Simple Minds found the experience of recording their 1979 debut album Life In A Day in London a little daunting, the Scottish post-rock upstarts feeling a bit like fish out of water when they were sent to down to posh London studios from their native Glasgow. It was all a bit much, so Jim Kerr & co. decided to change tact when it came to making follow-up Real To Real Cacophony. For that album, they stayed away from the big city and headed into the Welsh countryside, setting up base at Rockfield Studios, a few miles from the market town of Monmouth. Here, they assumed, they could set up base and crack on without distraction. That was the idea anyway, because they didn’t bank on their studio being gatecrashed by two rock’n’roll icons one night, the future Don’t You (Forget About Me) stars completely unaware that Iggy Pop and David Bowie were working on the former’s latest solo record in the studio next door.
Allow founder members Kerr and Charlie Burchill to take up the tale, as they explained to Q’s Tom Doyle a few years ago:
