All Fall Down (Ultravox song)
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- "Dreams?"
- "All Fall Down (Instrumental)"
| "All Fall Down" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | ||||
| Single by Ultravox | ||||
| from the album U-Vox | ||||
| B-side |
| |||
| Released | 10 November 1986[1][2] | |||
| Recorded | 1986 | |||
| Genre | Pop rock, new wave | |||
| Length | 5:07 | |||
| Label | Chrysalis Records | |||
| Songwriters | Chris Cross, Billy Currie, Midge Ure | |||
| Producers | Ultravox, Conny Plank | |||
| Ultravox singles chronology | ||||
| ||||
"All Fall Down" is a 1986 song by the British new wave band Ultravox. It was released as the second single from the band's eighth studio album U-Vox on 10 November 1986.
The song's lyrics carry a strong anti-war sentiment. The Irish folk group The Chieftains also guest-performed on "All Fall Down".[3][4]
After a string of hits in the 1980s, "All Fall Down" would be the band's sixteenth and final Top 40 hit until a remix of their 1981 hit "Vienna" was released in the 1990s.
Ure said in 1986: 'Although we said it before, the main difference is that we´ve no barriers whatsoever, we let its song and its arrangement dictate what that song should sound like. So a song like "All Fall Down" was like you´d imagine a Jacques Brel Celtic protest song to sound, it has a very strong celtic folk feel, with acoustic guitars and instruments. So we used Chieftains on it, went over to Dublin to record them. Although at the time the idea sounded really bizarre, the combination of us and them, a band who supposedly uses technology to its utmost and this band who uses no technology at all, that combination works really well.'[5]
Ure said in 2012: 'The album "U-VOX" is a mess and displays a band falling apart, but in "All Fall Down" we successfully gather ourselves together with folk band The Chieftains in a very easy and powerful folk song.'[6]
Structure
The song consists of two verses and an instrumental theme. It has no (sung) chorus. After the first verse, the theme is introduced and repeated one time. After the second verse, the theme is played as a coda and repeated for about 3 minutes, then faded out. The first and the last note of the theme are identical. In the coda, different from the introduction, the theme begins again with the last note of the preceding repetition; i.e. the theme actually never ends since, when the last note has been played, the next repetition has already begun.