Real Life (Simple Minds album)

This was the first album without founding member keyboardist Mick MacNeil as he left the band to spend time with his family. Peter-John Vettese played keyboards on the album. The rest of the band included lead singer Jim Kerr, guitarist Charlie Burchill who also took up keyboards, and drummer Mel Gaynor. Bass was played by Malcolm Foster. Stephen Lipson, who had co-produced Street Fighting Years produced the album and also played some bass parts.^[8] "Let the Children Speak" is based on the 1981 Simple Minds instrumental "Theme for Great Cities" from Sister Feelings Call. A re-recorded version of that piece, called "Theme for Great Cities '91", appeared as a B-side of the "See the Lights" single. "Travelling Man" bears some resemblance to the 1983 song "Waterfront" from Sparkle in the Rain.

"Rivers of Ice" is based on "Dr. Mackay's Farewell to Creagorry", an instrumental written by accordionist Iain MacLachlan in 1958. It became famous after being adapted for the 1962 BBC thriller The Dark Island.^[9][10] "When Two Worlds Collide" is based on the title track "Real Life", as is the 1995 song "And the Band Played On", which subsequently appeared on the following album, Good News from the Next World. "Women and Ghosts" (included on the US edition of the 1995 single "Hypnotised") is a reworked instrumental version of the title track.

The album reached no. 2 in the UK,^[11] and no. 74 in the United States. All four singles from the album were Top 40 hits in the UK, including the Top 10 hit "Let There Be Love". In the US, "See the Lights" reached the Top 40 and also reached no. 1 on the US Modern Rock Tracks chart.^[12] In America, the front and back covers were switched and the front was now the photo of the band on the white background. The US version of the cover is what has been used on reissues of the album.

Virgin reissued the CD as part of the Simple Minds remasters in late 2002 and early 2003. On the remastered version, a couple of differences are apparent when compared to the first edition: the 2002/2003 remaster features an extended mix of "Let There Be Love", not the one used on the first edition of the album, although it is not mentioned on the cover or in the booklet; the segues between tracks have also been re-edited, so that the running time of individual tracks may differ slightly between the editions; also, the CD version of the first edition had "Banging on the Door" split into two tracks in the disc's table of contents (running time was 1:16 + 4:22), but the music as such did not indicate any break between the parts. On the 2002/2003 reissue, the track is indexed as one.

The Australian edition included a bonus CD with 5 live tracks titled Live At Barrowland. However, two of the tracks were recorded at Universal Amphitheatre, Los Angeles, USA with the remaining three songs taken from the concert at Barrowland, Glasgow, UK.^[13]

The album received mostly negative reviews from critics. In Rolling Stone, Paul Evans said: "What might have been the band's most cohesive record misses, if only by frustrating inches."^[14]

AllMusic's Alex Henderson opined: "Real Life isn't terrible, but play it next to any of [the band's previous three] albums, and you're reminded how much less inspired their writing had become by the early '90s."^[15]