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Simple Minds - New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84)
Released: 14 Aug 1982
Genre: Rock
Style: Alternative Rock
Arctic Top Track: New Gold Dream
Arctic Rating: 
Review by: Rich Pickings - 6th April 2007
Jim Kerr’s Simple Minds were already five years into a stop-start career as cult electronicists before they emerged with New Gold Dream’s backwashed ambience as the preening euro babble of new romanticism began to wane. Subtle changes in the musical formula (Traditionalising Kerr’s song framework and bringing Derek Forbes undulating bass to the fore) allowed the group to astutely distance themselves from their less accessible Cabaret Voltaire influenced beginnings and accordingly the began to penetrate the charts to a degree never experienced previously with Promised You a Miracle, Glittering Prize and the prosaic elegance of Someone, Somewhere in Summertime. In showcasing the band’s newly galvanised ability to blend proto-electronica with erudite celtic pop, New Gold Dream remains almost an exercise in self-hypnosis, Kerr’s pied piper vocals happening somewhere far in the distance, whilst the listener wanders alone. The real pleasure is actually away from the slightly calculated singles; the title track, a triumphant victory parade of synthesised valedictories with an elastic, rumbling bassline and deft guitar touches (Aptly, Kerr implores “And when you dream, dream in a dream with me”) augered more of the “big” direction which came to dominate the album’s successor “Sparkle in the Rain” whilst “Colours Fly And Catherine Wheel” harked back to the claustrophobic minimalism of their krautrock-eque back catalogue.
Who knows what might have been had Kerr not sold the band’s soul to the stadiums in later work, and if he’d instead built carefully on the snowy ambience of “The Big Sleep” and the post-jazzy inflections, courtesy of Herbie Hancock, of “Hunter and the Hunted”. Although commercially one of the major winners from the original Live Aid despite a downed satellite, Simple Minds were arguably creatively bankrupted by the process of Americanisation which followed it; New Gold Dream seems highly incongruous now set against the calculated ethnic clichés of their career twilight, but in abstract it remains highly satisfying.
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