Reissue CDs Weekly: Simple Minds

As the album featuring Simple Minds’ first Top Twenty single, “Promised You a Miracle”, 1982’s New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) was aptly titled. After the success of the next single “Glittering Prize”, it hit number three in the album charts. Five albums in and three years after their first single, Simple Minds were indeed touching gold.

Whether their breakthrough into the mainstream was a miracle or not depends on how the band is seen. The album preceding New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) was actually issued as two separate records: Sons and Fascination and Sister Feelings Call. Each featured a fidgety, sometimes dark, art rock which drew from motorik and Euro-disco as much as nodding to Howard Devoto’s glacial Magazine and the late-period John Foxx edition of Ultravox. Though Simple Minds were a live draw and their records sold steadily, until the streamlined “Promised You a Miracle” no one would have thought of them as a pop group. New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) was their pivotal album. The miracle was in how they had reconfigured their sound, smoothed off its angles and embraced the anthemic without sacrificing their identity.

This new so-called “Super Deluxe Box Set” of the album is a brick-like box housing six discs, a booklet and a reproduction of a contemporaneous tour book. Disc One features the album. Disc Two includes extended versions and the similarly configured Disc Three collects edits and B-sides. Disc Four includes BBC radio sessions from 1982, Disc Five 10 alternate versions and different mixes. Disc Six is a DVD with a surround-sound mix, two promo videos and a pair of Top of the Pops appearances. Needless to say, this a lot of Simple Minds and one of their albums. New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) has been out on CD before and Disc Six’s 5.1 Surround mix was issued on DVD in 2005. Original vinyl pressings sell for between £2 and £5 depending on condition. Anyone forking out £40 for this new package will be an already committed fan.

The best case for New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) is made by the album itself. On Disc One, the new remaster puts the trebliness of original pressings in the past with more texture than ever. In opening the sound stage out, what previously seemed thin is now glossy. There is more separation between Jim Kerr’s voice, the instrumentation and percussion. The pivotal, transitional nature of the album is made clear when the anthemic opening track “Someone Somewhere in Summertime” gives way to the nervous “Colours Fly and Catherine Wheel”. Centring on its bass line, it recalls 1981’s “Sweat in Bullet”. Then, it’s back to the new world with “Promised You a Miracle”. Elsewhere, the instrumental “Somebody up There Likes You” feels like a homage to the Jon Hassell-derived Eno of 1980’s Possible Musics and could double as one of Japan’s more impressionistic outings. But the rousing title track stresses that this Simple Minds was swiftly moving towards stadia.

The tracks heard in their radio session versions are less polished

That Simple Minds were in flux on New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) is clear. What’s less obvious is whether this box adds to the story. The tracks heard in their radio session versions are less polished than what was issued on record, but still have the direct approach the band were adopting in 1982. The remixes and edits on Discs Two and Three say little beyond acknowledging that the band was subject to the commercial considerations of the period, but Disc Five’s alternates suggest some what-ifs. Apart from a different version of the album outtake “In Every Heaven” (first issued in 2005) and an alternate “Hunter and the Hunted”, all are as per what was issued but differ by being longer versions which were then shortened in preparation for release. The album could have been less immediate. It’s proof that New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) was about focus more than anything else.

Disappointingly, there are some packaging oversights. There is no disocgraphical annotation detailing the original release information of the contents of Discs Two and Three. The recording and broadcast dates of the radio sessions are not given. Some discussion of the tracks on Disc Five would have been useful.

Simple Mind's fifth album was a goodbye and a hello. A goodbye to artiness, a hello to the big gestures demanded by stadia. It’s not necessary to buy the box set to learn this, but it’s a conclusion baldly and decisively stated by the six-disc New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84).

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