Don’t you forget about The Sunday Times

Don’t you forget about The Sunday Times

The Sunday Times September 03, 2006

Don’t you forget about them

David Pollock

Simple Minds, T on the Fringe, Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh, Monday

In the usual scheme of things, any band that could be described as a nostalgia act will find itself subject to the laws of diminishing returns. Where once they stayed in the best hotels and hit arena stages running, heroes of bygone may find themselves booked into a last-minute B&B on the edge of town and shuffling into small-scale venues to face dozens of fans whose interest in popular music died many years ago.

By this admittedly narrow definition, Simple Minds cannot be discounted as a nostalgia act. While their recording career was put on hold towards the end of the 1990s, to take time out of a changed musical landscape and to concentrate on family, the band’s broad and memorable back catalogue ensures that, as a live act, they remain much in demand. Add to that the success of two recent albums — Cry from 2002 and Black & White 050505 in 2005 — and you get large and appreciative crowds still turning out to see them.

 

While recent dates around America and Europe have attracted healthy ticket sales, it is surely in Scotland that the Glasgow outfit find their most emphatically dedicated crowds. Jim Kerr, the lead singer, realises this and made a point of noting it here. This is the last night of our tour, he told us breathlessly. What a place to end it. What a crowd to end it with.

 

Further comments about Scottish audiences being the best in the world somehow didn’t seem like empty platitudes and there’s no denying there was something suitably epic about the surroundings.

 

On the last day of the fringe and in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, a set by one of Scotland’s most successful bands reverberating over the packed-out crowd and around Princes Street felt like both a noisy send-off to the Edinburgh festival and a welcome back to normality for the city’s natives.

 

The years haven’t diminished Simple Minds as a live act. Kerr was never the most glamorous frontman, eschewing the leather-jacketed rock-star posturing of their contemporaries U2 in favour of a far more endearing blokey casualness.

 

In jeans and a T-shirt, he looks as if he has just stepped out of the bookies round the corner. But there’s still something rabble-rousing about the way he struts across the stage and pumps his fist in the air at all the best bits.

 

While the rest of the band are even less attention-seeking than Kerr, they also approach their music-making with a zestful immediacy.

 

Charlie Burchill, guitarist and the other fulcrum in the Simple Minds songwriting axis, has a flair for guitar riffs that are almost as memorable as choruses in their own right, while Eddy Duffy, a recent addition on bass, steals a few minutes in the limelight with the hammering, nerve-tingling bassline of Waterfront.

 

At a show like this, it is always a pleasure to recall just how many great songs a band you haven’t listened to for a while have produced. Kerr turns and points his mike stand out over the crowd as the familiar intro to Don’t You Forget About Me kicks in, but this song was only one of the lesser highlights of a show played with energy and excitement.

 

Waterfront was another, as was the medley of Ghost Dancing and Gloria, but Sanctify Yourself sounded the most fresh and energising.

 

Amid the traditional anthems (Alive & Kicking, Glittering Prize), the Giorgio Moroder-like synthesizer stab of New Gold Dream also reminded one of Simple Minds’s beginnings as part of the new wave movement. Given the style’s rediscovery in modern music today, there are far worse candidates than the Minds for a full-scale revival.