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Simple Minds - Graffiti Soul

Glasgow, 22nd December 1982. Following the release of New Gold Dream 81-82-83-84, the homecoming Simple Minds have finally broken through, shunted into the mainstream by the popularity of the New Romantics, a trend that arguably, as Bowie and Reed disciples, they had minimal investment in. Born five years earlier at the height of punk's spread into the provinces, the band had been locked in the classic cycle of critical acclaim but undistinguished sales, but having flirted with new wave before de-camping into more avant-garde areas, New Gold Dream's mixture of dreamy ambient synths and plangent hooks had finally ignited the public's imagination.

Lead singer Jim Kerr, honed during hundreds of gigs in smaller venues - the kind where you were close enough to see the whites of punters eyes - has the most partisan crowd imaginable in the palm of his hand. He tells them that the night is "The most special night of the year for us" to a tumlut of noise akin to a late goal in an old firm game. The set is liberally sprinkled with older material - The American, Love Song and Sweat in Bullet - but whilst it's the latter two which close matters out, it's clear that it's also a celebration of New Gold Dream, which is played in it's entirety. Kerr urges more from the sweat and beer sodden crowd, and during the climactic singalong parts of the title track the audience congeal into a single, revelatory body, drowning out the music in the process.

Fast forward the thick end of twenty seven years, to a cold and blustery July evening in Edinburgh. As dusk begins to fall in the grand old city, a downpour threatens to wash away the crowd, situated loftily up on precarious looking temporary seating within the castle itself. It's a suitably austere yet fantastical setting, band meeting audience headlong in a vortex of history, the former now inevitably older, wiser and tempered by the hard knocks of a long musical career. Later, as the opening notes of Someone, Somewhere in Summertime float across Princes Street and the rain gradually abates, Simple Minds are in a place of new found Zen.

Alot has happened between those two evenings: Live Aid, celebrity marriages, Mandela Day, Belfast Child. But despite confessing to serious notions of dissolving Simple Minds for good - after a sustained critical onslaught usually reserved for the likes of Status Quo - Kerr resolved to press on, with a line up consisting of three quarters (Kerr plus guitarist Charlie Burchill and Drummer Mel Gaynor) of that which produced New Gold Dream.

Graffiti Soul is their sixteenth studio album, a testament to the inability of transient music journalists to read public sentiment, and also the group's ability to prefer surviving for their audience over the eighties revival mentality displayed by most of their contemporaries.

Pre 1986's Once Upon A Time - the stadium rock monster which cemented their fame but saw many of their original fans abandon the band in disdain - it was the sinuous, walking bass of Derek Forbes which resonated as the hallmark feature of the Simple Minds sound. His departure the year before prompted speculation about classic "Musical differences" - some observers felt it reflected Kerr's determination to steer the band into more commercial waters - and a very brief return during the recording of 1998's Neapolis was neither a happy or successful reunion.

Nowadays these responsibilities are undertaken by Eddie Duffy, but Kerr has the perspacity to understand that it's an aspect of the band's sound which isn't broken, and there's little attempt to fix it. In essence, it's pretty much Graffiti Soul's DNA, particularly on opener Moscow Underground, where it rumbles Peter Hook-esque underneath a suitably multi-layered soup of keyboard washes. One of the first things to stand out is the obvious enthusiasm the veterans still retain, despite their travails. As an example, Rockets froths with the kind of youthful joi de vivre of their heyday, whilst Love And Fly also carries the banner for older and wiser. There's little for the iPod generation to touch in truth, although Blood Type O is by comparison with it's adult orientated mainstream peers a relatively leftfield departure.

In making an evaluation, it's also fairer to point out what's not here: there's nothing startlingly new, but having wisely ditched the stadium pulp lyrics and faux-celtic stylings of old, there's a sense of quiet distinction. Both the title track and This Is It have an energy and lack of pretension, indicating an understanding of both their boundaries and expectations.

You would expect such maturity from a band who released their first album thirty years ago, but overestimation of your audience's capacity for change is a mistake which many artists have made in the past. Demonstrating that patience is a virtue, Simple Minds now arguably met popular music's aesthetics coming back the other way. Thus they'll inevitably hurtle out of fashion again soon, like a comet on a vast eliptical orbit. Their signal though will continue to be received.

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