Month: April 2023

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…

RIP Sandy Stone (for real at last)

Barry Humphries died. To be honest I don’t recall ever finding him that funny, and the progressiveness of his aesthetic tastes (he basically came from Dada) was somehow not matched by his politics… I see quite a few people on Twitter using his passing to fire shots in the culture war against trans people and “wokeness” etc, and given some of his later in life comments, he might even have been OK with that.

Water is wet again

According to Crikey:

I mean… obviously? The UK version of the Spectator has been publishing that crypto-Nazi Taki Theodoracopulos since the 1970s. Why wouldn’t the Australian branch of the rag do the same with the local equivalents? (NB: I kind of agree with those people who reckon terms like “fascist” and “Nazi” are thrown about too lightly these days, so I don’t use the term “crypto-Nazi” lightly myself. I just don’t know how else to describe a professional racist and antisemite who once wrote a piece about D-Day sympathising with the Wehrmacht.)

Off the beach

While browsing Tumblr recently, I sighted this somewhat curious variation of Neil’s once-elusive 1974 classic:

This cassette version reshuffles the running order considerably, for reasons I can only assume were about trying to make the running time of both sides nearer to each other (remember when that mattered with tapes?), otherwise I don’t see the point…

I actually just listened to it in this form to see how it works in practice, and, well, I’m not 100% sure. To be honest I’ve never been thrilled by the placement of “See the Sky About to Rain” as track 2, it feels a bit oddly situated there, but I don’t really know how else you’d redo it, cos side 2 is fine as it is on the original album. In this version, though, “Ambulance Blues” just doesn’t seem right to end side 1, and “Motion Pictures” similarly doesn’t seem like it should end the whole album… Maybe if you took this running order but flipped the two sides? Cos I read, too, that this was Neil’s original plan and so the cassette is actually nearer what he intended… but the version that ended up on the album feels (mostly) like the right one in a way that this cassette doesn’t. Or maybe it’s just familiarity that makes it feel that way. I don’t know. Must say I do like the cover font, though.

MyFuckwit needs to get off the crack (again)

Look, I don’t know if Mike Lindell is actually still a crackhead or not, but if he’s not he’s either using something else or he’s experiencing kind of amazing damage from the years when he did… Whatever the case, there’s a lot wrong with the guy, as his ongoing fellating of Donald Trump demonstrates, and the latter has come back to bite him in the arse. Mike has been particularly active in the whole “wah, the 2020 election was stolen from Glorious Leader” movement, to the extent of offering a $5m challenge to anyone who could disprove the data he offered to show Lord Dampnut was the real victor in 2020. And, well, someone did:

My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell has been ordered to shell out $5 million to an expert who debunked his data related to the 2020 election, according to a decision by the arbitration panel obtained by CNN.
Lindell, a purveyor of election conspiracies, vowed to award the multimillion-dollar sum to any cyber security expert who could disprove his data. An arbitration panel awarded Robert Zeidman, who has decades in software development experience, a $5 million payout on Wednesday after he sued Lindell over the sum.
CNN has obtained arbitration documents and video depositions, including a deposition of Lindell, related to the dispute.
“Based on the foregoing analysis, Mr. Zeidman performed under the contract,” the arbitration panel wrote in its decision. “He proved the data Lindell LLC provided, and represented reflected information from the November 2020 election, unequivocally did not reflect November 2020 election data. Failure to pay Mr. Zeidman the $5 million prized was a breach of the contract, entitling him to recover.”

“…Fuck.”

So Lindell refused to pay up, Zeidman sued him and won again, and now Lindell’s threatening another court case so he doesn’t have to pay up… the likelihood of Zeidman actually getting that money anyway is minimal, though, given that Lindell may not actually have $5m at hand; according to himself, he’s taken out twice as much as that in loans to stay afloat while battling various other lawsuits he’s facing over his election bullshit. Still, it’s a delightful spectacle… made even funnier by the fact that Robert Zeidman is a Trump voter. That detail just elevates the entire thing…

Elon goes off with a bang

Still not as bad as what he’s done to Twitter

Via. I suppose it may well be the first step on the journey to Mars, but it’s not exactly an auspicious first step, is it? Apparently they weren’t actually expecting a glowing success anyway, and the point of this test was as much about learning from anything that went wrong as anything else… at least, that’s their story and apparently they’re sticking to it, and in any case it looks like there’s plenty there for them to learn from. Hopefully they learn it before Elon’s planned private trip around the Moon (which was supposed to happen some time this year), cos you don’t want a spaceship containing a billionaire blowing up a few minutes into its flight. Or maybe you do.