Real Life (Simple Minds album)

This was the first album without founding member keyboardist Mick MacNeil as he left the band to spend time with his family. Peter John-Vettese played keyboards on the album. The rest of the band included lead singer Jim Kerr, guitarist Charlie Burchill who also took up keyboards, and drummer Mel Gaynor. Bass was played by Malcolm Foster. Stephen Lipson, who had co-produced Street Fighting Years produced the album and also played some bass parts.

For the title track, the chord sequence was built up around a drum loop called the Bonham Loop Idea or Loop Idea - inspired by the rhythmic backing of When The Levee Breaks by Led Zeppelin. It was one of the later demos, first appearing in March 1990. The opening intro was one of the last flourishes added to the album. (The edited version of the song, which appears on the single, was how early versions of the album opened).

"See The Lights" was first composed in November-December 1989. It was formally recorded (on the 11th December 1989) and committed to a compilation tape of potential ideas. Unlike most of the ideas floating around at the time, the song had its final title and some working lyrics.

"Let There Be Love" first appeared during the writing sessions at Wisseloord between November and December 1989. The first demos were called Anthem. It was premiered by national radio in February 1991 and confirmed that the post-MacNeil Simple Minds had not lost any vital musical elements. The song was a slick continuation of the sounds from Street Fighting Years, complete with celtic-sounding melodic pipes, but with modern drums and rhythms. (Trills and synth swoops came courtesy of Steve Lipson which he borrowed from Grace Jones' "Slave To The Rhythm").

"Banging On The Door" was formally demoed during the second Real Life writing sessions at Wisseloord in March 1990. Six takes of a new live arrangement was recorded at Loch Earn/Bonny Wee Studios on the 1st May; and this formed the basis of the various mixes and session recordings which took place at the studio during the following months. The opening intro, indexed separately on most CDs, was taken straight from a demo called Dark Isle. The voice in the background was Jim, directing changes within the song. (During the early stages of songs when the arrangement wasn't finalised, he'd direct the course of the song, often suggesting "Charlie. Go to the chorus" or "Repeat the verse.") The intro was one of the last things to be added to the album. A cassette from Olympic Studios (dated 16/1/91) has a different track order, but the songs are all in their final form, with the exception of Banging On The Door, which had yet to gain this magical opener. The song was many of the highlights of the album and was played during the Real Life and Good News From The Next World Tours. After other performances during the catalogue-spanning Alive And Kicking Tour, it enjoyed a comeback in the mid 2010s, becoming a staple of the various tours at the end of the decade.

"Rivers of Ice" was inspired by Ian Maclachlan's Dr. Mackay's Farewell To Creagorry although it gained promenance when adapted by David Silver for the BBC thriller The Dark Island. The programme was so popular that Maclachlan's melody also became known as The Dark Island. It was well known to Mick MacNeil, whose grounding in the musical celtic roots of Scotland made him familiar with the track. In a prophetic piece by Rapido in 1989, documenting Simple Minds preparing for the Street Fighting Years at Loch Earn, Jim opened the studio door to find Mick and Charlie working on an acoustic version of the song, and the narrator even described it as "the new Simple Minds sound." Perhaps it was being considered for the acoustic interlude for the tour - but got nudged out by Gaelic Melody instead. Charlie picked up the baton during the Real Life sessions. Mick MacNeil may have left the band, but one of his remaining legacies was planting the seeds of this melody. The song was recorded as a demo at Olympic Studios in London as Dark Isle. Opening with a haunting swirl of Charlie's keyboards and Jim's ghostly studio directions ("Try this Charlie") the intro jumped into a bass heavy thudder, rising to crescendo after crescendo, with Charlie literally working up through the keys. It would've slotted in nicely on Sparkle In The Rain in this guise. Oddly, for an early demo, it also featured lyrics - which were avery close to the final recorded version. These gave the song its final title, and on some annotated cassette inlays, the title Dark Isle was crossed out and replaced by Rivers Of Ice. In the end, it was calmed down, the elements subtly redrawn and reworked, and it moved back to its original, gentler form. Session work took place at Loch Earn/Bonny Wee Studios from July through to December 1990, with final mixes at Olypmic in January 1990. The haunting intro from the demo actually survived, neatly snipped from its original placeholding, and added to the intro of Banging On The Door. That brief opening is a rare occurrence of a demo recording slipped onto a commercial Simple Minds record. It appeared during the Real Life tour as a gentle ballad, serving as a brief intro to Alive And Kicking. It was also later showcased (with a slightly different melody) during the Big Music tours where this time it served as the introduction to Dolphins and as a showcase for Catherine AD. It appeared in the same pairing for the quickly aborted 40 Years Of Hits Tour in 2020 and didn't reappear when the reorganised tour recommenced two years later.

"Let the Children Speak" is based on the 1981 Simple Minds instrumental "Theme for Great Cities" from Sister Feelings Call. A re-recorded version of that piece, called "Theme for Great Cities '91", appeared as a B-side of the "See the Lights" single.

"Travelling Man" bears some resemblance to the 1983 song "Waterfront" from Sparkle in the Rain.

"When Two Worlds Collide" is based on the title track "Real Life", as is the 1995 song "And the Band Played On", which subsequently appeared on the following album, Good News from the Next World. "Women and Ghosts" (included on the US edition of the 1995 single "Hypnotised") is a reworked instrumental version of the title track.

The album reached no. 2 in the UK,[8] and no. 74 in the United States. All four singles from the album were Top 40 hits in the UK, including the Top 10 hit "Let There Be Love". In the US, "See the Lights" reached the Top 40 and also reached no. 1 on the US Modern Rock Tracks chart.[9]

In America, the front and back covers were switched and the front was now the photo of the band on the white background. The US version of the cover is what has been used on reissues of the album.

Virgin Australia decided to create a Limited Collectors' Edition of the album by packaging the album with five live tracks.

Virgin reissued the CD as part of the Simple Minds remasters in late 2002 and early 2003. On the remastered version, a couple of differences are apparent when compared to the first edition: the 2002/2003 remaster features an extended mix of "Let There Be Love", not the one used on the first edition of the album, although it is not mentioned on the cover or in the booklet; the segues between tracks have also been re-edited, so that the running time of individual tracks may differ slightly between the editions; also, the CD version of the first edition had "Banging on the Door" split into two tracks in the disc's table of contents (running time was 1:16 + 4:22), but the music as such did not indicate any break between the parts. On the 2002/2003 reissue, the track is indexed as one.

The album received mostly negative reviews from critics. In Rolling Stone, Paul Evans said, "What might have been the band's most cohesive record misses, if only by frustrating inches."[10]

AllMusic's Alex Henderson opined, "Real Life isn't terrible, but play it next to any of [the band's previous three] albums, and you're reminded how much less inspired their writing had become by the early '90s."[11]

The general public received the album a lot more positively. Many songs off the record remain fan favorites to this day, and the title track is one of the band's signatures live.

• Simple Minds – Real Life at Discogs (list of releases)