Easy Minds discovered the expertise of recording their 1979 debut album Life In A Day in London a bit of 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 massive metropolis and headed into the Welsh countryside, establishing base at Rockfield Studios, just a few miles from the market city of Monmouth. Right here, they assumed, they might arrange base and crack on with out distraction. That was the concept anyway, as a result of they didn’t financial institution on their studio being gatecrashed by two rock’n’roll icons one night time, the longer term Don’t You (Overlook About Me) stars utterly unaware that Iggy Pop and David Bowie have been engaged on the previous’s newest solo report 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 just a few years in the past:
“Iggy got here in on the lookout for a little bit of hash,” guitarist Burchill started, earlier than frontman Kerr took up the thread.
“Bowie is available in sporting a black jumpsuit, holding a can of Heineken and a giant little bit of cheese. I believe he had the munchies,” the singer mentioned.
The pair caught round till the early hours, Kerr continued, once they immediately had the concept Easy Minds ought to come and sing on a track they’d been engaged on for Pop’s new report.
“About two within the morning, they mentioned, ‘Oh, we’ve been engaged on this track and we would like all people to come back in and take part on the refrain’,” Kerr recalled. “It was a observe referred to as Play It Secure.”
“Particularly in that bizarre, surreal Rockfield setting, it was off the size,” Burchill said.
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 happening besides sheep and hills,” he mentioned. “We ran by the observe just a few instances, and really diplomatically Bowie mentioned, ‘Not unhealthy, however why doesn’t all people who doesn’t sing for a residing take just a few steps again from the microphone.’ In fact, that simply left me sandwiched between Bowie and Pop on the microphone and we did it and I acquired a credit score on the album and it was unbelievable. Lots of tales develop legs and arms as they get outdated, however that one’s true.”
Hearken to Play It Secure, which featured on Pop’s 1980 album Soldier, beneath:
