When Live4ever mentioned we were reviewing ‘Sparkle In The Rain‘ to a friend, their reaction was to wrinkle their nose and opine, “Ah yes – the bombast”.
Bombast is a word used so frequently in conjunction with Simple Minds that it sometimes feels like it ought to be the third word of their name: in his essential précis of post-punk and beyond, Rip It Up and Start Again, author Simon Reynolds describes the Glaswegian band’s work as ‘increasingly bombastic’ as they made their way towards Live Aid, The Breakfast Club and songs like the winsome ‘Belfast Child‘.
‘Sparkle In The Rain’ lies at the absolute mid-point of that journey, a record that finally dispensed with the art-punk and latterly dreamy ambiance of their previous iterations. In tone it feels like a preparatory step, an intake of breath before jumping into the void of pop stardom. It constituted a definite evolutionary step from its predecessor ‘New Gold Dream‘, on which Jim Kerr crooned ephemerally over songs from a niche which was part New Age, part New Romanticism. Along with contemporaries U2 and Big Country, at the time Simple Minds vied for the unofficial mantle of ‘Kings Of New Stadium Rock’, the spoils of which was ultimately unit shifting beyond the wildest dreams of their rain-coated Northern British critics.
It’s fair to say this newly emerging genre was laced with pretension, but it’s true defining quality was in the kinetic energy it brought both through the strident outpourings of their erudite lead singers, and in the towering, epic flourishes of the music they made. The movement’s house producer was Steve Lillywhite, who was again in the chair here, although his chief role seems to have been in persuading Kerr and co. to keep their powder even slightly dry throughout.
It was clearly a difficult job. From the opening moments – Mel Gaynor’s bellowed count-in to ‘Up On The Catwalk‘ – the studio sounds like it was awash with testosterone and gnosticism by the gallon. The sometimes inward looking phases of ‘New Gold Dream’ have been consigned to history; ‘Up On The Catwalk’s list of characters – including Robert De Niro, Kim Philby and Michaelangelo – were evidence of far the horizon now looked, a vista that now stretched from Raintown to Bombay and Montevideo, via Brixton.
And bombast? What about the bombast? Well yes, there’s undeniably plenty of that, Kerr un-ironically delivering lines like, “This could be the great divide”, about how he’d, “Love to feel a free world turn tonight”, or even about the celestial wish making of, “Sweet angels sing, about the fast pace of things”. In his defence, these were simpler times, and the sheer primeval throb of ‘Waterfront‘, ‘Speed Your Love To Me‘ and ‘The Kick Inside Of Me‘ were designed to shower optimism and togetherness on sweaty male crowds. This combination of momentum and soul-grabbing leaves S’parkle In The Rain’s isolated moments of reflection – the vaguely messianic ‘East At Easter‘ and instrumental closer ‘Shake Off The Ghosts‘ – as something of an incongruity. The one real misstep though is a truly vexing cover of Lou Reed‘s ‘Street Hassle‘, which is rendered into sounding like much of rest of ‘Sparkle In The Rain’, a feat which unhappily tells its own story.
It’s probably worth asking at this point why a period which promised much but ultimately rang hollow should be revisited, but without it you’d have no Muse, Coldplay or Snow Patrol. This deluxe package (there is a super-duper box set also featuring a Radio 1 session and a 1984 gig from Glasgow’s iconic Barrowland) features a remastered original and, in now time honoured reissue tradition, a slug of ‘bonus material’.
This second disc features a cache of goodies of varying merit. On the over compensating side there are three more versions of ‘Waterfront’ and an instrumental take on ‘White Hot Day‘ (mysteriously entitled ‘Bass Line’), all of which fall well short of essential curio status. There are, however, thankfully objects of greater interest, amongst them a peerless live version of one of ‘New Gold Dream’s finest pieces, ‘Hunter & The Hunted‘ (once you overcome the churlish question of why it was selected for a re-issue of a later record). There’s also a reminder of how the eighties were the signature period for the extended mix – used on 12 inch singles for padding mainly – but the seven minutes plus of ‘Up On The Catwalk’ are almost like listening to a different song. Finally, the hazy washes of ‘An African Band In Chimes‘ signposts the ambient techno of artists like Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada, a decade in advance.
Heritage bands and their heritage releases are becoming more populous than new music. There are some obvious reasons for this, but whilst some musical archeology is merely that, ‘Sparkle In The Rain’ on balance deserves to be re-examined – adrenaline, bombast and all.
