Precious mettle
New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) [Box Set]
SIMPLE MINDS were never called ‘New Romantics’, but maybe that just goes to show how misapplied that label was. Duran Duran were the poster boys of the brand, yet even their best music was worldly, knowing. Simple Minds, by contrast, brimmed with big ‘R’ Romanticism – glimpses not of girls on film but glass cities, crystal worlds. Singer Jim Kerr, oversize trews tucked into kneeboots, peered into a fantasy Neo-Europe or imagined a gilded utopia. If you’d grown up in the schemes of Toryglen, Glasgow, maybe you would too. In May 1982, when work on their fifth studio album began, the Scots were fresh from what is now widely deemed their highwater mark, the Steve Hillage-produced trance-rock doppelthreat of Sons And Fascination/Sister Feelings Call, yet they had parted company with original drummer Brian McGee, wasted to a six-stone shadow by the tour-album-tour treadmill. For the next nine months the band appeared to sway with whomever occupied McGee’s stool: economical pop while Kenny Hyslop (ex-Slik, Skids) presided; abstruse art-funk in the Mike Ogletree interregnum; sturdy rock grooves as Mel Gaynor bedded in. All three feature on New Gold Dream, pulling the record between alternate futures. Appropriately, the album is about nothing so much as the idea of Promise. It was Hyslop who’d bequeathed them Promised You A Miracle, taping a catchy horn riff off a US black radio station that keyboard player Mick MacNeil transposed into its overfriendly synth refrain. In April 1982, five years since their inception, it was Simple Minds’ ticket to the UK Top 20, but it’s arguably the most dated 4:28 of the album, out of synch (along with the similarly breezy Glittering Prize) with what is otherwise the last of Simple Minds’ great trance albums, albeit one that sounds bright, warm and open where Sons… had felt urban, cold, nocturnal, a transformation reflected in Kerr’s familiarly fragmented lyrics: now inlaid with “golden times”, “golden nights”, “gold memories”. The title track shimmers in sympathy, something like a heat-haze, MacNeil and guitarist Charlie Burchill perfecting their tingling, textural mesh to the tick-tock of two drummers, Gaynor and Ogletree set up in tandem by producer Pete Walsh. Colours Fly And Catherine Wheel skews stranger, with Kerr’s Burroughsian scat to the fore and Derek Forbes’ rubbery bass – still the closest thing to a lead instrument – combining loucheness and peculiar momentum, two steps forward, one sideways, but still in that Brit-Kraut lineage. Among other things, Simple Minds would never sound this easy again. The fully instrumental Somebody Up There Likes You is Ogletree’s apogee, his light touch aiding the song’s ascent into the upper atmosphere, yet Big Sleep is very nearly as good, sat in a comfy Gaynor groove where Kerr, bathed in sonic afterglow, treats death as if it’s some kind of altered state. Even closing track King Is White And In The Crowd, a slight return to the more unsettling mantras of yore, is languid and benign next to, say, a Thirty Frames A Second or This Earth That You Walk Upon. Skill was supplemented by serendipity. While cutting Hunter And The Hunted at London’s Townhouse, Simple Minds’ live sound man, Frank Gallagher, asked if a friend could pop down: his friend was Herbie Hancock’s manager and the jazz keyboard legend joined him, ending up adding the serpentine synth solo that makes the track. Simple Minds weren’t embarrassed in such exalted company. Of the extra bits that justify any box set, a February 1982 John Peel session (never before on CD!) yields a take of King Is White And In The Crowd where you can hear the group feeling their way towards an exquisite unity. (Although they weren’t infallible: various versions of puny offcut In Every Heaven sound like an ’80s holiday TV show theme.) The quintet would head elsewhere after New Gold Dream, pursuing neither the organic flow of Hunter And The Hunted nor the frangible pop formula of Promised You A Miracle. Instead, it would be a new, all-chiming arena-rock route facilitated by Mel Gaynor’s iron biceps. Something was gained, yet something too was lost.