Mainstream Notebooks

Compiled from original posts January 4th 2021 - June 5th 2021 with additional comments and editing March 4th 2025

Mar 04, 2025

∙ Paid

High And Low Hopes

February 13th, 2021 and March 4th 2025

This is going to take a while.

Mainstream's identity didn't really solidify until about half way through the recording. There were many rejected ideas, some of them complete songs, some unfinished. Some of them subsequently morphed into songs on the album, many didn't.

There are notes citing My Bag and Hey Rusty as song ideas in the Easy Pieces notebooks.

I Hate To See You, Baby, Doing That Stuff was a rejected idea. I have no recollection of that!

Work on Mr Malcontent began in December 1985, right after the Easy Pieces European tour, in my bedsit/songwriting studio in Glasgow. Mainstream (the song) and These Days were written in our Highbury Hill (London) flat on my new Apple Macintosh home computer less than a year later.

We were also between ages. The analogue age was coming to an end. The digital was beginning. When Bruce Lampcov remixed Forest Fire for our best of album, I was sent the mix on a DAT tape. It was fantastically strange - there was no hiss.

Anyhow, there are 10 songs on Mainstream, plus the 3 recorded after Blair left, and there are several rejects which will need to be included to make this thing make sense. Wish me luck.

Addendum 2025 - In retrospect, it's easy to see how we were lost. Looking back at the Easy Pieces notebooks, I think it’s fair to conclude that I put everything I had into that record. I had almost nothing left in the aftermath. I was exhausted. But we were more successful than ever and there was demand for more. And, amazingly, I got right back to writing on the American tour (Poons, Old Hats). But what seems obvious today, is I didn’t know who I was writing for. I know, now, that I’m never much use if I don’t have an end product in mind. We didn’t know what band we wanted to be. That was the problem. Utimately we decided on the one thing we weren’t really very good at. I suppose you’d call Mainstream ‘arena rock/pop’. But we weren’t quite an area band. U2 and Simple Minds were. We were closer to The Go Betweens, when we played to our strengths, I think.

You Win

January 4th, 2021

I'm not going to research and publish the history of songs we didn't ultimately release, but here's a couple of lyric sheets for one we briefly had high hopes for.

Everyone's Complaining

March 6th, 2021

Here's a song like Jesus Said. Arguably good enough to be on Easy Pieces or Mainstream, had the albums gone in slightly different directions, but they didn't and it was lost.

Which is a shame. There's a lot I like about this song.

After Easy Pieces the first songs completed were Mr Malcontent, Old Hats and Everyone's Complaining. We performed the first two at Glastonbury, and the stadium shows we played with Simple Minds, then we went into the studio in Paris, with Chris Thomas, recording Mr Malcontent and this song.

One notebook page is revealing. At the time I was working on this I had prioritized 29, You've Got All The Answers, Poons, Girl on Your Arm (Jennifer), Genevieve, and Gone Fishing (Old Wants Never Gets). Only 29 and Jennifer made it to the album.