In the summer of 1977, the future lead singer of Ultravox was making a bold transition from boy band pin-up to punk.

Midge Ure had topped the charts a year earlier as singer of Slik, with a song (Forever And Ever) written by the creators of the Bay City Rollers.

Inspired by the rumblings of punk, they decided to embrace the new sound, and look, and changed their name to PVC2, releasing a solitary single.

Sensibly, he kept his identity concealed from cynically sneering punks like me who wouldn’t have been caught dead with a Slik record in our collection – but I was more than happy to buy this.

With his once mellifluous voice transformed into a rasping roar, Ure put what one critic called “all the gusto of a medieval torturer” into singing its two flip-side songs Pain and Deranged, Demented & Free, released in August 1977 on Edinburgh’s Zoon label.

By this time Ure had already turned down Malcolm McLaren’s offer to become lead singer of a new band he was putting together called The Sex Pistols (Midge reputedly told him he had “got his priorities all wrong”).

In a busy 18 months, Ure left PVC2 to join the almost-as-short-lived punk supergroup Rich Kids, formed Visage with Steve Strange and Rusty Egan, and enjoyed a brief stint replacing Gary Moore as guitarist with Thin Lizzy before joining Ultravox in April 1979.