Simple Minds found the experience of recording their 1979 debut album Life In A Day in London a little daunting, the Scottish post-rock upstarts feeling a bit like fish out of water when they were sent to down to posh London studios from their native Glasgow. It was all a bit much, so Jim Kerr & co. decided to change tact when it came to making follow-up Real To Real Cacophony. For that album, they stayed away from the big city and headed into the Welsh countryside, setting up base at Rockfield Studios, a few miles from the market town of Monmouth. Here, they assumed, they could set up base and crack on without distraction. That was the idea anyway, because they didn’t bank on their studio being gatecrashed by two rock’n’roll icons one night, the future Don’t You (Forget About Me) stars completely unaware that Iggy Pop and David Bowie were working on the former’s latest solo record in the studio next door.
Allow founder members Kerr and Charlie Burchill to take up the tale, as they explained to Q’s Tom Doyle a few years ago:
“Iggy came in looking for a bit of hash,” guitarist Burchill began, before frontman Kerr took up the thread.
“Bowie comes in wearing a black jumpsuit, holding a can of Heineken and a big bit of cheese. I think he had the munchies,” the singer said.
The pair stuck around until the early hours, Kerr continued, when they suddenly had the idea that Simple Minds should come and sing on a song they’d been working on for Pop’s new record.
“About two in the morning, they said, ‘Oh, we’ve been working on this song and we want everybody to come in and join in on the chorus’,” Kerr recalled. “It was a track called Play It Safe.”
“Especially in that weird, surreal Rockfield environment, it was off the scale,” Burchill stated.
Kerr elaborated on the strange experience to Billboard. “It was unimaginable to us that Iggy Pop would be in the Welsh countryside, where there’s nothing going on except sheep and hills,” he said. “We ran through the track a few times, and very diplomatically Bowie said, ‘Not bad, but why doesn’t everybody who doesn’t sing for a living take a few steps back from the microphone.’ Of course, that just left me sandwiched between Bowie and Pop at the microphone and we did it and I got a credit on the album and it was fantastic. A lot of stories grow arms and legs as they get old, but that one’s true.”
Listen to Play It Safe, which featured on Pop’s 1980 album Soldier, below:
