Easy Minds discovered the expertise of recording their 1979 debut album Life In A Day in London slightly daunting, the Scottish post-rock upstarts feeling a bit like fish out of water once they have been despatched to all the way down to posh London studios from their native Glasgow. It was all a bit a lot, so Jim Kerr & co. determined to vary tact when it got here to creating follow-up Actual To Actual Cacophony. For that album, they stayed away from the large metropolis and headed into the Welsh countryside, establishing base at Rockfield Studios, a number of miles from the market city of Monmouth. Right here, they assumed, they may arrange base and crack on with out distraction. That was the thought anyway, as a result of they didn’t financial institution on their studio being gatecrashed by two rock’n’roll icons one evening, the longer term Don’t You (Neglect About Me) stars fully unaware that Iggy Pop and David Bowie have been engaged on the previous’s newest solo document within the studio subsequent door.
Enable founder members Kerr and Charlie Burchill to take up the story, as they defined to Q’s Tom Doyle a number of years in the past:
“Iggy got here in in search of a little bit of hash,” guitarist Burchill started, earlier than frontman Kerr took up the thread.
“Bowie is available in carrying a black jumpsuit, holding a can of Heineken and a giant little bit of cheese. I believe he had the munchies,” the singer stated.
The pair caught round till the early hours, Kerr continued, once they abruptly had the concept that Easy Minds ought to come and sing on a track they’d been engaged on for Pop’s new document.
“About two within the morning, they stated, ‘Oh, we’ve been engaged on this track and we wish all people to return in and take part on the refrain’,” Kerr recalled. “It was a monitor referred to as Play It Secure.”
“Particularly in that bizarre, surreal Rockfield surroundings, it was off the dimensions,” Burchill acknowledged.
Kerr elaborated on the unusual expertise to Billboard. “It was unimaginable to us that Iggy Pop could be within the Welsh countryside, the place there’s nothing occurring besides sheep and hills,” he stated. “We ran by means of the monitor a number of instances, and really diplomatically Bowie stated, ‘Not unhealthy, however why doesn’t all people who doesn’t sing for a residing take a number of steps again from the microphone.’ After all, that simply left me sandwiched between Bowie and Pop on the microphone and we did it and I bought a credit score on the album and it was improbable. A number of tales develop legs and arms as they get previous, however that one’s true.”
Hearken to Play It Secure, which featured on Pop’s 1980 album Soldier, under:
