holiday, and you feel and act differently, and when you get back home to your dull grey life, it doesn’t feel as if you’ve ever been anywhere different.”

He adds, “I have no idea where my passion for music came from. I grew up in a tenement building and no one in my family was musical but I listened to the BBC Light Programme on the radio.

“I didn’t get a guitar until I was 10 and discovered I must have this bizarre inherent gene for music. And I could sing anything – I’ve always had a bit of a voice.”

Midge honed his skills in a series of bands before joining Ultravox, which reached No3 in 1984 with Dancing With Tears In My Eyes. The same year, he joined forces with the Boomtown Rats frontman Bob Geldof to launch the Band Aid project, bringing together pop icons of the day to make the single Do They Know It’s Christmas? and staging the famous concert to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia.

Post-Ultravox, he has forged a successful solo career, reaching No1 with If I Was in 1985, and continuing to release albums, his latest in 2014 called Fragile.

He says, “There are many things I get involved with outside music – including the oddities I seem to have been part of over the years, alongside oddities I hope to be part of in the future.”

• Midge Ure and India Electric Company appear at the Ropetackle Arts Centre , Little High Street, Shoreham, at 8pm on Friday May 27. Tickets £24. For details, phone 01273 464440 or visit ropetacklecentre.co.uk.