The facts: “Belfast Child” is a song written by Jim Kerr in grief and anger after the atrocity of the 1987 Enniskillen bombing, built on a traditional Irish folk tune. “I’m not saying I have any pearls of wisdom,” he’s quoted on Wikipedia as saying, “But I have a few questions to ask.”
Noble intentions rarely translate into effective outcomes. There are an awful lot of cynical and rude things one could say about “Belfast Child”. They might involve words like “stupefying”, “leaden”, and “is that the time”. Or indeed, “desperate”, “wannabe” and “Bono”. But that would be too glib, and would also underestimate the extent to which this kind of statement-making seemed at the end of the 80s like something rock music could and must do. Rock was now happening at a scale where its practitioners felt they should use it to raise awareness of certain issues and causes. The B-Side of “Belfast Child” was “Mandela Day”, premiered at the 1988 Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute, the climax of this entire tendency – the line-up now reads like a nightmare of worthiness but there was no doubting the performers’ sincerity, or the cause’s importance, or the way that this idea of rock as a moral force had become naturalised since Band Aid.
But that very scale was also a trap. Kerr’s “few questions to ask” catches the problem – stadium rock amplifies and simplifies a musician’s feelings, and you need a remarkable level of skill to keep nuance alive in those circumstances (just ask “Born In The USA”). So when a musician “raised awareness”, it wasn’t simply in the form of a PSA, it was awareness filtered through their own understanding and response. “Belfast Child” rests on two assumptions which can’t easily be separated: that the situation in Northern Ireland is worth making this kind of record about, and that Jim Kerr’s take on that situation is a valuable lens for it. And if Kerr doesn’t really have a take – if all he’s got is “a few questions”, the same baffled anger and horror with which most of the mainstream mainland reacted to Northern Ireland, when they thought about it at all – then the danger is that the music he’s playing will shape itself into a take by its simple force.
Which is exactly what does happen. “She Moved Through The Fair” is actually quite a good song for the purpose – it’s about disappearance and death, the random and mystifying cruelty of sudden loss – and it’s got a lovely melody, the kind which would force the word “haunting” even if one wasn’t in the song. A straight cover might have been effective – OK, not a straight cover played by Simple Minds, but by someone. But “Belfast Child” takes the song’s weight and associations and won’t leave them alone: it piles on more and more over six long minutes, switching from cod-folksiness (“gallows tree” and that bloody tin whistle) to full-bore Rock Unleashed Mode.
The first sign of this shift is when Kerr sings “some say Troubles” with clomping emphasis and then turns the next word into a big arena rock growl just like the one he used on “Don’t You Forget About Me”. And now he’s getting to the real meat of the song he can properly let rip, so in come the drums and he’s off, yelling “Come on Billy!” and “War is ragin’! Cross the Emerald Isle!”. When surely the whole point of the record should be that getting quite so excitable about that stuff is a bad thing. But he can’t help it, this is arena rock and this is what arena rock does: the song is structured so that invocation of war is its natural climax. If you wrote a hands-in-the-air trance anthem about Gaza you’d end up with the same problem.
Scale and abstraction were once what made Simple Minds worthwhile – on New Gold Dream (“worldwide on a wider screen”) they were making big music too, as enormous, beautiful and unreal as the grid-plans for some great future city. Then during their chest-thumping years there was an exhuberant innocence to their huge singles, empty and absurd though they were. But this awfully misconceived thing is where it all comes crashing down. “Belfast Child” takes the grubby, botched, intractable brutality of the Troubles and makes them sound grand and mythic, which would be embarrassing enough even if it weren’t exactly what the fighters on both sides liked to play it as too.
Score: 1
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I admit I bought this album when it came out. The ‘haunting’ thing is spot on – at least in the first bit of the song. And yes it does descend into bombast, but 1?
Well, the haunting bit isn’t Simple Minds’ – they’ve nicked the melody of “She Moved Through The Fair” and changed the lyrics. Which is absolutely fine – not the first or last time we’ll see that kind of appropriation – but it’s hard to think of a number one where source material is put to a worse use (IMO).
Yep, I knew that about the melody (in fact just watched Sinead O’Connor’s version which is great) but I guess there must have been some reason why this went to Number 1, and I don’t know many other songs that are very successful at expressing the complexities of the Northern Ireland situation … but all IMO too, of course.
Correct Tom. Might be the worst No 1 ever, not just of the 1980s. Makes “Give Ireland Back To The Irish” seem like a treatise by AJP Taylor.
I feel like this one has slipped in from an alternate universe somewhere, I don’t remember Simple Minds getting to #1 at all. Is it possible to have Alzheimers in your late 20s because I’m worried at the amount of these I’m forgetting.
Few bands have lost the plot on the scale of Simple Minds, they were never the most original band with their Bowie and Kraftwerk roots showing through on their early stuff but tracks like “I Travel” were at least exciting in their own way and still sound good now. With this I’m just embarrassed for them.
Can I be the first to point out that Fairport Convention did a lovely version of “She Moves Through The Fair”
love the melody – the sententious vibe of the performance is overbearing and the song overlong.
I was at the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday gig at Wembley – the first and last of such events I have attended. I have vague memories of Neil Young playing ‘Rockin’ in the free world’.
In a loose kind of link here’s a link to a recent performance of ‘She moved through the fair’ by Bert Jansch as well as some recent performances by Neil Young.
http://bigozine2.com/roio/?p=497
Living where I do it’s impossible to regard Fairport as anything other than Godlike. Other good versions by the sublime Jean Redpath and (okay, I’m from Paisley) Kenneth McKellar. With those and The Chieftains/Sinead version it just keeps turning up on my IPod.
“I was at the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday gig at Wembley – the first and last of such events I have attended. I have vague memories of Neil Young playing ‘Rockin’ in the free world’.”
I too was there! Or rather, I was at the post-release 1990 gig (Mandela Day was unleashed at the 1988 birthday one). Neil Young was at the 1990 one. I had not delved into his records, but lots of people were very excited, then disappointed when he followed RITF with a crouching acoustic-feedback-heavy Mother Earth. Lou Reed, also new to me, did Last Great American Whale and Dirty Blvd. I was wearing shorts and my legs got someone else’s urine on them.
My main response to Mandela Day was sadness: the Special AKA song and Sun City had been records to listen to again and again. Not so this.
Was Mandela Day officially an AA-Side? I went with Everyhit on this because a) it meant not having to actually listen to MD and b) it also meant not dignifying the EP name “Ballad Of The Streets” with its own post title.
It’s no surprise that this has gone down like a lead balloon. There’s nothing more disappointing than seeing a band that re-drew the line between Punk (Johnny & The Self Abusers) and Prog Rock (Sons & Fascination) via Krautrock and New Romanticism, to descend into the murky waters of “The Troubles”. Jim Kerr and co are WAY out of their depth.
Give me Dead Can Dance or Sinead O’Connor any day over this.
Guinness just lists Belfast Child; Complete Book of the British Charts tartly notes: “BELFAST CHILD (Sleeve gives title as an EP: Ballad Of The Streets, though the 7″ format only had 2 tracks.”
Musically Simple Minds were sunk when Derek Forbes left in 1985 though his last LP with them “East Of The Equator” wasn’t very good either. How to go from being a very good band in your own right to becoming a K-Tel copy of another band you actually pre-dated !
Spot on Mark Tom. I would give it 1 for Trevor Horn’s mellotron blast after the first line of the second verse, the only bit of the record I can listen to without gnashing my teeth !
Re #3 – A genuinely good song (in my opinion of course) about “the troubles” is The Divine Comedy’s “Sunrise”. Even if you’re not a fan, check it out, it’s in no way arch or ironic.
I’ve always considered it as an E.P., with “Mandela Day” and “Biko” making up the other two tracks.
I’m basically going to sit this one out for the following reasons:
1. I think that the parent album Street Fighting Years is well worth defending but also that it’s a pity that its three worst tracks constitute this record.
2. Lena is going to defend this record pretty passionately here when she gets the time to do so.
Other than that I will simply note that “She Moved Through The Fair” was a big song at the time; a cover appears on the first All About Eve album (reasonable) and another on Irish Heartbeat by Van Morrison and the Chieftains (magical).
I could have sworn that this was listed in the charts at the time as Ballad of the Streets EP (as the cover of the single shows). Either way, I think if you’d had to suffer your way through Mandela Day the score would still have been 1, as it’s equally awful. Also: Belfast Child feels like it goes on for EVER. 4th longest number one of all time, apparently.
#14 genuinely looking forward to it – I always want someone smart and articulate to come and prove me wrong on a record I’ve slagged off. And I’ve never heard the album so I can offer no argument there.
#15 please don’t even remind me of the longest number one. *shudders*
Tom, I remember you describing this as the best example of an “overripe” number one – it reaches the top because the fanbase has peaked even though the act are in decline. Which is pretty much spot on.
Little to add to this except “the streets are emptaaaay!” has become a favourite catchphrase over the years. And I’d like to say Reel to Real Cacophony sounds ever so good these days – just shy of their I Travel purple patch, but somehow easier to listen to as it did so little at the time.
The first version I heard of She Moved Thu’ The Fair was marianne faithfull’s on her excellent 1966 folk album North Country Maid. I think the accompaniment is from Jon Mark, later of the 70s group Mark Almond, which ties in neatly with the last Popular entry. Ring a ding ding!
It’s a shallow irony, but I’m pondering exactly what it means to get your political and moral guidance from a bunch of people called Simple Minds.
At the very least, you can’t say you were lied to.
Oh, and weej: I’m glad you mentioned “Sunrise” — it’s an amazing and powerful song.
Actively despised in our house not least by my Mum who fondly recalls
She Moved Through The Fair as one of the tunes of her childhood.
Listening to Belfast Child now what I hear is a thousand stout advert cliches being assembled.
Simon Price recently pointed out that if Simple Minds had simply split up after Don’t You Forget About Me they would now be one of the most fondly recalled eighties rock bands. Certainly you would be hard pressed to find another band who have so woefully identified their weaknesses as their strengths.
Is this the first Popular entry which was released as a three-inch CD?
(Wonder if you can post inline images???)
(EDIT: Nope.)
@14 – THAT ‘Biko’? oh; yes. In SM’s defence all they do with it is to reproduce and perhaps enhance the clumpiness of Gabriel’s original (and the first link from the youtube video is to Robert Wyatt’s fluid and understated and lovely version, which will still make me weepy if it catches me at the right moment)
Horrid, pompous, misguided, ham-fisted, patronising, post Live Aid toss.
@15, it didn’t help that they insisted on playing the whole bloody thing on the chart rundown, either. Still, we had the likes of ‘Love Train’, ‘That’s The Way Love Is’ and ‘Wait’ further down the chart to keep us chipper. ‘LT’ would have made a great number one, I reckon.
One. Shame, I love ‘Theme For Great Cities’.
Is it safe for me to admit that I actually liked this at the time? For some reason, I think I thought the combination of soundscapes and folk stylings the record offered were in some way “different” – I’m sorry to say I was a rather naive boy at the time. My Dad liked it, too. “Now THIS is a record,” he said when he heard it on the chart rundown.
Listening to it now, all I can hear is a single which makes a lot of noise but doesn’t really go anywhere or do anything, or actually say much (despite claiming to). It’s all huff and bluster over substance, and if you’re a bit ignorant about rock music, it could trick you into thinking it’s impressive just by its melodramatic peaks and troughs (in much the same way that over-confident motivational speakers can kid you they’re saying something new just by the force of their delivery).
Oddly, when Pulp remastered “Different Class” I’m sure Jarvis Cocker mentioned “Belfast Child” in the liner notes, suggesting “It probably sounds good now”. It bloody doesn’t. Still though, 1 is a tiny bit harsh, not that I feel strongly enough about defending it to be willing to put up a fight. A 3 or 4 seems more accurate.
I asked in the office what PSA meant — as google was being sniggeringly unhelpful — and after I gave context (“So when a musician ‘raised awareness’, it wasn’t simply in the form of a PSA, it was awareness filtered through their own understanding and response. Belfast Child…” the nice Irish woman in across the room in finance grinned and said, “It means probably PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT. You know, like Bono…”
Too long and loses its way almost instantly; the string backing seems to ebb and flow independently of the rest of the song. The drums are handled rather hamfistedly and in general it doesn’t leave anyone any better off. A 2 I think.
More Bono than Bono?
that’s an excellent piece that really nails the problems with this record.
why did rock musicians take themselves so seriously at this point?
Terrible record-again though like #24 my dad was a fan too i recall-is this the true origin of Dad-rock??
Jim Kerr turned up on The One Show last week talking about this for some reason and still seemed very proud of it..
Fascinating fact- My Languages Teacher’s sister played the “bloody tin whistle” on this! Everyone in class seemed v impressed with this at the time even though nobody actually to appeared to like the single- for me personally I was moving out of the self-pitying weird teenager stage i’ve mentioned in previous posts who barely listened to anything recorded since 1975 and had started playing “Locust Abortion Technician” and “Straight Outta Compton” to death round about this time-funnily enough my dad was quite a fan of NWA as well as “The Minds”!
So, did Kerr really have that chat about career direction on the beach with Bono or is it just a good yarn (with bad consequences)?
This one was always a turkey but I find it almost unlistenable now.
Good piece. It’s a lugubrious record and probably does deserve some sort of thrashing. Still, I fear Tom’s gone overboard a bit: the 1’s too harsh given BC’s basic musical competence, and I completely disagree with the idea that musical genres can or should be restricted in terms of their content.
I see no problem with a trance anthem about Gaza or synth-pop about Hiroshima (or synth-pop about Hiroshima pressed into Middle East service as in the stunning use of Enola Gay in Waltz with Bashir) or a rock epic about Bonia or Tibet, it’s all in how you approach things. If the music ends up too romantically martial or energetic, say, to be plausibly overtly anti-war then the best option might be to ‘change sides’ lyrically, e.g., write from the perspective of a blood-thirsty general, say, or a coldly calculating politician or terrorist leader. In effect, that’s how metal squares the circle of writing anti-war songs with machine-gun riffs etc.. Or, a rather different solution and probably what Simple Minds should have gone for, stay lyrically abstract, go mumbly and shoe-gazery (e.g., tracks on primal scream’s Xtrmnator) if you have to. Radiohead’s Lucky works fantastically well as an epic wail about any conflict zone you want precisely because Tom Yorke’s in the first instance there singing about the insides of people’s heads.
I don’t have anything to add to all the splendid comments above on Simple Minds’ epic career flame-out. Kerr-razy:
2 or 3
In 1987 I briefly dated a guy who wore a Simple Minds t-shirt from the New Gold Dreams tour. I tried to get him to discard it as they were already so uncool.
My first exposure to She Moved was an Eyeless in Gaza cover, do I win most obscure?
Trevor Horn is clearly still proud of his work on Belfast Child, as it is included on the Trevor Horn Anthology Greatest Hits, taking up much space that might be more profitably filled by Dollar singles.
What was my 16 year old self thinking when he bought this? I think it was more the sense of buying into an event, than anything else. Being charitable to myself, that event was the first Mandela Day of 1988, a song that has a better tune than Belfast Child, and slightly less clodhopping sentiment.
Its unfortunate, though. Up to 1982, Simple Minds are one of my best pop things, and – for what its worth – ‘New Gold Dream’ is my favourite album. But whenever I’m talking about them I always have to emphasise that I’m praising THE EARLY Simple Minds, that prefix so essential that they now have a four-word name.
Number 2 Watch: the first of two weeks for Michael Ball’s ‘Love Changes Everything’, bookending a week for Michael Jackson’s ‘Leave Me Alone’.
Light Entertainment Watch: Simple Minds were always more at home in stadiums than television studios;
FRIDAY NIGHT WITH JONATHAN ROSS: with Catherine Deneuve, Catherine Tate, Ricky Martin, Simple Minds (2005)
LATE NIGHT IN CONCERT: with Simple Minds (1983)
THE OLD GREY WHISTLE TEST: with Simple Minds, Bruce Springsteen (1979)
THE OLD GREY WHISTLE TEST: with Simple Minds, Hot Club (1982)
ORS 84: with Simple Minds (1984)
THE TUBE: with Jools Holland, Paula Yates, Garfield Kennedy, Bananarama, Flock Of Seagulls, Robert Palmer, Simple Minds, Muriel Gray (1982)
THE TUBE: with Jools Holland, Leslie Ash, Simple Minds, Gary Holton, Mark Hurst, Rocky Morton, Annabelle Jankel, Ian Dury, Natural Ites, Mick Jagger (1983)
WOGAN: with Simple Minds (1991)
#35 The problem there is that I’ve never heard “Lucky” as a wail about ANY kind of combat zone – or about anyTHING even so mildly specific: though I’ve never listened that closely because I only really like isolated Radiohead songs and “Lucky” isn’t one of them. (It first showed up on a War Child album though, didn’t it? So maybe that’s the connection.) You’re surely right that R’head are more about capturing the subjective inner life/anguish, but this comes at something of a price in terms of specificity. For all its awfulness, Simple Minds have set out to write a song about the Troubles and they have written a song which is undeniably about the Troubles. Radiohead aren’t a fair comparison in that respect.
In general I agree that obliqueness looks like a way out of the trap though – more on this when we get to “ironic” U2.
re; 3 and 13 – my vote for best troubles song is the gang of four’s wonderfully deadpan ‘armalite rifle’ (“it’s used against you/like irish jokes on the bbc”).
now, i wouldn’t want to rep *too* strongly for ‘through the barricades’ which is in similar territory to ‘belfast child’ and is now similarly laughed at, but it at least attempts to capture some sort of recognisable small scale emotional truth (if not exactly an original one) which is something that pop song writers are generally quite good at. “belfast child” on the other hand is just a crappy newspaper op-ed piece roared from the heavens.
i was saying on another thread that “street fighting years” was the record that broke my covenant with q magazine, and i did resolve to myself that i would sit down last night and listen to it for the first time in twenty years just to see if time had been a healer. but then i noticed that simon amstell’s new show was on, so that was that. what i must do though, is investigate Good Simple Minds – i don’t think i’ve ever heard ‘new gold dream’ etc. and by all accounts i’m missing out.
I was always a bit out-of-step in my Simple Minds appreciation: rather than New Gold Dream and “Don’t You Forget About Me”, my touchstones were “Alive and Kicking”, which I liked enough to buy the single but not the album, and Real Life, which nobody much rated but I listened to quite a lot at the time. Enough, in fact, that I eventually worked my way back to Street Fighting Years on second-hand CD and… didn’t like it much. This song was one of the reasons.
I wouldn’t go as low as 1 – reserving that for songs I actively dislike, and this is one I’ve never really given much thought – but it gets a 2 for crimes against “She Moved Through the Fair”, which deserves so much better a reading.
Sometimes a song has one meaning, no matter where you first hear it; songs can change in emphasis, however, if you are in a different place than most listeners, and I use the word “place” in more than one sense here…
At this time (winter ’89) I was living in a town that was quiet, modest, reasonably well off and full of people from the UK who had at some point decided to leave and try their luck in Canada. At least two of my father’s fellow teachers at Sheridan College were from the UK, and there are countless others across Canada who left for whatever reason and yet still felt a pull towards home, even if they could not return. To hear a song that explicitly calls for native sons and daughters to ‘come on home’ is perhaps one thing when heard on one side of the Atlantic, and quite another across the ocean. (My favorite Pogues song by far is “Thousands Are Sailing” which also came out around this time; and let’s not forget The Proclaimers’ “Letter From America” that lists the towns devastated as residents moved away, forced out…)
What to do if your home and native land (to quote “O Canada”) is full of violence? What if you leave? How can you go back when you know very well awful things are continuing to happen? “Someday we’ll return here” he sings, “when the Belfast child sings again.” (Echoing, if a bit clunkily, of all things, “Someday We’ll Be Together.” Part of the confusion of the song is that Kerr sings the verses as someone leaving and then in the chorus as someone encouraging himself and others to return.) This is a song that tugs rather heavily on what is usually buried or not talked about, not without some diligent prodding, and that is the idea of home and where one’s actual ‘home’ is. It is, I agree, an awkward subject for a song and yet when he cries out “The streets are EMPTY!” and then quietly resigned, nearly whispers “Life goes on…” – that is the punctum for me. Life goes on whether the person – indeed the people – return. (Though I don’t want to comment [yet] on the album as a whole, it is most profoundly a breakup record, the rawness of that feeling of loss feeding into everything else…)
So the ultimate sense I have here is of a man talking to himself in a room, his own heart breaking and being vulnerable – overly-vulnerable you might say – to the quiet and semi-buried misery of others, their own losses and longings. It is as if the shiny yellow New Pop balloon has burst and here he is, seeing the world in a new (fractal and fragmented) way, full of separations. “But all’s not lost!” he sings at one point, however – he still has that “81-82-83-84” optimism that something is going to change; not right now, but something is going to happen.
@Rory, 37. Thanks for the Sinead link (what a super-cute look/haircut she has in that clip too!). She’s got a real gift for song interpretation I reckon: her version of anything is always worth hearing in my experience.
@pink champale, 36. You can’t go wrong with Empires and Dance, Sons and Fascination/Sister Feelings Call and New Gold Dream. Very few if any duff tracks with some of the best being the very great instrumental pieces on each (e.g.,Somebody up there likes you on NGD).
@Lena, 38. Beautiful note – I certainly prefer your slightly more general/abstract reading to the politically v. specific one that the rest of us following Jim Kerr’s lead have been taken in and then duly unimpressed by. Thanks for opening up that possibility.
“She Moved Through The Fair” Scooter style http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdFOTluXFlQ (no really about 1:10)
On the same album they do Scarborough (af)fair too.
#36: If you want to get into “early” Simple Minds I’d go further back to ‘Real To Real Cacophony’ and ‘Empires and Dance’ though even then you could claim their tendencies to overblowness were flowering, I remember John Peel playing ‘This Fear of Gods’ off the latter album and saying something like “So I guess 7-minute-long songs are OK again” but at least they still sounded more like Bowie than U2.
This is the first I ever heard or heard of this song. 1 is too low, though the Troubles were never a crucial issue for me (nor was an emptied-out Old World*, and thank you Lena for that beautiful post), so Simple Minds making a botch of an attempted reflection on this complex phenomenon isn’t going to hurt me.
But he can’t help it, this is arena rock and this is what arena rock does: the song is structured so that invocation of war is its natural climax. If you wrote a hands-in-the-air trance anthem about Gaza you’d end up with the same problem.
But if the music were far better**, the problem wouldn’t go away. And what is the problem? Aesthetic? Political? Intellectual?
Makes me think of a problem with Dylan-S&G-VU-Cohen, which is that you can’t sing well about suicide and self-destruction without aestheticizing and glamorizing suicide and self-destruction. And that particular problem – if it is a problem – made the music better, if not better for you, and gave e.g. Dylan (“She knows there’s no success like failure/And that failure’s no success at all”) yet something else to ruminate on and rile us up with.
*Unless by “Old World” one means the Sixties.
**Real Punks Don’t Wear Black p. 244: “If you want more contradictions from me, here’s one: I think that good music can have bad effects and that bad music can have good effects, but I also think that what music does is part of what music is. I mean, can you call something a good dance track and then say that many people have tried to dance well to it but none have succeeded? (‘It’s got a good beat and no one can dance to it. I’ll give it a 75.’)” There’s no general way out of this “contradiction”; it’s something you wrestle with from song to song, event to event.
Thanks swanstep and koganbot, I really appreciate it! I totally agree that music is a highly contradictory art and that a ‘bad’ song (I wouldn’t give this one a 1 or a 10) can be ‘better’ in a way than a ‘good’ one in that it makes the contradictions inherent in music more obvious.
Speaking of wrestling, “Log In” is no longer on the Freaky Trigger toolbar up top, at least not when I’m looking at it in Google Chrome. So to log in I’ve got to go through Register – go to Log In – Log In – back arrow – back arrow – back arrow – Refresh.
It’s not very good, but it’s certainly not a 1.
Another example of one of these bands which probably deserved to have a number one, just not with this song… the problem being that none of their great singles came anywhere near doing it – “I Travel” and “Chelsea Girl” didn’t even chart!!
Surprised no-one’s mentioned Jim Kerr’s new solo album. I’ve not heard it myself but appraently it’s not at all bad!
You know, I think there’s a glimmer of quality here that many of the other bad tracks are missing. The rhythmic lilt of the “aggressive” section could make a very nice house groove with the right remix!
Of course, there was a fantastic hit house reworking of Simple Minds in 1993;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sPUpKGI1Z4
The source material was a bit less stodgy than Belfast Child, though…
I have no doubt as to what my favourite album is. It’s ‘New Gold Dream’ by (THE EARLY!) Simple Minds. For the abstraction and the expanse. You know the experience when you’re on a coach or a bus, coming into New York or Boston, say, and for the first time you cross over a bridge and see the whole expanse of the city? The many blocks, the twinkling lights, the vast scale of it? You feel a sense of possibilities suddenly in front of you, the feeling that you too have a place in this?
New Gold Dream evokes that moment and sustains it for 45 minutes.
It sounds incredibly shimmering, the closest that sound comes to being like light, and is a synesthenic experience, not bombastic stadium rock at all, no siree. It is the album that is most likely to make me feel better when I’m unhappy, and the album most likely to keep a feeling of happiness going when I feel that way.
So you might expect me to have my doubts as to an Italian rave version of the title track. Not a bit of it. Hearing the introduction slightly faster with some blips and souped up with a rhythmic undercarriage, gives me a tremendous sense of communal affirmation. Look! This music is so good that it works on a pilled-up dancefloor, too, not just in my head.
What you don’t get are the lyrics, neither the heroic vagueness nor the one thing that locks the original into its specific time (“81 – 82 – 83 – 84”) Instead a stentorian Eurovoice commands the listener to;
“O-PEN YOUR MIND! O-PEN YOUR MIND!”
An instruction that is repeated many many times.
Remarkably, this is not irritating, largely because the command is actually supported by the endless possibility of the music. Also, the merciful lack of elaboration comes as a relief. How many records of the early 1990s were ruined by the elucidation of half-baked philosophies of positivity (The Shamen being perhaps the most persistent offenders)?
This disc both rocks and shimmies.
Thanks for posting that, Lena. I didn’t really get the whole emigration aspect to the song before, although listening to it again now it seems as if it should be quite obvious. It’s given me a bit of an idea why somebody might get something out of the song, although I don’t think it’s a patch on “Letter From America” or (as one poster has already mentioned) The Divine Comedy’s “Sunrise”.
On another subject, the chart movements of “Belfast Child” are quite interesting – for a song which I would ordinarily assume only appealed to their fanbase, it stuck around the charts for awhile. Unlike the efforts of Morrissey or U2, there’s no “straight in the top five, up one place, then out of the charts three weeks later” activity. It entered at number 2, went up to number one where it stayed for two weeks, then went down to number 6, then relatively gracefully continued its descent from there. So what was that all about? Did the song cross over to a much bigger audience, or was it just the effect of the package having two reasonably well promoted songs on it (“Mandela Day” being the other one?)
Being as this is probably the only opportunity to discuss Simple Minds on here, I have another J’accuse moment from their Sparkle In The Rain album, where their penchant for bombast probably first reared it’s ugly head.
“Street Hassle” was Lou Reed’s most ambitious and forward looking piece of work. A 3 part mini opera divided into “Waltzing Matilda”, “Street Hassle” and “Slip Away”, it’s opening a string quartet playing a tango that introduces Reed singing as David Byrne would sound on “Psycho Killer”. The first part, the WM part, predicts Arcade Fire. The story begins with Waltzing Matilda picking up a bisexual male prostitute and conducting business with him. After a presumably heroin-fuelled bout of coitus, Matilda OD’s and slips into unconsciousness. In the second part, “Street Hassle”, a drug dealer, the prostitute’s boyfriend picks up the story, telling of (we assume) Matilda’s demise and how his gigolo friend should dispose of Matilda’s now lifeless body. Before the final part,”Slip Away”, Bruce Springsteen guests and suggests what we have heard was a lie and the real story is coming, but what we get is Reed pouring out his regret and his pleas for his lover not to die or leave. We’ve been taken on a journey through the city’s deep dark underbelly, where desperate, hopeless characters do desperate things to survive. All they have is love and death, and only the latter can be assured.
Simple Minds, aided and abetted by Steve Lilywhite behind the desk and Kirsty McColl on bv’s, abridge the song by roughly half it’s length and in the process, suck all the tenderness and nuance from it. The vital second act “Street Hassle” is thrown away and Kerr & co blast away U2 like, repeating “Slip away” and “She took the ring from my finger”, disjointed quotes from the touching third act. To say the song has been butchered is something of an understatement.
Measure it against “Belfast Child”, and the plea to return to Belfast’s deserted streets seems a tad more attractive. Only a tad, mind.
Lena’s comment (#38) has made me want to listen to this song again, something I would never have thought possible before, so many thanks for offering a different perspective on this.
Other than that I just wanted to chip in with the others that have stood up for Simple Minds early work and say that everything between Reel to Real Cacophony and New Gold Dream is worth checking out. There’s a lot to love in there. I’ll always have a soft spot for the latter album, though it’s worth pointing out that it was one that divided the fans at the time.