I CAUGHT up with Midge Ure on the morning of the global climate strikes. And in spite of all the excitement in the singer and campaigners life, the world-wide display of teenage activism was right at te forefront of his thinking.

“Have you seen the photo of Australia? There are about a hundred thousand people in Sydney and it’s rising – it’s absolutely massive,” he tells me.

About to cover the Glasgow march myself, where even Billy Connolly showed face, the former Ultravox frontman’s enthusiasm was contagious.

“It’s huge. And have you seen the clip of Greta (Thunberg) in Congress yet? It’s fantastic.

I loved it.

“She’s saying, don’t listen to me, don’t listen to my words – listen to the science. Jesus Christ – we need more of her,” he declared.

I shouldn’t be surprised

at his enthusiasm for Greta’s campaigning, though – the 65-year-old has brought about more then his fair share of change.

As one of the driving forces behind Live Aid in 1985 – the protest concert which, as Midge himself said, “would shift the world on its axis a little bit and change the world’s opinion on what charity is” – he seemed energised by that same spirit in the young climate strikers.

An Ivor Novello award, Grammy and BASCAP award recipient, and one of the most recognisable singers of his generation, it’s hard to believe Midge Ure was once a spotty teenager from Cambuslang with a dream.

Now he is back, touring both Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’. Beginning this week, he returns to Glasgow on October 13 at the Barrowland as well as playing a string of European dates for ‘The 1980 Tour’.

Brexit. It had to come up eventually. I ask if it will be strange to sing an album about Europe amidst our current constitutional crisis?

“If it does go ahead at the end of October, or whenever it is meant to go ahead, if we do decide because we have a cut in our finger, we’re going to chop our arm off, it makes things incredibly difficult to go into Europe”, Midge tells me.

“There is a weirdness about it all.

“It really feels like cutting your nose off to spite your face.

“There is a form of madness that seems to have taken over politics now, not just here but in America as well. I think it has stemmed from people being unhappy and unheard, and I absolutely appreciate that. But you don’t kill something just because nobody is hearing your voice, you fix it – you try to fix it from the inside.”

And is that what The 1980s tour intends to do – attempt to fix things from the inside?

“Music is a fantastic healing motion: it’s a vehicle for telling people things, for voicing your opinion, galvanising people – that is what we all need to be concentrating on right now. Not this madness.

“Whatever happens we need to heal the rift that’s gone right across the whole of the UK. Just the same way when the referendum was happening in Scotland, the rift between the ‘leave’ and the ‘stays’ had to be healed and looked at, and the problems that instigated that rift in the first place.

“And that’s what we should

be thinking of right now.

“Get this thing finished one way or the other, get it out the way, and concentrate on people who are using foodbanks, paying nurses, making sure the NHS is good.”

And with all this healing and fixing, will there even be time to enjoy a moment of peace in his hometown before the Barrowland gig?

“I’ll be out on the streets of Glasgow before, there’s not a worry about that,” Midge assures me.

“I’ll have a wee wander about the guitar shops, go for a Crolla’s ice-cream. I don’t know anywhere in Scotland you get that, and it’s the taste of my childhood. And I’ll have to break my diet and have a Lorne sausage and fried egg roll.”

Returning to the 1980s in more way than one, I joke with Midge – will his flying visit home be a tour of Scotland’s culinary delicacies?

“And a bit. Every time I’m up, I go back to Cambuslang where I used to sing in the scout hall when I was eight, and I walk the streets there. It reminds me of why I wished for it, and that I got that wish.

“Sometimes it’s so easy to take all this stuff for granted, and I do not want to do that.

“Walking about the streets reminds me of being a spotty youth, playing whatever guitar I could get my hands on, and wishing I could make a living out of what I dreamed doing. And I got it.

“You start off at the thin end of a wedge, and the wedge opens up and weird and wonderful things happen.

“It’s just that mine has

been very extraordinary, and very lucky. It’s been a lovely wedge.”