Simple Minds and a Marathon Run of Greatest Hits at an Unforgettable Zagreb Spectacle (2022)!
Venue: Zagreb / ŠRC Šalata / Croatia
Concert date: Thursday, 30 June 2022
Simple Minds! The greatest Scottish band of all time. Out on a hits tour. Celebrating 40 years in the game. A band born in the second half of the seventies, riding the crest of the punk explosion, and one that channelled its self-cultivated new wave/art rock charisma into massive commercial success in the eighties — powered by a string of glorious evergreens led by Don’t You (Forget About Me), Alive And Kicking, Waterfront, Someone Somewhere in Summertime, Glittering Prize and Belfast Child — cementing their unforgettable place in music history.
This tour — like every other one in the past two years — had been pushed back and rescheduled, for reasons that hardly need spelling out. It finally returned to Zagreb for the first time since 2014. The band was booked into a venue that holds around 3,500 people, only this time, unlike the band’s March 2014 visit, it was a blazing summer’s day. Simple Minds arrived in Zagreb with a marathon set clocking in at three hours in total, split into two halves with a 20-minute intermission. Welcome, then, to the carousel of greatest hits and other landmark tracks spanning a long and storied career — a band that by this point had released eighteen studio albums in total, and had already dropped the new single Vision Thing in June, hinting that a new studio album called »Direction Of the Heart« was on the way, slated for October of that year.
It’s half past eight in the evening. The sun is still high. Way too high. But there’s no more time to wait. Forty years of hits are on the bill. The Zagreb show had been sold out for at least two weeks. The crowd buzz is enormous, emotional sparks crackling in the air! The anticipation of a band that definitively shaped the pop rock culture of the eighties. A nostalgic wait for those years to wake back up through a three-hour spectacle and carry us for a moment into a parallel world — one in which many of the people at this concert were still growing up. Sharing something intimate with the band. Nowhere else but at a concert. Live. It doesn’t get more real than that.
The core of the band in 2022 is its founding duo — what you could easily call iconic frontman Jim Kerr and guitarist/occasional keyboardist Charlie Burchill. Onstage, Simple Minds present themselves as a septet, which is what they’ve officially been in recent years. Flanking the two main players are: bassist Ged Grimes, the electrifyingly energetic and charismatic drummer Cherisse Osei, the superb additional backing vocalist Sarah Brown, extra guitarist Gordy Goudie, and the most recently added member, keyboardist Berenice Scott.
Did anyone doubt them? Did anyone even dare? Riding a dream setlist of singles and hits. A marathon carousel of the eighties, weighted on the four most important albums of their career — »New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84)« (1982), »Once Upon A Time« (1985), »Sparkle In The Rain« (1984), and »Street Fighting Years« (1989). Jim Kerr, a man of unyielding charisma who is, year by year, looking just that little bit more like Bruce Willis — with his trademark flirtatious moves rooted in the dance floors of eighties pop culture, even dressed in a way that unmistakably evokes the spirit of those times, his signature (often wide-legged) stage poses and non-stop salutes to the crowd. The audience was his within seconds. The band opened with three songs that all have the word love in the title (Act Of Love — a brand new track, Love Song, Let There Be Love). The message is clear. It’s inside us. That mission. It just needs to be woken up. Given meaning and brought to life. Positive vibes everywhere. People completely relaxed, full of warmth and goodwill. If you accidentally bumped into someone while squeezing through the crowd to grab a beer or two — and squeezing was unavoidable — the person you bumped into just smiled and let you through. Wherever you wanted to go. You could walk right to the front at any point during the show. People simply didn’t care if someone ‘pushed through’ from the back mid-concert. A uniquely relaxed crowd, and yet emotional and fully locked in.
That this show was going to be a complete success somehow felt inevitable even before it actually started. Kerr is in superb vocal shape even at this stage in his career, and Charlie Burchill is the well-known ‘professor’ of sonic wizardry — his guitar so often sounding like a curtain of shimmering synthesizers with a sonic contour that builds the whole essence of eighties pop. When Sarah Brown stepped onstage for a vocal duet with Kerr on Glittering Prize — immediately followed by hit Promised You A Miracle — the concert burst fully into life in all its glory and passion. The first set ran about an hour, and the band raised more than a few eyebrows when, nestled between the well-known and universally beloved Mandela Day and a particularly stunning, concert-extended rendition of Belfast Child — which always delivers its own singular atmospheric experience — they slipped in the brand new track First You Jump, another indirect signal, after the opening Act Of Love, that a new album »Direction of the Heart« was brewing behind the scenes.
A Simple Minds concert is all about building atmosphere. The band does it gradually. Methodically. All the way to an absolute peak in the closing stretch. The second set was not only longer than the first, but more intense, and more theatrical too. The band opened it with the excellent instrumental Theme for Great Cities, where Grimes’ bass dug through the heart of the track, lending an extra glow and magnetism to its mysterious melodies. That was followed by a real surprise: the inclusion of the »New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84)« classic King Is White and in the Crowd, a song the band has performed live extremely, extremely rarely throughout their long career. Simple Minds also delighted many when they pulled out the »Street Fighting Years« hit Let It All Came Down, as well as the title track from Once Upon A Time — both of which had only begun reappearing on the band’s setlists in the last few years, after being absent since ‘the ancient eighties.’ Woven in among these were of course the firmly ingrained, roof-raising hits led by Waterfront, All The Things She Said, Someone Somewhere in Summertime, She’s A River, and of course the one and only — Don’t You (Forget About Me). The band stretched their career-defining hit out theatrically, locking the crowd’s singing in even tighter before the big finale. It was becoming clear we were approaching the end of the main set, which the band brought to a searingly intense close with the title track from their breakthrough album »New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84)« — where Simple Minds generated extraordinary groove kinetics through the intensifying interplay of contrasts between the rhythm section and the synthesizer curtains.
Then the obligatory encore. It kicked off with a radically rearranged Speed Your Love To Me recast as an acoustic ballad, with Sarah Brown and Berenice Scott stepping to the centre of the stage. The latter took on the lead vocal duties from Kerr, who stepped down to a riser next to drummer Cherisse Osei. Anyone who’d been missing the energetic original was more than rewarded when the long-awaited Alive And Kicking finally arrived — complete with Kerr theatrically cupping his hand to his ear and egging on his bandmate Ged Grimes — followed by the closing Sanctify Yourself, which the band had been saving for the grand finale.
The sound throughout was flawless. Perfect, in fact. Contrasts intensified, the sonic density tight and full. Instruments in brilliant balance, and Jim Kerr’s vocal power not fading in the slightest. Backed by the captivating Sarah Brown — who simply cannot be left off any stage — the intensity of every hit’s delivery is that much more overwhelming.
You simply could not miss this evening in Zagreb. Devoted fans knew that, and they were there. So was everyone looking to reconnect with the nostalgia of the eighties — a decade that felt loose, carefree, brimming with hope and big dreams. Sure, a large chunk of the crowd had grown older alongside Simple Minds and had spent their teenage years living through the eighties. But it was encouraging to see that a load of younger people had shown up too, which means interest — not just in Simple Minds, but in those unforgettable times when bands still achieved commercial success naturally, on the strength of their own creative talents — is on the rise again. An ultimate, spectacular concert packed with classic hits and singles on a three-hour carousel of soaring atmospheric intensity and pure magic! Simple Minds didn’t reach beyond 1995 and the album »Good News From The Next World« in choosing their setlist — which is perhaps exactly why the sense of reliving the eighties was all the more intense. And we’re talking about the year 2022. Despite Kerr and Burchill’s advancing years — who by all rights should probably be at home babysitting grandchildren — the band has not yet said their last word. There’s every reason to expect Simple Minds will be hitting the road again come next spring. In the meantime, we wait for the new album. There were still plenty of hits left in the tank that evening, and Simple Minds could easily have played another two hours in Zagreb. That conclusion wasn’t hard to reach — not after such intense emotions and impressions, and what was in some sense a feeling of (temporal and spatial) hypnosis that the legendary Glasgow band conjured in us that night.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik & Edita Klemen (nos. 45–47)
Setlist:
Set 1:
1. Act of Love
2. Love Song
3. Let There Be Love
4. Glittering Prize
5. Promised You a Miracle
6. Book of Brilliant Things
7. Mandela Day
8. First You Jump
9. Belfast Child
—approx. 20 min. intermission—
Set 2:
10. Theme for Great Cities
11. King Is White and in the Crowd
12. Waterfront
13. She’s a River
14. Once Upon a Time
15. Someone Somewhere in Summertime
16. See the Lights
17. All the Things She Said
18. Don’t You (Forget About Me)
19. Let It All Come Down
20. New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84)
—encore—
21. Speed Your Love to Me
22. Alive and Kicking
23. Sanctify Yourself
