#18 Simple Minds - New Gold Dream ('81,'82,'83,'84)

 

Hindsight, as it's blatantly apparent, only comes to us with time. I still think all these years later that for a short while in 1982 Simple Minds were the greatest group in the world and New Gold Dream the greatest record. I'm not alone in this. No group that I can think of has fallen as fast and hard from grace as they did in a few short years. They themselves I think have come to realise it.

 

The album was one of my first musical loves and remains one of the most important ones.. It didn't lead me to anything else particularly like other records I've bought have but it was one of the most important ones in helping me to be myself. One of my first albums. I had a couple of Police ones, the Bugsy Malone soundtrack, some Muppets a compilation by T.Rex, and Time & Tide by Split Enz, possibly Teardrop Explodes Wilder (a great record) if my memory serves me correctly before buying this album. But this is the one. It opened up a world to me.

 

Brilliant days. Wake up on brilliant days. 

 

I wish I could put my arms round myself as a sixteen year old. That guy needed it. I was spotty and geeky and in need of direction. I'd like to think New Gold Dream gave me that direction. I don't know what prodded me to buy it but I do remember the effect it had on me.

 

 

 

I used to come home from school. Put this record on in the front living room in our house in Richmond. Lie down in the living room. Hold my parents' cheap Fidelity speakers to my ears. And listen to this. God knows how many times I did this. It's widescreen. It gave me some imagining of the great experience of life that lay before me. 

 

 

Simple Minds had a huge, glorious pre-history that led them to this album that I wasn't aware of. That was one thing I did track down afterwards. All those wonderful late seventies and early eighties imaginary soundtracks. Dreams of David Bowie, Kraftwerk and Iggy Pop, travel, films and Europe. I recommend them to you.

 

'What do you know about this world anyway?'

 

New Gold Dream was the first thing of theirs' that I knew. But it was clear they had a past. They hadn't chanced upon this huge, glorious sound by chance or first time round. It was something they had built towards over the course of their lifetimes. Dreamt their way to.

 

"Every band or artist with a history has an album that's their holy grail. I suppose New Gold Dream was ours. It was a special time because we were really beginning to break through with that record, both commercially and critically. The people that liked that record connected with it in a special way. There was a depth to it: it created its own mythology. It stood out. It was our most successful record to date and, critically, the Paul Morleys of this world were writing very nice things about it." Jim Kerr

 

 

 

Years of travel touring, books, films and meeting and playing for and with their heroes had brought them to this place. And dreaming. Never was a record more aptly named.

 

"We were speedy. Loved it. Driving to Rockfield with 20 grams. We didn't like sleeping. Or eating. That changed! There were two or three heady years, but it wasn't a dark time. It was an innocent, young thing."

 

Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill on The Tube in 1982. A revealing and in retrospect slightly sad interview given the descent in quality which came after this . It's also worth listening to interviewer Muriel Gray's intense tone. This stuff was considered important then.

 

Everything is quite unspecific on this album and all the more beautiful and realised for that. It's all about an undefined optimistic vision of life as a wonderful, expressible, emotional, transient yet at the same time an experience of eternity. Musically the whole record is stabs of sound. No instrument is dominant. Guitar, bass, vocals, keyboards and drums all meld together punching and counter-punching. Pistons, sparks and wheels. Electric noise forged into a gleaming, state of the art, sleek, post industrial machine speeding cross a European landscape into the future.

 

 

1982 must have been one of Top of the Pops greatest years. A whole troop of artists, dreamers and mavericks danced, preened, pranced and pouted across its dressing rooms and stages. Associates, Dexys, Simple Minds, Bunnymen, ABC, Soft Cell, Banshees, Aztec Camera, Japan, Orange Juice. There was a real sense that an alternative was being realised to the drab reality of daytime Radio 1 Smashey and Nicey ugliness.

 

Simple Minds were at the heart of it all. The cover of New Gold Dream heralds a new dawn just as the sleeves of contemporary albums Lexicon of Love, Sulk and Dare do. It all ties in with the emergence of Smash Hits as an alternative to earnest rock weeklies that leave ink on your hands and The Face's arrival as a style bible. The poseurs and chancers were skipping gaily down the main highway.

 

Belle.  Never turn your back. Great times attack. Inexpensive thrills

 

The album cover speaks of the records messianic, awestruck, mystic content. Flecked, imperial backdrop, medieval lettering, a cross. A heart inside a pulsing sun. On the back sleeve the group are pictured behind bars. All shadows and light. Earnest, knowing, posed. They're heavily mannered, made up, hair slicked back. Heirs to Bowie, Roxy, Neu and Kraftwerk. Kerr appears twice in the montage. Looking like a pixie visionary.

 

The music as Paul Morley suggested in his entranced NME review is almost alchemy. It's melting, molten music. It invites his pretentious review because it's so blindingly ambitious. It encourages either complete dismissal or to be praised to the heavens. It got both responses though usually at the time the latter. If it's been castigated the main criticism has been that it brings back the legacy of prog as if this in itself is sufficient to dismiss a great golden moment. An album that if you need to categorise it would be much better placed as a record poised between rock and pop music than as a prog rock album. A trick Simple Minds never managed before or since. Which is why it's their best record.

 

 

“Empires and Dance and Sons and Fascination were so crammed, the sound was so heavy, the way it feels before a storm breaks. When the storm is over, the air is clear and clean. That’s what New Gold Dream felt like,” Jim Kerr 

 

First track Someone, Somewhere in Summertime lays down the template and the rest of the album takes it from there. It's effortless and deft. I've always loved various moments and songs more than others but really the album is a whole which flows seamlessly from one moment to the next, one track to the next, one side to the next. There are nine songs in all. One of them an instrumental. None of them sounds a false note.

 

Belief is a beauty thing. Promises promises. As golden days break wondering

 

There are hit singles. There are hit singles from a parallel universe (I'd vote for Colours Fly and Catherine Wheel, Big Sleep and the track New Gold Dream itself as Top Ten singles on a planet I'd choose to inhabit). There's a guest appearance from Herbie Hancock on Hunter and the Hunted where his contribution takes them to another realm entirely.

 

 

 

The band tried out three drummers during the making of the album before settling on Mel Gaynor and the line up which would hit commercial and critical paydirt. There's more Moroder and ABBA  than Faust and Can, formative influences on their early records by now. There's also a definite shift musically  a real emphasis on melody and glow rather than the  jar and clatter which earlier records had engaged with.

 

 We were on the top and the world was spinning. We were only young in the whirlpool of warning.
Communication lost in the thundering rain style. A shelter from the storm in the early beginning
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

 

If I had to go to particular moments that represent New Gold Dream's greatness and illustrate just how it casts its spell I'd go first to Big Sleep. It takes me back to being sixteen and holding those small, cheap, plastic speakers to my head. It's mesmeric. Kerr is doing his mystic, dancing, weaving, chanting thing. Derek Forbes, Mick McNeill and Charlie Burchill and whoever the drummer is on this track are embroidering it with layer upon layer of beautiful melodic, hypnotic waves of sound which repeat and build until opening up to a whole level of intensity towards the end of the song. Like so often on the album the title and the lyrics are a hint towards where we're heading. Into a glorious, dreamlike eternal moment. It feels like an invitation back into childhood. Or else onto a children's crusade.

“I have the most beautiful memories of New Gold Dream. 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.” Jim Kerr

 

 

Then I'd go past the state of the art instrumental Somebody Up There Likes You to Side 2 and New Gold Dream itself. Everything comes together. It's pretty much a manifesto for the place they've come from find themselves and are sure they're going. The best description of it is as messianic, absolute, intense, self-belief. It's a bright,  ecstatic, glorious, cleansing noise. A relentless high-speed train a sleek automobile.

 

As always the lyrics are unspecific joy, optimism. Blind, passionate, ecstatic fervour. As I said they were the best band in the world at this point in time. For me U2 never in their whole careers despite all their plunder came within touching distance of the glorious intensity Simple Minds and the Echo & the Bunnymen in particular achieved and maintained through 1981 and 1982. Bunnymen with Heaven Up Here shaded 1981. 1982 belonged to Simple Minds.

 

'New Gold Dream. She's the one in front of me, the siren and the ecstasy. New Gold Dream
Crashing beats and fantasy, setting sun in front of me. New Gold Dream. And the world goes hot
And the cities take. And the beat goes crashing. All along the way.'

 

The second side of the album is nothing less than a process or realisation of dreams and ambitions. Glittering Prize, which comes next is one of my favourite ever singles. It's a statement following the success of Promised You a Miracle that they are a singles band. A national concern. No longer a cult for modernists with J.G.Ballard novels on their shelves, Fad Gadget in their record collections and sleek hair and wardrobes. Simple Minds at this point belonged on Top of the Pops and in Smash Hits as much if not more so than on The Old Grey Whistle Test and in the NME because theirs' was a pure pop product. Alien though they, and Kerr particularly must have seemed outlandishly strange to some (see the clip below), they were there because they deserved to be there.

 

'Like a Glittering Prize. I saw you up on a clear day. First taking hearts
Then our last breath away. Always came a time - time was on our side.
We were spending time - we were staring out. Catch me in a dream - Captured all in heart
We were spending time - we were staring out'

 

'And then when Herbie Hancock glides in to embellish the lovely Hunter And The Hunted, one doesn't sense a clumsy, irrelevant intrusion by a name pianist with a huge erratic musical background, just an apt, almost hidden contribution by one musician to the effort of other musicians. It's a fine moment, sealing the group's (radiant) simplicity, and claiming that the group can exist on any terms - no longer must they be locked into a strained art-pop closet.' Paul Morley

 

  

Morley is right for once. Not only in his opinion but the way he expresses it without for once tripping up over his own words, (just my belief, I like his tastes but his writing style can be deeply painful to plough through). Hunter & the Hunted does seal something. It takes the band onto another plane. Makes them players on the world stage. 'Kyoto in the snow. Heaven's far away.' It seems ever so slightly more melancholic than their other songs, slightly conscious that all the 'cruising at the speed of light' will be at some cost. More than the other songs here it seems aware of its own mortality.

 

Still, it's blinding.  None of their contemporaries, in a very great year for pop music, with the possible exception of The Associates in some songs on Sulk, created such shimmering sleek, luxuriant pop objects. This is Mick MacNeill's moment. The song glows and shimmers, like the most glorious, haziest, hottest day of a long summer.

 

'They were young - they were brave - they were the honest set. The greatest show on earth is here tonight love. See me as a figure in the late night plan. See me as I'm cocooned up in Badlands. The side effects of cruising at the speed of life. The side effects of living in temptation. When only one star is waiting up on all of us. You'll see me as I'm cocooned up in Badlands.'

 

King Is White and in the Crowd the album closer is an odd song in the context of the album. It seems like a throwback almost to the dark art of their early albums yet it's given a pop gloss to make it slot in here. More than any other song on the record it took me back to buy a lot of their back catalogue tracking down their origins and I've never regretted it. Everything with perhaps the exception of bits of their first album still stand up. They were a courageous, experimental band and they deserve a greater due than they're generally given.

 

Talking by the pool of light, language from America. She puts on the film of him, king is white and in the crowd. They are not a melting pot, say no, say no tapestry. She puts on the film of him, king is white and in the crowd.

Interesting that here there's mention of America where previously the focus has clearly been on Europe mainly. The band have truly gone widescreen here. Their horizons have broadened. They turned their attention to the States in the next few years. It was the greatest mistake they ever made artistically.

 

They shed members one by one, including crucially Derek Forbes their bassist, who had anchored their sound. They became leaden and flat-footed. Jim Kerr grew an awful, unforgivable mullet. The band became a poor man's U2 as has often been said when at their peak they dwarfed the Irish band artistically. They fell like Icarus from the sun. This doesn't lessen their early achievements for me in the slightest. They were pioneers in the truest sense. I still love this record very much. It was my first real personal discovery. As Kerr said it created its own very special mythology. It's a record that stands in its own space like very few others. It glows with artistry, genius, beauty, intelligence passion, and invention.