‘A Mitteleuropean psychodrama’ … listen to I Travel, the opening track on Empires and Dance.Īs Simple Minds travelled by road from Hamburg to Berlin, barely 24 hours after arriving on the continent, they witnessed megatonnage of military hardware passing on the other side of the autobahn, a seemingly endless line of tanks, trucks and missile launchers, dozens of helicopters tracking them above. Then you go back home and it obviously starts to bleed through.” It felt natural … We’d be listening to Grace Jones or something funky in a German nightclub and thinking: I really like that. “Doing a lot of smoke, meeting a lot of women, thoroughly enjoying what age we were, on tour. “We were bedding into the culture, because we were clubbing it every night and having a brilliant time,” says the former keyboardist Mick MacNeil. Reading Albert Camus and Mikhail Bulgakov by day, by night, crucially, they were listening to Chic, Kraftwerk, Donna Summer, Michael Rother and Grace Jones in the clubs. Kerr borrowed The Master and Margarita, which made a deep impression. We were young men travelling through classical Europe, reading Camus, and it was all feeding the machine.” Burchill toured with a case filled with novels, which were passed around. Kerr calls Empires and Dance “a travelogue with spiky dance music. I started to write sort of as a character moving through all of that.” All the stuff that, sitting here, you read about in the newspapers, it was in the air, it was around. When we got to Italy, it was the Red Brigade. In Germany, it was the Baader-Meinhof gang. I remember being in Paris and a synagogue was set on fire just down the road from where we were. “We’d get to places with all these famous names we knew from history – bad history. “We did grow up in the shadow of all of that,” he says. Europe was the future, the way forward.”Īt home, Kerr has a framed and mounted black-and-white photograph of the band in 1980, shot at the Berlin Wall. The Beatles, rock’n’roll, American country, Johnny Cash – forget all that. “That European tour was a big thing,” says John Leckie, the producer of Empires and Dance. Europe made a deeper and more sustained impression. Seventy-two hours in New York had felt like a fever dream, vivid but barely real. Unwavering, uncompromising, steely, committed, it is powered by a fearsome cohesion of intent not a single crack breaches a shared sense of purpose.įor their previous album, 1979’s exquisite and bewildering Real to Real Cacophony, Simple Minds played outside the UK for the first time. It strips a continent down to bare lightbulbs and hard wiring, the pomp and pretence of classical culture raised up only to be kicked in. Sustaining an overpowering and unrelenting mood, music, voice and words perfectly in lockstep, Empires and Dance is a Mitteleuropean psychodrama. Go into your brain and see what’s there.” It’s a nuclear reactor of musical orchestration from five working-class Glasgow boys – it’s fucking brilliant.” He says Empires and Dance taught him that “you don’t have to be like a bad actor, asking: ‘What is my motivation?’ You can just let the music come through you … It taught me to look a bit farther beyond and not to be worried of pretension, either. “It was almost like learning a new language. “Empires and Dance was massive for me,” says the Manic Street Preachers frontman James Dean Bradfield.
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