"If you look at my career, yeah, it does look like I'm sort of some dreadful old musical tart."

Right now Midge Ure is driving along the M4 and down the line of memory. We are talking about the last 40 years of his musical life; about punk and parents, about synths and Steve Strange and Live Aid and Jack Daniels and all the good days and the bad days he's seen through the years.

He's on his way from Bath, which is where he and his family call home these days (have done for the last two decades in fact), into central London to play a gig because that's what he does. That's what he's always done, from his days as a boy band pin up in Slik via the Rich Kids, Ultravox and Visage.

That chameleon quality is what is sometimes held against him, he knows. From pin-up to punk to new romantic. The aforementioned "musical tart" at work. But, really, that's not how he sees it. It was never about opportunism. Progression is a better description.

And anyway, tilt the glass another way and you can see him for what he really is; a musical survivor, someone who has managed at least four pop lives in his time, culminating in his current gigging veteran incarnation (coming to a venue near you this month and next).

And someone who along the way was a sartorial icon (my mate Ian used to model his sideburns on those modelled by Midge in the video for Vienna) and a life-saver thanks to his involvement in Band Aid and Live Aid in response to the Ethiopian famine in the mid-1980s.

Not bad for a boy who grew up in a one-bedroom flat in Cambuslang with an outside toilet.

Music was always the goal for Ure. "I could sing. I could always sing, which didn't cost my parents anything. So the singing came long before I was allowed anywhere near a guitar. And it was only because I moaned and nagged and drew guitars and painted them that my parents managed to scrape together enough money to buy me a second-hand one when I was 10."

He was a full-time musician by the time he was 18. He loved being on stage from the get-go. "I wanted girls to like me. It was that deep. And it worked."

The teenage Ure joined Salvation, a band who played the circuit and, after a name-change to Slik, were soon being groomed to be the next big Scottish thing after the Bay City Rollers. For a moment they even were, when they had a No1 in 1976 with Forever and Ever. But it was not a band built to last.

And really that should have been the end of the story, Ure admits. "We'd already been tarred with the boyband brush and once you are seen in that light, that's it."

Except … except others saw something else in him. Malcolm McLaren asked him to join the Sex Pistols. He turned that down and joined Glen Matlock's new band The Rich Kids instead, where he met and became mates with the band's drummer Rusty Egan.

Ure was not a punk as such but he was paying attention. "We knew what was happening. We were listening to the John Peel show. We were consuming it and getting excited by it."

Only Ure was interested in the emerging new sounds of synths and brought one into the Rich Kids. It didn't go down well. "Half the band hated it and it broke The Rich Kids up."

For Ure, though, it was the punk thing to do. "If you think of a punk band picking up a guitar and learning three chords, we took that exact attitude and did the same thing with drum machines and synthesisers. We started making this electronic thing so it was the same punk ethos but in a different way. That was as punk as the Pistols."

He teamed up with Egan to create music to play in Egan's clubs under the name Visage and he also joined Ultravox, in place of former singer John Foxx. At the time it couldn't have seemed a propitious move. The band was on the verge of breaking up, having been dropped by its record company and owing the label a fortune.

"But the moment I walked into that band and we made a noise in the first rehearsal – which we had to chip together to pay for – the noise we made was magnificent," Ure recalls.

Soon he was in the studio with both Ultravox and Egan and Steve Strange working on songs for Visage. "Steve was never a singer. Steve wanted to be in a band. He'd been in a band with Chrissie Hynde back in the punk days for 10 minutes. The Moors Murderers. That was bound to be a big success.

"He was a mate of Rusty's and we needed someone who could front the band. Steve was never a great singer but I could make him sing in the studio.

"It was only ever meant to be a studio project. It was about making music we could play in the clubs that Rusty and Steve were running in London at the time and that was the height of our ambitions for it."

That's not how it worked out. Visage and Ultravox arrived in the charts on the same week. Ure was suddenly hot. And he took advantage by working even harder. "I was just doing everything. I was grabbing every moment that was there. I was producing other artists. I was directing videos for other artists. I did it all. I absolutely loved it."

The desire to be in control was a strong one, he admits. "I suppose it was a backlash against Slik where you turned up in the studio for your first ever recording and the session guys had been in that morning and knocked the backing track off." He made sure that never happened again.

But more than that, the Slik experience left him with the understanding that success could quickly evaporate.

"I think for me the fear of it all disappearing overnight was massive. I slept and I worked and that was it. You met a few girls in the middle somewhere, but otherwise it was just work. Because I had tasted commercial success with Slik and we were well known for six months and then it was all gone."

That wasn't to happen a second time. With Ultravox, Ure became a proper pop star. Singles in the charts. Pin-ups in Smash Hits. And then in 1984 he wrote the second-best selling record of all time in the UK for Band Aid, the ultimate charity record, Do They Know It's Christmas.

Seven months later he was going onstage with the rest of Ultravox in front of 80,000 in Wembley Stadium and one billion TV viewers as part of Live Aid.

Did he enjoy playing that day? "You know what? I think we sang in tune. That was pretty good. We tried to choose songs that used the least technology which meant that less things could go wrong. Because there was no sound check. It was just get on, plug in and do it. And we got away with it. And when we saw those 80,000 people all clapping in time with the Vienna drumbeat that was magnificent. But your bum cheeks were firmly clenched, because it was petrifying."

He did go to Ethiopia himself to see at first-hand why Live Aid was necessary. He then came home and sold his fleet of cars and got rid of his eight-bedroom house. "It changes something in you. You see how futile it is, having all this stuff.

"After that first time I vowed I'd never go back. I'm a kid from Cambuslang. I'm not designed to deal with that stuff. But I went back 20 years later with Save the Children and saw the difference. It was quite amazing."

All careers have their peaks and troughs of course. And perhaps inevitably, given how high he climbed, there would be a vertiginous fall for Ure once the eighties disappeared into the rear-view mirror. In his case he fell into a bottle.

Drinking went hand in hand with success in the 1980s. A bottle of Jack on your rider alongside the guitar tuner. "It's only at the end that it becomes hideous. The rest of it was fun," he says.

But life happens. "You get a series of events that knock you for six. That can be anything and for me my career stalemated. I left the band. My marriage broke up. All the solid points in my life that I had were gone. And then my father died.

"It was a great excuse for me to notch it up a gear and feel incredibly sorry for myself and lose myself in alcohol.

"And when someone says maybe you could curtail that a bit you realise that your brakes don't work and you have to do something about it. Which I did.

"I stopped 11 years ago and I got my life back. It was harder than anything I've ever done in my life. For that first year or so it was like climbing Mount Everest every day. It was really tough."

Tough but doable. It's what survivors do. As for the rest of it, well there are gigs to be played. He is, was and, for the foreseeable will be a musician. "I'm 63 now. Unless people don't want to hear me anymore or bad health gets in the way I have no intention of stopping."

Midge Ure's Something from Everything tour is at The Lemon Tree, Aberdeen tomorrow night, Eden Court, Inverness on Monday night. He plays Motherwell and Glenrothes in December.