The Best Album You'll Buy This Week

Real to Real Cacophony was an abysmal failure for Simple Minds despite my best efforts. Four versions on vinyl, a cassette tape and two CDs have been bought, placed into my collection and, somehow, vanished without trace. While people were reluctant to get a copy themselves, many appear to have been happy to take mine.

It's 1980 in a wealthy provincial market town strewn with school kids in blazers prematurely approaching middle age. My parents decided that I was not to continue at school and would be shifted to somewhere with a paucity of ambition to match my own. Oddly, they insisted I continued to associate with my peers at the town's farm-based club. None of my friends were farmers, lived on farms or had any passing interest in agricultural machinery. We sat through riveting presentations on weather, sowing advances and warnings regarding the high incidence of farm-related maiming. We waited patiently for the opportunity not to be age-checked when buying pints afterwards.

It was here I lent my first copy of Real to Real to a mate. "It's phenomenal," I gushed, advertising my new found new town coolness in a crowd who had yet to move on from Pink Floyd. It was never returned.

Hot on the heels Life In A Day, with its singalongaworthy Chelsea Girl, Real to Real presented the listener with a collection of material you can still immerse yourself in. Well, depending on your streaming service. Apple Music still leaves it out of the Simple Minds collection.

Labelled "derivative" by lesser minds, the album opens with the echoing title track, hauntingly channelling the spirit of Eno's Roxy Music into the 1980s. For me, the album signalled the end of the experimental phase of electronic music - Ultravox's Ha!Ha!Ha! album and Numan's first Tubeway Army LP being cases in point. Maybe people were already ready for Underpass, Are Friends Electric and the like. Maybe this is the reason for its lack of traction at the time?

Track 2, Naked Eye, swirls. It's an explosion of discordance, a celebration of studio-based creativity as the band were forced to add to the four songs they entered Rockfield Studios with. Followed by the drama of Citizen, there's a post-apocalyptic feel to the tunes from a generation who had just lived through cold war warnings about ducking and covering.

"Shock effects of the avant-garde", wrote John Gill in Sounds.

Track listing for Real to Real Cacophony

In retrospect, you can see how Carnival gave an indication of the stadium rock the group would go on to write. But I'm a snob. I like these tunes more than anything they went on to release. I love that no one else loved Real to Real Cacophony.

In Factory, Kerr's voice resonates from the walls as they fuse noise, found objects and yet more echo. In Cacophony, the oppressive dark foreboding of the hook is interspersed by bells and silence. There is nothing derivative about this album, this a band hitting their creative stride. By Veldt, we have muffled vocals and a track Eno could have written for a soundtrack for a film about a tower in a jungle. But he didn't.

Enter Premonition, the B-side opening with a polished yet raw track fit to grace a larger stage. Kerr's singing moving on towards what will become his stadium Simple Minds voice.

It's 1981 and I'm working at a pleasure park that says it was "the place where fun was invented". I'm not so sure. This is middle England, we don't have fun in middle England, we exist. They pay such little money it feels like I'm handing over cash for the privilege of collecting tickets on their mini railway looping around the bottom end of the park. By replacement copy of Real to Real is in the branded record shop bag at the back of the train. The tunnel arrives as I'm collecting tickets from a young mother and her daughter. The tunnel smacks into my head, I collapse, blood and swear words all over their feet. I'm in the hospital getting stitches. I return to work. LP#2 has gone.

I picked up the cassette tape in a secondhand shop. That got stolen at a house party in Northampton. I bought a CD version in Southend which disappeared when we moved to South America. I bought and imported a CD to Colombia which was no longer in my CD cases when we returned to Britain. I've not had this problem with any other album.

Changeling is probably the most accessible track on the LP - and predictably my least favourite. The guitar sings out a treble hook that will become a very familiar noise. The song structure is pure early Simple Minds. We're just a year away from The American, Love Song, and Sons and Fascination after all, the point at which I begin to drift away from the band and their stage gets further away from the audience.

Track 10, Film Theme, is a perfect accompaniment to a zombie flick where the main protagonist has reached the end of the story, surveys the barren blood-soaked landscape and we all remember those who died along the way.

And then comes Calling Your Name. The absolute perfect fusion of experimental and electronic pop. Five minutes seven seconds of upbeat krautrock influenced floor filler in any self-respecting indie club of its time.

All good things have to end, be they a bag of chips, a successful cup run, or a jolly jaunt to Mount Doom. At times Real to Real challenges, at times it rewards, and the final track, Scar, pulls the curtains closed with a sigh.

It's 2026. Due to round the world romps, constantly moving, and the potential for small children to really mess up a record deck, I became a streaming person - the equivalent of fast food music. A smorgasbord of options, dipping in and out. The vinyl LP is a vector for music that forces you to sit and listen, I've really missed that. With a new hi-fi due to be delivered tomorrow, I looked at what to buy for my first new album in many years - I bought this one. In fact, due to early onset male confusion, I've bought two copies. Given the fate of my previous editions of Real to Real Cacophony, this was probably a wise move. I suggest you grab a copy too.

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