14 Oct, 2010 The Past Is A Foreign Country
While stood in the hotel elevator for some reason I found myself considering the past, and perhaps more specifically, just how much I should consider it within my present life.
Coincidentally, as I soon after entered the airy room, the bedside radio was quietly playing one of Bob Dylan’s greatest songs. One featuring a lyrical scenario where a character invites another to cynically review their once considered “glorious past”.
Even more coincidentally and very soon after I switched on the TV news to be informed “The past is a foreign country.” Or at least it is according to the UK politician ED MILLIBAND who offered that sentiment while making his acceptance speech as the new leader of the UK’s Labour Party.
Like many long lasting institutions, Simple Minds today are as much as anything else a result of our past, and quietly proud of it too. Fullest evidence of that is on our concert tours when we wander on stage to play songs that come from almost each and every phase of our 33 years career. In doing so we are not just playing a collection of disconnected songs that are separated by the time and space in which they came to exist. No, what we are playing is our past story to date. That is what people come for and that is what we are expected to deliver. It’s a pleasure to fulfill the expectations. It’s also not that much of a creative challenge in all fairness, although that said there is a tremendous level of commitment to pull it off night after night and still somehow manage to keep the ill effects of too much routine well at bay.
How is that done? Mostly it’s done by consistently adding a few new songs to each and every tour.
As well of course as working out revamped arrangements to the songs that fans consider to be past landmarks. It means playing a few obscures from the catalogue that still have the strength of effect to enable them to sit confidently within the commercial classics that one feels obliged to play without questioning. (Promoters would withdraw their offers if we refused to play the big hits, the songs that the causal punter has come to hear above all, the same songs that the hardcore fans are least interested in!) More than that it is done with an attitude and sense of purpose that comes from us. It’s an attitude that on the given night infiltrates everybody involved with a show. It’s an attitude that has us believing that nothing is more important than the present moment, where yesterday’s gig no matter how successful has already receded into distant memory, and that tomorrow night’s is much to far away to even bother considering.
For us it’s all about the task at hand in other words, and if we take care in making sure we do a good job on the night, then the chance of having a long running future to come is much easier met. The bonus in that is that it is through the idea of a future that I can imagine us reaching a point where we will really want to rediscover our past much more thoroughly and in doing so perhaps get round to all those things that our more sentimental fans would like to see us doing. But not right now please!
Let us get on with the next stage, let’s get on with building a solid future!
Jim Kerr