“Real to Real” by Simple Minds

"Real to Real" shares its name with Real to Real Cacophony, the second Simple Minds album, released on November 23, 1979 through Zoom and Arista. Producer John Leckie remembered the Scottish band showing up at Rockfield Studios with only four songs ready, and this wasn't one of them: it was written on the spot, during a five-week stay that took in the mixing too. Leckie produced and mixed it and shares the arranging credit with the band; the music is credited to Simple Minds, the words to Jim Kerr.

The album was a hard swerve away from Life in a Day, the debut from earlier that year that had left them dissatisfied, toward something stranger that fed off the studio itself and the repetitive motorik pulse of German bands like Neu!, Kraftwerk and La Düsseldorf. The charts shrugged: neither the album nor its only single, "Changeling", made them.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz.