A Thread for Simple Minds - Sons & Fascination/Sister Feelings Call

70 Cities is the best thing here I think, and probably the most formally ambitious - sounds like a song built by the sound of duelling rocket factories.

I’m not sure there’s really a weak track on the combined CD version except “Wonderful In Young Life”. It is exhaustingly long though.

70 Cities would slot straight back in at track 3 then. I do really like Wonderful... though. Hmm

i like wonderful in young life too, very magazine-meets-roxy music

I love when they string words in titles as if they have no idea how functional English works!

“Wonderful In Young Life” is good! Perhaps it’s just less surprising to me than the other material (perhaps precisely because it is Magazine meets Roxy Music), and coming at the end doesn’t help.

Whereas “70 Cities as Love Brings the Fall” is like... Remain in Light meets Abacab?

also electronic cow moos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK-thT2IaaA

slightly later era but have just been watching this tv performance from 1982. version of 'new gold dream' on this is great (starts at 11:05), especially the last couple of minutes - synths just a teeny bit too high in the mix and sounding like a warning of imminent alien invasion, guitar caught up in a whirlpool of delay, bass like a rushing train. it's like some sort of new romantic hawkwind, ominous and psychedelic and really quite strange. there's a version of 'the american' right afterwards and yeah - charlie is already starting to throw in some of those awful out-to-row-z guitar parts, chorus would desperately like to meet an arena that's up for a few nights out and a bit of a singalong

that Hawkwind comparison is so on-point! this kind of IS the space-rock of its time isn't it

"League of Nations" is an attempt to do Can with two bass notes plus mumbling.

Their first album Life In a Day basically alternates between pastiches of Roxy Music and Magazine, but not very effectively.

yeah the title track is nice but otherwise meh

Really amazing that they went from the quite drab Life in a Day to the holy-fuck-what-is-this brilliance of Reel To Real Cacophany in less than a year. Hard to think of many (any?) glow ups so extreme in such a short time span.

I'd say there's a similar leap in quality between the first two Japan albums, also less than a year apart.

"League of Nations" is an attempt to do Can with two bass notes plus mumbling.

big 'mother sky' vibes on this one too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbZSXSICdFE

The body of work that Simple Minds produced between 1980 and 1984 is absolutely phenomenal. Some of the most exciting rock music to ever come out of the U.K. I wish they’d stopped then and walked away as legends instead of fading into parody

R2RC was a good example of second album syndrome, they went into record with John Leckie with just a few songs, I always used to wonder why it was much cheaper than all the other SM records, then I bought it (around 1985) and shelved it away, love it now, of course.

Love SaF/SFC, but can't help feeling that "Theme for Great Cities" is Jim Kerr's best vocal performance.

He was fine chanting mystical nonsense, until he caught a bad case of Bono-itis in the mid 80s.

Real Life is a pretty decent album, but I can't be doing with anything after that

“film theme” from R2RC is dark, sexy, cool as hell. first heard it on a Daniele Baldelli mix

Capital City is my jam, I love that bassline so much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hth0iPU29tw

<3 the 5x5 box set, that was my full immersion after years of missing out. Because of that I don't think of these albums individually but as part of a whole continuum.