Author:Richard Houghton
This coffee table style book follows the same template as the recent volume on Free and Bad Company, printed on top quality paper with lots of photographs of rare memorabilia. It comprises mainly reminiscences from diehard loyal fans over the years, together with further contributions from former band members, their then manager and road crew. Simple Minds are a band that initially had quite an experimental sound on their first few albums before morphing into a more conventional U2 style stadium rock outfit at the height of their fame. For me, the early stuff still sounds great, songs like I Travel, The American and Love Song still holding their own today. The highpoint of my interest was the New Gold Dream album, a fantastic culmination of their work and influences to that date, and this was followed by the splendid Sparkle in the Rain, although this was also the album when they began to move away from electronica and towards the big arena filling sound they would perfect on the subsequent run of big selling albums. In doing that though, I feel they lost some of their best attributes, smothering the atmospheric intricacies and subtleties of their music with huge rock riffs, but I guess you can’t argue with success. In later years, the band have returned more to their original sound and although their recent albums didn’t receive too much coverage, they are certainly worth a listen – you may be pleasantly surprised! The book has been very well researched, and has been put together with obvious great care and meticulous attention to detail. Beautifully produced and lavishly presented, fans will definitely want to take a look at this comprehensive and lengthy volume, which gives a different and unusual perspective on the band’s rise to success from small Scottish clubs to the world’s stadiums.
Length of Read:Long
Might appeal to people who enjoyed…
The band’s music over the last forty years.
One thing you’ve learned
The band seem to have a great relationship with their core fanbase.
I have never met anyone with a coffee table full of books such as this.
Great review Bargepole, thanks so much for that.
A band I still hold in very high regard and also one of a few bands that have managed to keep my interest for most of my life (I’m 54), they’ve (I guess we have to say just Jim and Charlie), for me, produced consistently strong material, but New Gold Dreams still rates as one of my top 5 Albums of all time. Saw them for the first time on the NGD tour in 1982 at the Birmingham Odeon and saw them again in 2016 (review below)
Would agree with your analysis, except, for me, Sparkle in the Rain was not a good album at all. The show I saw on that tour remains arguably the most disappointing one I have ever seen. Saw them again in 2011 and that was a bit better, on that occasion I was mainly interested in the support act though, Manics.
New Gold Dream is one of those albums that still sounds good now. Sparkle in the Rain I really liked at the time but less so now. Up on the Catwalk is still ace though.
Again, I really liked Once Upon a Time when it was released but that’s the one that’s dated the most.
I thought Waterfront was good, even bought the single in advance of the album release
I really like 1998’s Néapolis, made after being dropped by Virgin with much of the NGD lineup (and Hammy from Furniture/Transglobal Underground). It sounds somewhere between Sister Feelings Call and NGD.
Two words: Derek Forbes.
Quite right @tiggerlion
He’s ace.
He’s also got his own band these days I believe, playing early Simple Minds.
Here’s something I posted back in 2015 starting a post entitled “When they lost it and why”.
Inspired by the recent Sparkle in the Rain thread, I thought I’d start a thread in which people can vent on the subject of when bands they liked completely and irretrievably lost “it”. For example you may feel Fisherman’s Blues was when the Waterboys crossed the line or, like my brother, the Cure smiling in the Lovecats video was the final straw. When Roddy met Knopfler is another watershed.
Over the years I have given more thought to exactly when Simple Minds lost it than any other band. They’re not my favourite band by any stretch and for years, like a poster on the other thread, I thought it was as simple as getting rid of the genius-of-bass Derek Forbes. I felt this was compounded by the pursuit of the American market through the awful likes of Don’t You Forget About Me and allowing producers/writers to influence their vision (Keith Forsey, I think…) Key to this was the inclusion of actual piano sounds as opposed to the wonderfully abstract keyboard sounds of their previous albums…
Anyway, having dwelt on this matter too long and too often, I have come up with the notion that it was on the track Up On the Catwalk at the precise moment that Jim mentions Nastassja Kinski, presumably in an understandable attempt to register on her radar, that Simple Minds lost it, for it never to return again. Until that point, they operated in the abstract – Theme for Great Cities was exactly that, not London Calling. Nothing they did really referred to the real world (ignoring Konstantinople and Chelsea Girl…okay) that the rest of us occupied and that was the appeal. As soon as a real life person was referenced, the bubble had burst…never to be unburst. I rest my case. Feel free to agree or disagree or share your own pet theory regarding the demise of a previously loved act…
I think it comes a little later in Ghostdancing. Lines like “You talk about South Africa – I tell you about the Irish children” . A strange song, referencing I Travel at the beginning and the clapping song at the end. And then the live performances of the time – stadium setting, white billowy shirts and crucifix poses and songs lasting 10 minutes.
It was the white billowy shirts that did it , definitely.
They had to be cajoled into recording Don’t You Forget About Me for the Breakfast Club soundtrack, the song already having been turned down by Bryan Ferry, hence it’s non inclusion on the next studio album. It broke them in America though.