Simple Minds: the Arista years

Lately I’ve rediscovered the early albums by Simple Minds after several years of not having played them, which has been quite an interesting experience; for one thing, it’s taken me until now to realise the first three albums came out on Arista, not Virgin as I always thought (that would be a little later), and I see now Arista’s handling of the band was… somewhat different to theirs. Anyway, let’s go back to early 1979 to start off with this:

I’ve thought for a long time that 1979 was a truly phenomenal year for music, after the initial wave of punk had started burning out and the post-punk movement in its various shapes started to assert itself in response to that. Some great albums came out of that year… not including this one, alas. I mean, it’s not really bad as such, I think they picked the best two songs for single release (could’ve done the same with “Sad Affair”), Jim Kerr’s lyrics aren’t as obtuse as they would get later, but I get a sense of a band that hasn’t yet escaped its influences (or its own immediate past as Johnny and the Self Abusers, with one song on the album dating from those days), and whose ambitions were still out of its reach. Cf. the two long songs that close each side. They rapidly became unhappy with the finished product, and Kerr later said that just after the recording was finished he heard Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures and wanted to re-record the entire thing but the label said no… I’m not sure how that worked given that Joy Division hadn’t even recorded UP at that point, it’s not like he could’ve even got an advance cassette of it, but whatever; a few months later this happened:

I’ve seen the difference between Life in a Day and Real to Real Cacophony described as being like Radiohead going from The Bends directly to Kid A but in seven months rather than six years. I always found this to be a kind of gross overstatement and this recent re-listen has made me think there’s actually a bit more continuity between the two than I used to think. Still, no denying that there is quite some progression from one to the other, and side one at least is a markedly more angular beast than the first album was (side two is less obviously off-putting). Apparently Arista shat themselves when they heard it and complained that there was no obvious single like “Chelsea Girl” from the previous album (I presume they’d forgotten the latter actually bombed when it came out as a single)… Given the band recorded this in something of a hurry to get a new album in shops to try and displace the one from just a few months earlier, the end result is actually pretty good and they started getting critical respect, but I don’t think it’s quite on the same level as other post-punk hits of 1979… though they weren’t too far off:

Third time’s the charm? Well, maybe it would’ve been if it weren’t for Arista, who for some reason decided it would be fun to ignore the actual growing demand for Simple Minds product and do a run of just 15000 copies, wait for it to sell out then do another run of 15000, let that sell out, etc. So much better, apparently, than having the album available in shops in adequate numbers when people were looking to buy it… The album itself is the sound of a band with more experience and touring under its collective belt, and accordingly their ambitions are a lot more in their reach now. I feel like “Twist/Run/Repulsion” was a hangover from RTRC that doesn’t work here (might not even have worked there), but so much of Empires is so good; I remain astonished that “I Travel” wasn’t the hit that it obviously should’ve been, and there’s just something implacable and ominous about the whole thing. Not perfect, but a kind of peak of the post-punk era nonetheless.

But once all was said and done, the band were so sick of Arista they nearly broke up just to be finally done with them; happily Virgin Records actually wanted Simple Minds on their books and bought them from Arista, and everyone was happy and Simple Minds went on to be the veritable pop stars they weren’t yet. Whereupon things did kind of start to melt down for them, but therein lies another story…