super groovy delicious bite: life in a day

Simple Minds walked a crooked mile and looked deep inside to create this pleasantly disturbed post punk prelude. As the first wave of punk hit Glasgow, childhood friends Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill got hooked up with local scenemaker Alan Cairnduff and his friend John Milarky, who were forming a band called Johnny & The Self-Abusers. Kerr and Burchill brought their schoolmates Brian McGee and Tony Donald and Milarky recruited his buddy Alan McNeil and they all adopted punk pseudonyms: Milarky as "Johnnie Plague", Kerr as "Pripton Weird", McNeil as "Sid Syphilis" and Burchill as "Charlie Argue". The band got signed to indie label Chiswick and released one single "Saints and Sinners" / "Dead Vandals" before breaking up (on the day it was released) over tensions between the different factions in the group. Milarky and McNeil left to start The Cuban Heels, while the remaining quartet changed their name to Simple Minds, taking the name from a line in Bowie's "Gene Genie".

Duncan Barnwell and Mick MacNeil joined the group and their new manager Bruce Findlay used his connections and their new demo tape to get them signed to Arista Records. Donald quit and was replaced by Barnwell's friend Derek Forbes took his place before Barnwell himself was ousted. The band became a local favorite. Kerr remembers: “There'd been a couple of riots at punk gigs in Glasgow, by The Stranglers and so the city fathers banned visiting punk bands. Well, we weren't visiting. So we were OK to play. And for two months, which then seemed like an eternity, there was a starvation of punk in Glasgow. So when we played, they were queuing round the block! There were Aberdeen punks, Dundee punks fighting Stirling punks – and it was horrendous, people jumping up and down, and me and Charlie looked at each other and said, “Wouldn't it be great to do this for real?...By this point, too, sequencers became cheap. Punk bands could get hold of them. Up until then they took up half a room. Later, Charlie discovered this guy who played in a crap wedding band with a synthesizer, a sequencer. He was an accordion player, originally, would you believe, did weddings, got interested in the sequencer, only listened to top 30 stuff. This was Michael McNeil. We brought him in, gave him all this Krautrock stuff... That was a very fortunate move.”

The working title was Children Of The Game. Their first two choices of John Cale and John Anthony for producer were rejected by Arista, who agreed to their third choice John Leckie. 'Life in a Day' was "recorded at a very low temperature" on the grounds of Farmyard Studios in Amersham, in the Rolling Stones Mobile unit. Final mixing was done at Townhouse and Abbey Road studios. The album features Jim Kerr on vocals; Charles Burchill on guitar, violin, and vocals; Derek Forbes on bass and vocals; Brian McGee on drums, percussion, and vocals; and Michael MacNeil on keyboards and vocals.