Simple Minds - New Gold Dream Reviews

The Simple Minds review is done. Still love the album which doesn't surprise me in the least. It's a great record. So to mark it here are a few reviews. One the famous Paul Morley review for The NME at the time. It's typical Morley. He needs a good shake at various points, (what has it got to do with Baudelaire, make some effort to explain at least). He writes well at others but as with much of his prose is far too much about himself for my liking. The second,.written by David Stubbs looking back twenty years is much better in my eyes. Then there's Robert Christgau's ludicrous take. Foolish man!

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The Melting Point Of Gold

Paul Morley
NME
18th September 1982

 

 

ONE THIS RECORD is something of a glow. Whatever your preference you will find it memorable and instructive. Find its qualities and fix your place. Be swept, be drained ... This is really all I have to say, but I shall not stop on that account. Indeed, I shall begin again.
TWO MY LOYALTY towards Simple Minds is known to be considerable, yet even I am jarred by the constant beauty of this music. Truly, all I need to say is that New Golden Dream(sic) robs me of my breath - but let's continue. Be swept, be drained, believe me.
THREE After their last (double) LP it could be said that despite their undoubted ability, the group threatened to settle down into an overwhelming, agitating monotony devoid of nobility: a heat-switch has been turned on, the looming Simple Minds solid has melted, is melting into a bewitching, fresh sound. Suddenly the group sound acutely aware of space and emptiness, and their impact is a lot harder because of that. (When I say harder, I am just as likely to mean "softer" - it depends whether you're stood on your head or not.)

  Simple Minds took a certain way with rhythm and motion to it limits; they've now shook away what was becoming a kind of concussion, to be left with a very clear head. And, clearly, a heat. 'Melting' is a useful word to use in connection with this record. Not only are the known Minds cliches melting into new forms and shapes, but also more general cliches melt into new meanings. The familiar deliciously fails in on itself. This 'melting' results in an exotic re-orientation. Indeed, and this is perhaps because the Minds' aspirations sometimes seemed too great for the pop context to hold, the music contained here is as searching a representation of the meltings between what is 'memory' and what is 'imagination' as that which troubles me in the workings of Beckett and Baudelaire. New Golden Dream(sic) is the perfect attack upon those who think POP too small to think big.

  The group, confounding banal limitations and their duff reputation as kids muddling in areas roughly outside their scope, have outgrown what was previously their defiant restlessness, a celebrated stoicism, and turned their song into an adventure: an adventure embedded in memory/imagination, patient and dark, as intoxicating as the adventure of Buckley, as personally aggressive as the adventure of Joy Division. It is responsible to no one and nothing, it is sensation for sensation's sake, but it takes the working listener to wherever, it suggests to the working listener that ... everything is possible.

 Let's face it, it's a glorious achievement to produce something that works generously in the usual sweet way tucked inside the trivialised pop context, yet that stretches far beyond those coloured walls to stand strong as an exhilarated, canny comment on the "state of the world's flow", on the position of hope and anxiety. There's plenty of light and melody through the 'Dream' to please you; but enough heat to chill you. There's a number of outstanding instrumental performances to turn to - Forbes' arrogantly shrewd and eager guitar, MacNeil's expressive and seemingly infallible keyboarding - but 'Dreams' music is something that succeeds smoothly yet provocatively as 'a whole'. A rippling, humming, beating, rustling, driving, melting 'whole', with Kerr's voice, his glancing, broken words, as if tiny holes allowing glimpses into the worldview that enabled such noble music to appear. The 'whole' is an ardent, tender sound that sweeps and sways between the sly and the open with pleasured mastery; as for Kerr's 'holes', there's nothing wrong with his spelling, his spelling is binding, his images and touches spellbinding. If previously he could be irritating, now he and his words insist on response. And measure the words' intrigue by the depth of that response. The working listener will be quietly, carefully, profoundly re-placed.

  The absolutely gripping opening song Someone Somewhere (In Summertime) immediately announces that Simple Minds have shed old skin. What accounts for this shedding, the 'melting', the shaking away of concussion, is the group swallowing the pill of simplicity: rather than try to make a point or point towards mystery through a rush and rush of overcompensation - this is where many other groups, ie. Bauhaus, flip and flop into the muddle of futility - the group have moved out into the opening of understatement, tweaking will and snatching heart through implication. It's the kind of simplicity Joy Division smashed into accidentally and to devastating effect: a proof of articulacy and sensitivity through keen selectivity. The two '82 singles Promised You A Miracle and Glittering Prize fit into this record not blatant shows of concession for the charts but as bright, confident celebrations of this simplicity: the group scatter their assault rather than channel it. Listening to the completely satisfying instrumental Somebody Up There Likes You it sounds as though Simple Minds believe they a creating magic: and in a way they are, conjuring up from nowhere such vital, cajoling systems as Big Sleep and King Is White And In The Crowd, systems that will connect themselves to your experiences without wasting your time or minimising your energy. The title track confirms that Simple Minds' diagnosis of what is up and down about the bits and pieces of the world is as shocking, shaming and indignant as any pop group's. 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.     So certainly this is Simple Minds' most distinguished collection. It also continues, powerfully, a period of music that melts and scatters around For Your Pleasure, Correct Use Of Soap, Closer, Sulk, Tin Drum, a music that went to follow through how Iggy somersaulted through good and bad possibilities, how Reed reached below the functional surfaces of city life, how Bowie travelled, how Hamill hoped, how Eno twisted and treated the pop song to the edge of 'the marvellous'. A music swerving and unnerving through recollection and recognition and habit and faded sensations ... searching for connections and new vantage points, using pop to mind more about memory than the order of guitar notes. Simple Minds have produced something as inventive, as cleansing, as suggestive as anything by the musicians, The Heroes, who first inspired them to form around the days and nights in Glasgow. This will thrill them, for it is still in them to be thrilled. And what will thrill you is that it is possible to pluck something as special and triumphant as this out from amidst all the painful failures. Its uses are abstract, but its signifance is universal. And the feeling grows, as I listen, that they're just beginning.
FOUR AND NOW you begin...
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New Gold Dream (81,82,83,84)

'Glasgow Kisses - Classic Albums Re-Visited'

David Stubbs - 'Uncut' Magazine May 2002 (UK)

 

Nineteen-eighty-two, the year of Simple Minds' sixth and best album, was one of the greatest in music history. There was a thriving Club Culture, fed by the subversive narcissism of the new romantics, and across the water an explosion of synth-funk innovation, from Larry Levan's The Peech Boys to Afrika Bambaataa, all of which fed the sensibilities of popists introverts New Order and Scritti Politti. The year also saw ABC's The Lexicon Of Love, The Associates' Sulk and, the third in that great trilogy of impossibly romantic, untoppable new-pop albums, Simple Minds' New Gold Dream (81,82,83,84).

 

From their raucous beginnings as Johnny And The Self Absuers, Simple Minds had been liked to refinement and a sense of the epic by a love of groups like Chic, but also by Eno, Roxy Music, Neu! and La Dusseldorf. They swiftly rejected the glum and parochial chrysalis of punk in order to find a sound that straddled the biggest and best of America and Europe: cinematic, transcendental, the stuff of distant dreams rather than gloomy quotidian realities - and if that sounds 'apolitical', remember this is the sort of 'politics' pop is very often, most effective at.

 

With Empires And Dance (1980), featuring 'I Travel', it was clear that Simple Minds had listened to the right German groups, watched the right European movies, read the right texts as they inter-railed across the continents. As brilliant a musical transcription of their experiences as it is - check the slide projection effects of '30 Frames A Second' - you can make out the joins of their influences.

 

 

 

With the follow-up albums, 1981's simultaneously released Sons and Fascination and Sister Feelings Call, Simple Minds broke another punk taboo. Not only did Jim Kerr talk in interviews of his love of Genesis (circa The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway) but they hired Steve Hillage, the ultimate prog hippie, as producer. For those more interested in the credible than the incredible, this was heresy. Kerr's pomp baritone, meanwhile, bristled with vaulting, epic ambition. But so it might with tracks like 'The American', 'Theme For Great Cities' and 'Seeing Out The Angels', Simple Minds were on the point of achieving a unique synthesis of pop, prog, punk, funk and avant-garde.

 

Come New Gold Dream and Simple Minds enjoyed critical worship and every prospect of a vast, dawning fan base. If they wanted to take over the world, there were plenty willing to hold Kerr's coat: "Anything is possible..." Indeed.

 

 

 

For the cover art, the Minds eschewed the oblique modernist tendencies of previous sleeves for a typeface and aura suggestive of some rekindled mediaeval mysticism. Had the contents been less than brilliant, more impertinent attention might have been paid to this conceit.

 

As it was, New Gold Dream glistened like a grail from it's opening chimes. On 'Someone Somewhere In Summertime', Michael MacNeil's keyboards are reminiscent of Abba's 'Dancing Queen' (according to a mischievous Paul Morley, the best new music was "post-Abba rather than post-punk") as Kerr hints at a shimmering and elusive fictional or authentically imagined state of environmental ecstasy: "Moments burn, slow burning golden nights, once more see city lights...". 'Colous Fly And Catherine Wheel' equally twists and flickers and falters - grammar and sequence collapse to great effect. "Great times attack inexpensive thrills... catch a boy fell falling in love fell falling.." In conjuction with the intricate interplay between MacNeil's keyboards and guitarist Charlie Burchill, there's a perfect, dazzling sense about these non sequitars.

 

'Promised You A Miracle', which became the band's first hit single, makes what has come before it seems like small fireworks. "Promises, promises as golden days break wondering." What's so great about this track, and indeed 'Big Sleep', isn't just it's combination of stinging riff with delicate mosaic musical colouring, but it's subtle rhythmical patterns, which are a feature of the whole album. There's no programming on New Gold Dream (though credit must surely go to producer, arranger and engineer Peter Walsh). Instead, three drummers were used, Mike Ogletree, Mel Gaynor and on 'Promised You A Miracle', former Skids drummer Kenny Hislop. Interwoven with Derek Forbes busy, funkified bass, the rhythms never tumble to 4/4 earth, seeming to dance and shape-shift in mid-air, like the aurora borealis.

 

 

 

Following 'Somebody Up There Likes You', a golden, dawn-breaking instrumental follow-up to 'Theme For Great Cities', which was generally the opener for gigs around this time, comes the title track, in which all of the pent-up energy of the album is finally unleashed with full-on locomotive optimism, a sort of celestial bullet train. "Crashing beats and fantasy, setting sun in front of me" - it's as close to anthemic as the album gets, a chant for the New Pop Class of 1982 who didn't know that Howard Jones and Nik Kershaw, were around the next corner.

 

'Glittering Prize' teeters gracefully, a stately but snowblinding display of the jumbled motifs on New Gold Dream - clear skies, dreams, romantic moments that are both perfect but transient and uncertain. It's these last qualities that distinguish Simple Minds from U2, whose open-air, sanguine tendencies, while bracing, lack intricacy or nuance.

 

 

 

With 'Hunter And The Hunted', the album begins to draw to a close and cast long shadows. "Kyoto in the snow but heaven's far away," sighs Kerr, who even alludes to "the side effects of cruising at the speed of light, the side effects of living in temptation," as if aware of the impending mortality of the moment captured on the album. Yet in the autumn of it's 40-odd-minute life, it seems more beautiful than it's springtime promise, as encapsulated in guest player Herbie Hancock's magnificent, meandering solo - kudos to the lateral thinker who got him on board.

 

Finally, there's the oblique and inconclusive 'King Is White And In The Crowd', with it's surreal mix of Simple Minds' influences, from Eno to Abba to Krautrock, and the sense that the much-vaunted concept of perfect pop is both fleeting and fragile - or 'powerful and transient'. MacNeil's decaying synth tones, the measured rhythmical pace and Burchill's fire fly guitars all amount to a dignified fade-out into the dying light, leaving questions and ambiguities still hanging in the dark, electric air.

 

 

After New Gold Dream, Simple Minds gigged incessantly and became addicted to stadium crowds. The Steve Lillywhite produced Sparkle In The Rain (1983) had it's moments, but after 1985's 'Don't You (Forget About Me)', a song not written by them but for the film the Breakfast Club (it had already been rejected by Bryan Ferry), the Minds' golden sound lapsed into turgid, leaden parody. The political consciousness of 'Belfast Child' (1989) and Amnesty International campaigning did them more credit but seemed to lend a pious starch to their sound.

 

In a sense, though, the decline that followed New Gold Dream was the point. New Pop was only ever a glimpse, not a sustainable proposition - a break in the clouds, a shaft of sun. The moment may have passed but, 20 years on, New Gold Dream sounds as pristine and out of time as when it was first released.
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New Gold Dreams (81-82-83-84) [A&M, 1983] Robert Christgau
With more effort than hedonism should ever require, I make out three or maybe four full-fledged melodies on this self-important, mysteriously prestigious essay in romantic escape. Though the textures are richer than in ordinary Anglodisco, they arouse nary a spiritual frisson in your faithful synesthetician. Auteur Jim Kerr is Bowie sans stance, Ferry sans pop, Morrison sans rock and roll. He says simple, I say empty and we both go home. C+