Street Fighting Years

Street Fighting Years is the eighth studio album by Scottish rock band Simple Minds, released in May 1989 by record label Virgin Records worldwide apart from the US, where it was released by A&M. Produced by Trevor Horn and Stephen Lipson, the album reached the top of the UK Albums Chart. Background Produced by Trevor Horn and Stephen Lipson, it was a major stylistic departure from the previous album, 1985's Once Upon a Time. While still maintaining the epic arena rock sense of scale and drama which the band had developed since the mid-1980s, Street Fighting Years also moved away from the American soul and gospel influences of its predecessor in favour of soundtrack atmospherics and a new incorporation of acoustic and Celtic/folk music-related ingredients including fretless bass, slide guitar and accordion. The lyrics built on the more political themes which the band had introduced with "Ghost Dancing", moving away from the impressionistic or spiritual concerns of earlier 1980s Simple Minds songs and covering topics including the Poll Tax, the Soweto townships, the Berlin Wall and the stationing of nuclear submarines on the Scottish coast. Recording The music and themes on Street Fighting Years emerged as a reaction to Simple Minds' accession to the role of stadium rock band after years of effort. Kerr would later reflect "we’d had success beyond our belief and we were just on the verge of getting bored with our own thing. I don’t think we quite knew that, and we certainly didn’t talk about it, and it’s inevitable after ten years that it happened." After many years of lyrics which were intellectual, impressionistic or emotional in nature, Kerr had also decided that it was time to start writing about the outside world and directly political subjects, rather than his own emotional landscape (partially due to his ongoing divorce). "The last thing I wanted to write about was myself. I didn’t want to sit licking my own wounds... The word ‘activists’ might be pushing it, but we were from that background. It was inevitable the strains of that would come out in our music."