Siren guitar. Absolutely granite bassline and phosphorescent synth. Bring on the drums. ‘Overground / Underground,’ a voice sings with a hint of the unhinged. ‘Pulsating through / Street Parade / Day arcade / No cloning you.’
I’m back in Scotland just in time for Hogmanay and New Year and it’s time for some fun. On my return, one song keeps getting played every time I go out dancing, whether I head up the hill on Scott Street to Maestro’s or end up in some dive selling watered down lager, where blootered neds love to get their fists flying over any flimsy excuse. ‘Are you lookin’ at ma burd?’*
Already available on their second album Reel To Reel Cacophony, Changeling comes out as a single in the early days of the new decade. Simple Minds have a wide range of supporters from John Peel and NME to Smash Hits, who even reviewed the album twice, firstly giving it 8/10 before awarding it 9 1/2. ‘Strong melodies, vivid imagination, intensive atmosphere and the unique stamp of Jim Kerr’s dark genius.’
That January, I see Peter Capaldi’s band The Dreamboys at the Third Eye Centre. According to a pal I see them again supporting Dexy’s at Glasgow Tech although I can’t remember much about that show, due to an excessive day on the booze. If only the last but one Doctor Who could transport me back in his Tardis to refresh my memory. I see a number of bands in the Countdown and, best of all, I see Simple Minds at Tiffany’s.
Changeling somehow fails to chart but anybody who sees them live that night at Tiffany’s knows it is only a matter of time before they will emerge as bona fide stars and chart regulars. Here they were a couple of months earlier at Hurrah (which I always thought was Hurrah’s) in New York:
Music is changing at an amazingly speedy rate as the 1970s moves into the 1980s. A punk-tinged version of ska has been pioneered by The Specials, and something called rap has just started appearing in the British singles chart with acts like The Sugarhill Gang and Kurtis Blow although some speculate that that’s a novelty that will never last. Another big trend is the rise of the synthesizer.
Tubeway Army demonstrated six or so months earlier that electronic pop had the potential to provide huge hits but success like Numan’s is still a real rarity for the synth brigade at this point. The Human League have yet to commercially take off and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and John Foxx haven’t yet dented the charts. But again, it is only a matter of time before they will.
In Glasgow, it wasn’t only Simple Mind Mick MacNeil who embraced the synth. There was Modern Man, who released a couple of Midge Ure produced singles and an album later in 1980; there was Teutonic Veneer, who in between practising and playing likely listened to Trans-Europe Express on repeat and visited the Glasgow Film Theatre whenever a Fritz Lang movie appeared. Then there was The Berlin Blondes.
Orange Juice’s anti-macho image might not have endeared them to Glasgow’s more traditional rockers but with their lacquered hair, lippy, eyeliner, and perfectly contoured cheekbones, The Berlin Blondes made the Postcard boys look like a bunch of Possilpark brickies. And on the singles front they got out the starting blocks a fraction quicker. Snapped up by Britain’s biggest record company EMI, in January The Berlin Blondes released their debut 45 Science, a month before Falling and Laughing officially kicked off ‘The Sound of Young Scotland.’ I bet Alan Horne despised them.
The band did divide opinions. Some viewed them as bright young things with the vision to embrace the brave new world of the synthesizer and electronic pop music. Others judged them narcissistic poseurs and believed that Steve Bonomi’s highly mannered vocals made Gary Numan sound positively soulful.
Once signed, they decamped to London, where they recorded an album with Mike Thorne, a producer best known for his work on the first three long players by Wire.
By the time the album hit record shops, David Rudden had said ‘auf wiedersehen’, going off to help set up Endgames, while Jim Spender decided to try his luck elsewhere too, opting to join Altered Images and become Jim McKinven.
The album failed to sell in the quantities envisaged by EMI, who quickly dropped the Blondes. The band did recruit some new members and continued on but released only one more single, Marseille, on the Scratch label in the summer of 1981.
A crunching slice of futurism, in the early days of the 1980s, this was zeitgeisty as hell, with that glinting synth intro and those galloping basslines. Here is the track that kicks off the band’s self-titled album, their second single Framework:
*Glasgow, incidentally, has sometimes been compared to San Francisco. Obviously not for a famous flower power/peace ‘n’ love vibe but for the hilly terrain of both city centres. Glasgow even stood in briefly for the Californian city in Hollywood movie Cloud Atlas.
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