“Vienna”

“Vienna” is an Ultravox song whose mournful lyrics and striking video recur at two distances in the narrator’s life: as a song that once gathered his teenage friends into shared silence, and as a sound that later returns him to memories he had thought he had mastered. Its significance lies not in a single fixed message but in the way it holds private losses together while giving the narrator a form through which to revisit—and narrativize—the past.

The song and its images

At the video space, “Vienna” appears as a black-and-white, deliberately spare video set to a slow drum-machine beat, mournful piano, and synth bass. Its images move between a horse crossing a foggy cobblestone street, lightning, an empty city, and the singer in a trench coat. The setting shifts between Vienna in the off-season and North London, with gargoyles punctuating the urban landscape. These scenes create an atmosphere of absence rather than explaining a complete story.

The video also assembles the heightened details of an ominous fantasy: an embassy party, a candelabra on a white baby grand under a chandelier, martinis drunk by grotesques filmed through a fish-eye lens, a tarantula crawling across a passed-out guest, and a child playing a violin. Lovers are discovered by paparazzi; someone is shot on the grand, curving staircase of an opera house. The final chorus rises with a cymbal crash. The sequence offers the teenagers a set of images to inhabit, but, like the song itself, remains open enough to carry meanings beyond its depicted affair.

A shared moment at the video space

The song interrupts the ordinary movement of a night out. After an incident in the hallway, the narrator returns to the main space with Debbie Schaffer and Jeff Taylor. The room seems untouched: music is playing, people sway in the shadows, the bartender makes drinks, and the others appear not to know what has happened. The narrator, sitting apart, has just been thinking of how he might turn the incident into material for a novel when “Vienna” begins to play on the wall.

Thom Wright has been playfully wrestling with the narrator on the carpet, urged on by Jeff. The pair are laughing; then Thom lifts himself from the narrator’s chest as the familiar video catches their attention. The narrator describes the moment as one in which the images still entranced them despite their having seen them hundreds of times. The shared viewing suspends the room’s activity: the friends remain silent until the song ends. The song therefore becomes more than background music. It briefly gathers people whose private griefs differ into a common, wordless attention.

A song that holds different losses

The narrator resists treating “Vienna” as a statement with one authoritative meaning. It is slow and long, yet moving; its abstraction lets it serve as a launching point for separate longings. He associates its sense of loss with Thom’s pain over his parents’ divorce and the father who had once been close to him but was now far across the continent. Jeff’s grief is linked to his father’s alcoholism. The narrator connects his own loss to the role of an actor he often played but did not want, and to his father’s continuing refusal to recognize him as he tried to perform the son he thought his father wanted.

In that scene, the song seems to sum up the friends’ condition obliquely, regardless of what its lyrics or video were literally about. Its force comes from this mismatch between the specificity of each person’s pain and the generality of the song’s images. The refrain’s sense that feeling has gone, and that something means nothing, can be heard as an expression of emotional loss without reducing the friends’ experiences to one story. Their silence at the end is the scene’s answer: the song has given them a shared form, not a shared explanation.

Recurrence, memory, and writing

Years later, the song returns as an involuntary passage into the narrator’s past. While driving toward Palm Springs, he sees a former schoolmate outside the Palihouse Hotel, someone he has not seen in decades. A horn sounds behind his car; his partner, Todd, asks what is wrong. The narrator manages only to say that he knew the woman. The satellite radio is tuned to the Totally 80s station, and “Vienna” is playing. Its refrain carries the fear back to the fall of 1981, when the song had been played near the end of parties and featured prominently on the friends’ mixtapes.

That return unsettles the narrator’s belief that he had already worked through the events of his seventeenth year by writing fiction. The memory demonstrates the limits of that supposed resolution: the trauma reappears in response to a sight and a song, even after years of writing. During the week in the desert, he sleeps little despite taking benzodiazepines; black dreams and rising panic keep him awake. The song’s recurrence thus marks not a completed recovery but the persistence of what had been thought resolved.

The song also re-enters the narrator’s life during the later writing of a book about that period. As he works through the material, he drinks gin, sometimes takes Xanax or Ativan, and returns to music from the era on YouTube for hours at night. “Vienna,” alongside songs including “Nowhere Girl,” “Icehouse,” and “Time For Me To Fly,” first recalls anthems of hope, metamorphosis, and leaving childhood behind. At fifty-six, however, the narrator hears those songs differently: their promise also sounds like desire, rejection, and escape. What once seemed to describe a child becoming a man can now sound to him like the story of a man who remained a child. Across the video space, the car radio, and the writing desk, “Vienna” gives memory a recurring sound, while making clear that recurrence is not the same as mastery.