Simple Minds -‘X5’ (Virgin/EMI)
It could all have turned out so very differently…
1989: The Cure release their seventh and best album Disintegration. U2 are still riding high on the release of The Joshua Tree and the resulting Rattle & Hum album and film, and are generally regarded as being the biggest band in the world at this point. Simple Minds release Street Fighting Years. Although it is a no.1 album, it’s bombastic, and way behind their pioneering best work. ‘Belfast Child’ is the band’s only no.1 single, a reworking of the folk song ‘She Moves Through The Fair.’ It is also the last album they will do with keyboardist Michael MacNeil and manager Bruce Findlay.
1979: The Cure release their debut album Three Imaginary Boys. Though within a year they will have reinvented themselves completely, at this point their debut album only offers a hint of how excellent and essential they will become. Over In Ireland Dublin four-piece U2 release their debut EP Three, solely in that country. Simple Minds, in the year that is arguably the greatest ever for music, are streets ahead of both of them…
X5 is a fantastic compilation. In essence, what it is is Simple Minds’ first five albums together as a box set, retailing for around £12.00, with decent extras, like the extended remixes of tracks that are worth hearing, rather than the need for an entire album’s worth of the demos. The box set also deals nicely with the issue of Sons & Fascination and Sister Feelings Call – one album or two? – by placing them together in a gatefold sleeve.
It’s fascinating to track the evolution of ver Minds at this point. Debut Life In A Day wears its’ love of the Velvets and Roxy on its’ sleeve, to the extent that I swear it sounds like Jim Kerr is actually trying to sound like Bryan Ferry (they would eventually work with Lou Reed on, erm, Street Fighting Years). The quantum leap to Real To Real Cacophony (described by then label Arista as being one of the most uncommercial releases they had ever heard) is comparable to the jump between Pablo Honey and The Bends. While U2 were sounding earnest, the Minds were looking to Berlin more than a decade before U2 would make Achtung Baby. And both those Minds albums came out in 1979.
1980’s Empires And Dance showed them progressing yet further. Opener ‘I Travel’ still sounds remarkably fresh thirty years on, and predates much of the dance music of the forthcoming decade, never mind stadium rock. It’s intersting though that on the following year’s double pairing of Sons…and Sisters that the ’20th Century Promised Land’ suddenly hints at the direction they would take. By 1982’s New Gold Dream 81-82-83-84 breakthrough hit ‘Promised You A Miracle’ (what the hell was with that white biker jacket though on Top Of the Pops?) showed that the anthems were coming through. But they were still am excellent bloody band. And they even made it into John Peel’s Festive Fifty that year with no less than 3 entries.
Sure, they got really big, and the quality control dipped, but forget the stadium pomp and focus on the peerless work herein. It’s taken long enough for this era of their work to be re-evaluated – but with bands from the Manics to the Primals to the Horrors lining up to acknowledge their influence, it really is time to embrace them.
*****
X5 is out now on EMI