Simple Minds: 10 of the best

1 Changeling

The sight and sound of Simple Minds at Live Aid – Jim Kerr’s shirt billowing as they abseiled to world domination on the back of 1985 smash Don’t You Forget About Me – is the epitome of so much about the 80s, from the cannon-fire drum sound to the singer’s desire to reach the fans at the back of the stadium. But few among the millions of mainstream record buyers and footie lads that punched the air to Simple Minds in their stadium pomp will have had any idea that the band were once a makeup-wearing, experimental, art-rock electronic group who made six tremendous pioneering albums, or that their stadium-conquering favourites once emerged from the ashes of a Glaswegian punk band called Johnny & the Self Abusers. In those days, school friends Kerr, guitarist Charlie Burchill and drummer Brian McGee further lumbered themselves with punk pseudonyms – Kerr was “Pripton Weird” and Burchill was “Charlie Argue” – and they managed to split up on the day they released their only single. Even when they hastily reassembled as Simple Minds, their first key musical development – the acquisition of a synthesiser – came about when Burchill saw keyboardist Mick MacNeil playing the futuristic instrument in a wedding band. Their 1979 debut album, Life in a Day, is not without its moments – the title track and excellent Chelsea Girl – but by the time they released Real to Real Cacophony a mere seven months later, a metamorphosis was under way.

As early as 1977, Kerr and Burchill had stood entranced in Glasgow clubs listening to the futuristic electronics of Donna Summer’s I Feel Love. Other early influences included David Bowie and Mott the Hoople, the Velvet Underground, Roxy Music and Brian Eno’s influential electronic albums. However, by the time they recorded Real to Real, Simple Minds had supported Magazine and Kerr had heard Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, and decided to attempt something similarly dark and powerful, but which was their own sound. Thus, the strange, austere form of disco of Changeling, one of several tracks that came out of long jams Kerr would tape before coming up with words. Burchill drives the song with post-punk guitar, but the sound also marks the emergence of the sizable imprint of Derek Forbes, a crucial member in Simple Minds’ early years, who was recently voted Scotland’s greatest ever bassist.. “I would be sent to another room to come up with a killer bass line,” he recalled recently, speaking of their creative process. “Changeling was one of those early eureka moments.”

2 I Travel

Manic Street Preachers’ James Dean Bradfield has been known to give copies of Simple Minds’ third album, Empires and Dance, out as presents, and the album was the key influence on the Manics’ recent acclaimed Futurology. This mesmeric 1980 single that opened the album is typical of the treasure trove of adventures and invention that led Bradfield to call the early Minds “crystalline gods … my church”. It’s another Forbes masterclass in post-punk, futuristic bass, a track inspired by Berlin clubland as the music and lyrics reflect the band’s experiences touring Europe. The Jim Kerr of I Travel is very much the Glaswegian abroad, stunned by the mix of decadence and poverty he finds among the ageing architecture of Europe’s postwar capitals – “Evacuees and refugees, presidents and monarchies” – and the creeping sense of cold war unease. “We were seeing the picture-postcard stuff, statues, parks and galleries – but bombs were going off,” he told the Quietus in 2012. “The Red Brigade had struck, or Baader-Meinhof, or one time when we were in Paris, a synagogue had been set fire to – there was danger in the air. We seemed to be in Berlin every week, going through the corridor from Hamburg, seeing all these Russian guards and feeling like these postwar kids. We were really finding our feet then, that it was our thing coming together. This is Simple Minds.”

3 This Fear of Gods

This glacial seven-minute epic from Empires and Dance is the epitome of the experimental Minds: it’s steeped in Kraftwerk and Neu!, but also sounds as if it could have been recorded yesterday. Forbes and McGee cook up a meaty, European groove – all marching armies and rumbling trains – which proves the chassis for a kaleidoscopic barrage of sound and noise: everything from Middle Eastern-sounding horns to what sounds like a baby crying. However, at around three minutes in, the song suddenly shifts gear into a cracking hook line: even at their most left-field, Simple Minds had a pop sensibility that would serve them very well.

4 Sweat in Bullet

Although by now the band were appreciated by the music press and alternative types who were into New Order and Talking Heads, Simple Minds now had a whiff of the top 40. They felt their label, Arista, didn’t understand them, so they decamped to Virgin, where they’d hear German experimentalists Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft blaring out of the office stereo rather than Barry Manilow. Sons and Fascination/Sister Feelings Call were the first results of the new partnership, two albums from the same sessions, which were initially released as a double/joint album, which reached No 11. The band were starting to weave their arty leanings into more recognisable – if not exactly conventional – verse-and-chorus structures. Years of incessant touring had given Forbes, Burchill and MacNeil a fearsome musical chemistry. Here, Kerr floats around the sound, jabbing his obtuse lyrics – “Air mobility, dress ability, tranquil / You’ll never meet again” – like an ethereal boxer.

5 Love Song

In 1981, when the band were ensconced in a flat in Edinburgh preparing new material, producer John Leckie apparently suggested that Kerr should move away from abstract imagery and just pen a simple love song. By the time they did that, for Sons and Fascination, the band had switched producer to Gong’s Steve Hillage, who shared their love of Krautrock, and they plunged further into pulsating electronic rock. Here, though, the band’s thick, juddering rhythms begin a transformation into something sleeker and more expansive, and while stadiums are still years away, Love Song still sounds so gigantic that few venues could hold it. Although the same sessions would produce the equally thrilling The American, Simple Minds never sounded more brutal, more insistent or more invincible.

6 Theme for Great Cities

The ghostly, authoritarian-sounding instrumental opener of Sister Feelings Call spawned one of the more unlikely Minds metamorphoses – as kings of Balearic beats – when DJs started remixing the song for use in their Ibiza sets. Kerr told the Quietus that opting not to sing on this shinier-sounding, distant relation of Bowie’s The Speed of Life was one of his shrewdest moves. As he explained: “I remember walking around with that in Glasgow on my new Sony Walkman thinking, this is fucking perfect.”

7 Someone Somewhere in Summertime

If the story of early Simple Minds is one of a gradual, heady ascent up a huge mountain, then 1982’s magnificent New Gold Dream (81/82/83/84), which spawned three singles and reached No 3, is the summit. By 1982, the bleakness of post-punk was giving way to an unlikely positivity, typified in Joy Division’s resurrection as New Order in the aftermath of Ian Curtis’s suicide. Perhaps, when things are particularly bleak, you search harder and grasp tighter to any rays of sunshine. This was the period of high unemployment, inner-city riots and the run-up to the Falklands war. Despair was everywhere, yet a prominent slogan of the period was “Fuck politics, let’s dance” and pop was suddenly exploding with colour. The Associates and the Human League brought symphonic and synthetic pop, respectively, and Paul Morley had started praising Dollar and Abba in NME. The buzz phrase was “new pop”.

That was the climate into which Simple Minds released the best album of their career, an album of almost supernatural-sounding positivity and ethereal wonderment. Kerr’s vocals are possibly his most masterly, bridging the great divide between the new romantic era and Sinatra-like crooners. “I have the most beautiful memories of New Gold Dream,” he recalled recently. “It was made in a time between spring and summer, and everything we tried worked. There were no arguments. We were in love with what we were doing, playing it, listening to it. You don’t get many periods in your life when it all goes your way.” Album opener Someone Somewhere in Summertime is typical of that feeling of approaching warmth and joy. Brian McGee had left and new drummer Mel Gaynor brings a firm yet stilldelicate spine, as the Minds’ new sound crashes in like golden sunbeams, completing a sublime volte face from their early asceticism.

8 Big Sleep

We’re atop that mountain now: the atmosphere is hushed, still, airy. MacNeil’s keyboards and Burchill’s guitars have never sounded so weightless and beautiful, and Forbes brings the most delicate funk imaginable. With a title perhaps referencing the Raymond Chandler novel, New Gold Dream’s fourth song finds Kerr, just 22, pondering the bigger issues. Ostensibly, Big Sleep finds him wondering where we all go – when we sleep, when we die. However, the elemental imagery seems to contain an inherent recognition that all triumphs, however great, are only fleeting. Indeed, at the very moment that they stand atop that mountain, the band are perhaps penning their own requiem for their mercurial youth: “We were on the top and the world was spinning / We were only young in the whirlpool of warning … Going out in the Big Sleep, out in the Big Sleep / Could have been years, you know it could have been years / Or only seconds ago.”

9 King Is White and in the Crowd

As late as 1982, Simple Minds were still primarily a hipster’s band – evinced by the superb version of this track that appeared on the underground cassette-zine Touch, and brilliantly swapped Kerr’s lyrics for cut-up snatches of an interview with him. In a way, though, the track that ends New Gold Dream also starts to close the door on this wonderful period of the band’s history. Kerr’s lyrics are among his most surreal: “Shot from where the action is, a rhapsody in black and blue / She puts on the film of him, king is white and in the crowd / Love lies under western eyes, powerful yet transient / She puts on the film of him, king is white and in the crowd.”

The lyrics were inspired by a TV broadcast of the assassination of the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, the singer later explaining: “There was a thing of beauty in that tragedy. Sadat was inspecting a parade, some soldiers walk past and suddenly they shoot him like an animal. And the next thing you saw was a close-up of his wife. I’d always been interested in the idea of the outsider. And you can’t get more of the outsider than the assassin.” This marked the pinnacle of the collision between what Kerr saw as the dark and shining hearts of Simple Minds: after this, everything would change.

10 Waterfront

A controversial inclusion to some, perhaps, but no 10 of the best from the Derek Forbes era of Simple Minds would be complete without his most famous moment – Waterfront’s solitary bass note, repeated over and over. Years later, Kerr recalled the moment the bassist came up with it. “It just sounded amazing, it felt amazing, it felt built for big venues, it actually felt like a steamship or something, it really had this size to it.” Simple Minds’ first stadium-sized anthem, from Sparkle in the Rain, also forever took a piece of Glasgow with it in Kerr’s lyrics about unemployment and the decline of the shipyards. Forbes would be sacked over his womanising in 1985 – and MacNeil left in 1989 – but if there’s a bridge between “old” Simple Minds of the stellar early albums and the guitar-crashing stadium rock bluster that would follow, the big music of Waterfront makes a perfect swansong.

A five-CD reissue of Sparkle in the Rain (with a live concert and rarities) is out now on Universal.