Simple Minds - Sons and Fascination

    Simple Minds – Sons and Fascination / Sister Feelings Call

    22 Feb

    By

    Label: Virgin
    Format: 2 x LP
    Country: UK
    Released: 1981
    Genre: Rock, Pop
    Style: New Wave, Post Punk, Art Rock
    Producer: Steve Hillage

    “Their early work is better than the later stuff”

    How many times have you heard that about an artist or a band. Often its related to the departure of an original thinker or creative force. The work of Simple Minds out of bonny Scotland has gone global and continues to fill huge stadiums. Lead singer Jim Kerr, guitarist Charlie Burchill and drummer Mel Gaynor still power the band today. Whilst I will still make tracks to hear them live, the football stadium sized venues are not built for sonics and ended up with Kerr singing anthemic work in a more loud rock style than his earlier more poetic almost “Sprechgesang” spoken style. The tipping point in this morphing was in my opinion the Sparkle in the Rain album from 1984. Still a great album but not that special early sound. Many of you might recall the preceding New Gold Dream album which was chock full of hits and a soundtrack to many youthful pursuits.

    But hark back to their earliest works will reward a listener with timeless music inspired by the Krautrock pioneers who influenced a young Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill. Keen ears will appreciate Michael MacNeil’s keyboards in what was originally a synth band. The bass playing from Derek Forbes combined to create a new wave of sound that resonated in listening rooms and dance clubs of the 1980’s. Brian McGee was on the drums for the early work.

    Sons and Fascination/Sister Feelings Call is the (double-LP) fourth album by Scottish post-punk band Simple Minds. It was released in September 1981 and was their first to reach a wide international audience. It includes the singles “The American”, “Love Song” and “Sweat in Bullet”.

    Sons and Fascination and Sister Feelings Call were two separate albums. They were assembled from the same sessions and released at the same time and, in some instances, sold as a double-LP set. The two releases are variously categorized as a double album, two single albums or a single album and an extended play.

    Having ended their contract with Arista the sessions were the first recordings the band made for Virgin Records. They worked with producer Steve Hillage, who was a guitarist in the progressive rock band Gong. One thing Hillage and Simple Minds had in common was a love of Krautrock music.

    The rhythm section was made more prominent than on any earlier album of the band, loud, heavy and sometimes anchoring a track to one or two driving rhythm patterns, but also often put at moving angles with some of the other instruments or with Kerr’s vocals (as in “The American” or “Sweat in Bullet”); this gave the songs a spatial, multi-planed and atmospheric sound, whilst keeping up propulsion.

    Since 1981, the album has been certified gold by the British Phonographic Industry.

    In The Essential Rock Discography (2006), Martin C. Strong rated Sons and Fascination/Sister Feelings Call highly and wrote: “Simple Minds were beginning to find their niche, incorporating their artier tendencies into more conventional and melodic song structures.” The album’s legacy was further strengthened in retrospective critic listings; a 2007 issue of Mojo magazine listed Sons and Fascination/Sister Feelings Call as one of the 80 greatest albums of the 1980s, while The Guardian newspaper selected the record as one of the “1000 Albums to Hear Before You Die”, writing, “Before they descended into epic pomp-rock bluster, Simple Minds were purveyors of supremely romantic, slyly futuristic synth pop. Sons and Fascination found them cannily mining a seam of mesmerizing, shimmering art-rock, while tracks like ‘Love Song’ were so gorgeously lustrous that you could even forgive them their future.”

    Michael MacNeil keyboards are for me a critical part of early Simple Minds sound. With the driving bass of Derek Forbes they combined to form a backing that was like Sly and Robbie on Simply Red albums. Take them away and the band ain’t the same. Live Mick MacNeil would improvise melody and arpeggios and Forbes would lay down a fundamental trance like groove. To see them in this heyday period was something you can never forget or regret. Fashion choices were driven by this music and yes we thought we were a pretty cool “tribe”.

    Track the “The American” is so right, so totally underground with a sublime bass line and the guitar solos highlighting how good Burchill is on guitar and that single pounding snare drum. Nowadays when played live the crowd erupts in a unified stadium wide chant in tune “Ameri, Ameri, Ameri Amereee, Aamerakan”.

    How listenable is this album in 2020?

    It’s still relevant and the revisit brings back fond memories of simple times for simple minds (no mortgage, no fees, cars that you could service yourself, airplanes that had a staircase out the back, when fast food took 20 minutes to cook, fax machines were used to speed up communications, mobile phones were the size of a shoebox, Maverick wasn’t a Goose, A Personal Computer was $10,000, CD Players were a Sony CDP-101 away, Rubik was a cube, Betamax was belting it out with VHS and Jane Fonda kicked off an industry.

    Take a trip back to the future with Simple Minds on Sons and Fascination – Good times!

    Instrumental tracks are blended in with vocal tracks.

    Track listing

    Sons and Fascination

    Side A

    1. “In Trance as Mission” 6:50
    2. “Sweat in Bullet” 4:30
    3. “70 Cities as Love Brings the Fall” 4:48
    4. “Boys From Brazil” 5:30

    Side B

    1. “Love Song” 5:03
    2. “This Earth That You Walk Upon” 5:26
    3. “Sons and Fascination” 5:23
    4. “Seeing out the Angel” 6:11

    Sister Feelings Call

    Side A

    1. “Theme for Great Cities” 5:50
    2. “The American” 3:49
    3. “20th Century Promised Land” 4:53

    Side B

    1. “Wonderful in Young Life” 5:20
    2. “League of Nations” 4:55
    3. “Careful in Career” 5:08
    4. “Sound in 70 Cities” (Dub mix of “70 Cities as Love Brings the Fall”) 5:01

    Personnel

    Jim Kerr – voice
    Charlie Burchill – guitars
    Mick MacNeil – keyboards
    Derek Forbes – basses
    Brian McGee – drums
    Additional personnel Ken Lockie, Jaqui

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