Music got bigger in the 1980s. In a sense no decade since has eclipsed the larger-than-life sensibilities of its biggest stars, such as Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna. The technology has advanced and the dynamic pricing became dramatically more inflated, but the magnitude remains largely unrivaled. But the 1980s was also ground zero for the Big Music, a term coined by The Waterboys‘ Mike Scott—and the name of one of their earliest singles—to describe the grand and dramatic sound that they created via anthemic melodies, rich arrangements and ample amounts of reverb. The Waterboys gave a name to Big Music, but they weren’t its sole purveyors. Big Country made Big Music, as well The Alarm and U2 (as if it even needs to be said). And by the mid-1980s, few bands to have emerged from punk and new wave embraced such grandeur like Simple Minds did.
The Glaswegian group didn’t start out that big, their 1979 debut album Life in a Day steeped in glam rock influences and a kind of agitated post-punk more synonymous with bands like Magazine. They embraced moodier art punk on 1980’s excellent Empires and Dance and slipped through darker corridors on the twin 1981 albums Sons and Fascination and Sister Feelings Call. It’s not necessarily that surprising they’d undergo so much change in such short time—it takes any young band a few years to sort out who they are, and considering the turnover of about five members in their first five years, that’ll certainly have an effect on the shape of a group’s music. But 1984’s Sparkle in the Rain found them finally crossing the Big Music threshold via singles like “The Waterfront,” and they’d be firmly entrenched in that stadium new wave largesse with Once Upon a Time, their only album to go gold in the US. (And with songs such as “All the Things She Said” and “Alive and Kicking,” it’s easy to understand why.) The group even released an album titled Big Music in 2014, as if to offer their retrospective, explicit endorsement of this characterization of their sound.
Simple Minds also had “Don’t You (Forget About Me)”, a ubiquitous single featured on the soundtrack to John Hughes’ 1985 high-school coming-of-age film The Breakfast Club that became the band’s best-known song despite their initial reluctance to record it. The most successful single in the band’s history, it reached number one in the U.S. and went triple platinum in the UK. It was also the first single released by Simple Minds that wasn’t written in the band. Penned by Keith Forsey and Steve Schiff, it was first offered to Bryan Ferry and Billy Idol, each of whom passed on it for different reasons (though Idol would record it later on in his career). And Simple Minds nearly turned it down themselves, having not written it themselves. But it nonetheless ended up an unqualified crowd pleaser—one I gave my best attempt at belting at karaoke night at a San Diego bar with the ironic name of Cheers, despite being the sort of place where you might prefer nobody knows your name.
But Simple Minds wouldn’t have been offered a song like “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” if they hadn’t already aimed their sights higher than cult art-punk obscurity. And they definitely wouldn’t have done so if not for achieving that rare equilibrium of commercial and critical success with 1982’s New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84), their best album and a step out of the shadowy corridors into a revelatory vision of promised land that singer Jim Kerr alludes to in the leadoff track, “Someone Somewhere in Summertime”: “Somewhere there is some place that one million eyes can’t see/And somewhere there is someone who can see what I can see.” (Its cover art, depicting a cross with a burning heart, would suggest Heaven.) Where subsequent albums embraced a more populist, stadium-ready sound, New Gold Dream expands its spectrum. Their palette comprises more than just bold colors, but subtler shades and hues—to paraphrase something else The Waterboys’ Mike Scott once sang, where before they saw the crescent, here Simple Minds saw the whole of the moon.
That very song, “Someone Somewhere In Summertime,” feels like an immediate shift in M.O. An atmospheric and gauzy single that leans toward the more ornate end of new wave, it’s leaner than Kate Bush’s most towering statements but more anthemic than peers like Ultravox. It’s the kind of outsized vision and versatile palette that would leave an impact on U2 as they were crafting a breakthrough album of their own—1984’s The Unforgettable Fire.
New Gold Dream isn’t a hits-first album, but make no mistake, it has them. “Promised You a Miracle” was the group’s first charting hit, reaching number 13 in the UK and landing on the Billboard Dance Hits chart in the U.S. But it retains the sleek sheen and artful haze of the post-punk aesthetic they’d cultivated—not quite the driving dancepunk of “I Travel,” but spiritual kin perhaps. “Glittering Prize” is the band’s most pristine moment of hook-driven New Romantic pop, with the drama of a song like “Someone Somewhere in Summertime” but with a glossier sheen. It’s a romantic vision of a love that won’t last (“Like a glittering prize, I saw you up on a clear day/First taking heart then a last breath away“), a more somber counterpoint to the utopian fantasy of “Someone Somewhere.”
The title track wasn’t a hit, exactly, released as a single only in Italy (your guess is as good as mine). But its cowbell-clacking rhythm propels what’s as strong a candidate as any for Simple Minds’ best song, a pulsing, Neu!-wave standout awash in bright and intoxicating synths. Like with “Glittering Prize,” Kerr juxtaposes transcendent imagery with devastation, a vision of love as both salvation and disaster: “She’s the one in front of me/Siren and the ecstasy.”
The sleek abstraction of their four prior records isn’t gone on New Gold Dream, but it takes a slightly different shape. Derek Forbes’ bass adds some lively funk to the remaining coldwave in the band’s DNA on “Colours Fly and Catherine Wheel.” And “King is White and In the Crowd” is the kind of moody proto-synthwave dirge that you could imagine scoring scenes on Miami Vice just a few years later. These standouts aren’t the norm but rather serve as moments of contrast, highlighting the contours of the brighter, resplendent points in between.
Even during the process of making New Gold Dream, fittingly their first album to go gold (and eventually platinum) in the UK, Simple Minds were well aware that they were creating something even greater than what preceded it. “Every band or artist with a history has an album that’s their holy grail,” Kerr said via the band’s website. “I suppose New Gold Dream was ours.” And in a 2012 interview, he noted that “Everything we tried worked.” Bold statement, but true nonetheless—one of the things they tried was inviting jazz legend Herbie Hancock to lend his groovy synth soloing to “Hunter and the Hunted.” And you’re damn right it works. That’s thinking big.
Simple Minds’ place in post-punk canon has always been somewhat hazy, having transitioned between underground experimentation and commercially friendly hit singles. They’ve had a long successful career, but most of their best material is still often filed away as a cult classic (or a crate dig) than a monolithic record like Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. When Joe Tangari wrote on Pitchfork in 2004, “I’m not going to set any Simple Minds LP up as a masterpiece, because I’d be lying if I did,” he wasn’t going against already established ideas about the group. But we do disagree on one important point here, so I might as well go ahead and say it: New Gold Dream is that masterpiece.
Treble is supported by its patrons. Become a member of our Patreon, get access to subscriber benefits, and help an independent media outlet continue delivering articles like these.