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Baker's Dozen

Reel To Reel Cacophony: Jim Kerr Of Simple Minds' Favourite Albums
Mark Eglinton , November 4th, 2014 13:44

With their sixteenth LP Big Music just out, the Glaswegian new wave veterans' frontman gives Mark Eglinton a Baker's Dozen of his top 13 formative influences

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Talking Heads - Remain In Light
We'd been big Talking Heads fans from the very start, ever since we'd seen them at a great weekend in Glasgow in 1977. On a Saturday night at Strathclyde uni, Talking Heads opened for The Ramones and then on the Sunday night, Blondie opened up for Television at the Apollo. So, we managed to see arguably the whole of New York over one weekend in Glasgow. Eno had always been a favourite of ours and then when he started working with them on Fear Of Music, it seemed like he'd given them this other dimension completely.

We finished that Peter Gabriel tour in Lisbon and we were driving the whole way back fae Lisbon to Glasgow, stopping off at various places along the way obviously. I remember being stuck in a traffic jam on a Friday night on the outside of Paris and it was fuckin' relentless. I think we were listening to the radio to get traffic news when, out of nowhere, comes this, "And you may find yourself…" lyric. We only heard it once and then at the end there was: "Same as it ever was…". We just thought, wow, this is something. Then when the album came, that mixture of the African grooves and the poetry on those slower songs, wrapped up in the New York thing and Eno's still space age noises, made it quite something indeed.