38. Simple Minds - Sons and Fascination (1981)

I confess. Simple Minds may be my favourite band of all time. Their album ‘New Gold Dream 81-82-83-84’ is the benchmark that all albums from the ‘New Pop’ era of 1981-85 are measured against. ‘New Gold Dream’ is the destination, the end of the rainbow, the alchemist’s dream, the moment where it all comes together. ‘Sons and Fascination’ is the journey.

Bowie is to blame. In the mid 1970’s, fleeing LA, cocaine, the occult and a diet of milk and Gitanes, David returned to ‘Europe’ (more precisely France, Switzerland and Berlin) to record without doubt the best work of his career. Back in Glasgow punk band Johnny and the Self Abusers listened to ‘Low’ and laid down their weapons. Europe was where their heart lay, modernists to a fault, embracing elements of punk but at the same time adoring the very same figureheads that punk was turning itself inside out to erase (Kerr was a big fan of ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ era Genesis’)

With the post-punk passport to pick and choose the tinsel and baubles from the 1970’s Christmas Tree, Simple Minds plundered with the eye of an assassin. Motorik rhythms of Can and Faust are blended with Kerr’s reflections from their first European Tour in 1980, a young Glaswegian thrust into a land of the Baader-Meinhof gang, Red Army Faction kidnappings and a sense of otherness that today is hard to comprehend in this era of cheap travel and globalisation, a sound crystallised on the album ‘Empires and Dance’. Kerr himself was endearingly honest in interviews at the time and in song; confusion in modern music has never been as wondrously expressed as in his lament on the opening track  ‘In Trance As Mission’  - ‘… just what is going on?

The album is much bulkier than ‘New Gold Dream', which skims across the listener like a pondskater. In contrast, ‘Sons and Fascination’ leaves huge footprints in snow layered streets in Dusseldorf. ’70 Cities as Love Brings the Fall’ booms out, chaotic and pristine at the same time, ‘Boys from Brazil’ is all latent energy. ‘Love Song’ rattles along like it was written yesterday and gives glimpses of a Kerr, tired of driving his band mates insane by playing Kraftwerk’s ‘Neon Lights’ on arriving in every new European destination, looking west as on later tracks ‘The American’ and ‘20th Century Promised Land’.

‘Empires and Dance’ is more brutal, ‘New Gold Dream’ fleeter of foot and perhaps the most perfect new pop ever made but ‘Sons and Fascination’ has a grandeur that is only equalled by the band’s sense of wonder at Old Europe and the New World.