Location: Grado / Diga Nazaro Saurio / Italy
Date: July 28, 2012
Simple Minds are one of those sonic heavyweights who carried their musical craft over from the “golden eighties”, the decade that crowned them with huge commercial success, and who never stopped working! They’re still evolving artistically today. There are quite a few rolling dinosaurs left on this planet who started out in the late seventies, inspired by the punk explosion of the time. At the turn of the eighties they founded the new wave movement, and with a dose of brains added, the post-punk genre as well. These are bands that developed a truly authentic, homegrown voice in their musical expression, and you recognize it instantly. Each went in its own musical direction, so the art component is very strong in every one of them. The spectrum of originality in their songwriting is wide, rich in message and, I’d even say, downright provocative. If we leave out U2, who by now have been thoroughly licked smooth by every corporation going and who sold off their art intellect long ago, and stick only to Simple Minds’ peers who are still active today, we’re talking about a wave of bands from the British Isles, from The Cure to the reunited Ultravox and Kajagoogoo, to Duran Duran and New Order, and we can throw in Depeche Mode too, while the US caught the moment with bands like The Cars and the (retired) Talking Heads. Their common ground, alongside the commercial success of the eighties, was the integration of synthesizers. And every one of those bands pulled that off in its own way. To the original “banality” of punk music they added brains, and developed a distinctive face of artistry in their musical craft.
Simple Minds, of course, walked their own path of musical preaching. What marks this band is a sharp-edged engagement with the rhetoric of pop music, in the age of the trendy impulses of the eighties. What we back then treated as Simple Minds’ commercial success has, over the years and up to this day, grown in quality into a treasured work of art expression. And the price of that work only keeps rising.
As part of this year’s “Grado Festival Ospiti d’Autore 2012”, held every year in the small town of Grado, on a peninsula in the Gulf of Trieste in Italy, the legendary British new wave rockers Simple Minds took the stage on July 28, 2012. We can safely say the great Simple Minds, a band that has sold over 40 million albums in its career! Simple Minds’ show was in fact the closing act of this year’s edition of the festival.
This past February and March the tour was dubbed “5×5 Live”, because Simple Minds promised to play five songs from each of their first five albums in the live repertoire. It wasn’t quite that “severe”, though, which means shorter setlists. The “5×5 Live plus Hits” tour hit Italy on July 26, 2012 with the band’s first stop in Modena, and two days later Simple Minds arrived at the seaside resort of Grado, a stone’s throw from the Slovenian border, near the town of Monfalcone (Tržič).
So for the summer leg of their new European tour, too, Simple Minds dedicated themselves to promoting the six-disc CD box set “Simple Minds X5”, released via EMI Records on February 20, 2012, which contains remastered versions of the band’s first five studio albums: “Life In A Day”, “Real To Real Cacophony”, “Empire And Dance”, “Sons And Fascination/Sister Feelings Call” and “New Gold Dream (81, 82, 83, 84)”. The sixth CD in the set is a compilation of unreleased material and B-sides of released singles.
It’s 9:25 PM when the spectacle kicks off. The venue is packed to the rafters, and a concert that sold out completely a good month in advance confirmed just how hugely popular Simple Minds are in Italy, something they’ve enjoyed throughout the band’s years of activity, and something partly backed up by Kerr’s permanent home in Sicily. He’s lived there for many years as a naturalized Italian, in the town of Taormina (one of the songs on the album »Graffiti Soul« (2009) even bears that name), where he owns and runs the hotel »Villa Angela«, with a gorgeous view of the Ionian Sea. That Simple Minds concerts in Italy are no cheap joke is also shown by the RockLine report from August 3, 2010, when the legends of new wave pop art rock sound played the little town of Spilimbergo near Udine, where they likewise filled the town square with a boiling Italian crowd right down to the last corner – RockLine report HERE.
The setlist was a real dream. Again. It’s precisely the constant shuffling of the setlists, even within a single tour, that keeps going to Simple Minds shows so appealing. From the start to the end of the set, they hold you in check with a peculiar magic that only they can create. The dream of every true Simple Minds fanatic comes true in an instant the moment you find yourself in their very own world of live re-creation of the Simple Minds musical universe. The front rows were filled with fired-up forty-something women who turned into giddy teenagers and ate out of Kerr’s and the crew’s hands, carefree, from the first beat and note to the last sonic structure and spotlight beam of this magical evening. The feelings, charged with emotion, were reminiscent of those we experienced in Ljubljana at the gig of the “wild boys” Duran Duran a good two weeks ago – RockLine report HERE.
Simple Minds took the stage as a five-piece: Jim Kerr (vocals), Charlie Burchill (guitar), Mel Gaynor (drums), Andy Gillespie, and the band’s newest member, seasoned bassist Ged Grimes, who replaced Eddie Duffy in the Simple Minds ranks in September 2011. Ever hearing Celebrate, I Travel (»Empires And Dance«, 1980) or Love Song (from the debut studio album »Life in a Day«, 1979) was of course a quiet, guilty dream, and it finally came true. But that was only the beginning of the show.
The band is in great shape. You can tell Simple Minds play all the time. Jim Kerr once again grabbed all the attention in an instant, since he’s an outstanding stage figure with a fulfilled, chiseled charisma. It’s not just his instantly recognizable voice and vocal approach, but the way he runs the stage show itself, which features a kind of “tribal, personal-meditative singer’s dance”, a spontaneous swaying made up of a whole constellation of improvised moves, an almost model-like posture that highlights the musician’s sex appeal and his hugely infectious charm, which of course left most of the women in the crowd breathless. On that score Kerr is a real contender alongside Bryan Ferry and the sadly, far too early departed INXS singer Michael Hutchence! Kerr repeatedly stepped right to the edge of the stage and shook hands with the fans in the front rows, struck his trademark half-crouching, half-kneeling theatrical pose, and wrapped himself in the cable of the mic. At one point Kerr even dropped to his knees and then lay back all the way onto the stage floor, arms raised in the air. His vocal delivery, of course, keeps up the Simple Minds standard and only deepens and builds on it with maturity. In this galaxy Kerr might even be the only fitting replacement for Bono in U2! Although Bono could only learn from the refinement of Kerr’s gentlemanliness, really his stage gentility, in how he talks to the crowd.
Kerr’s inseparable partner Charlie Burchill is an exceptional guitar master, fascinating with short but pithy moves of remarkable flexibility in the sonic structures triggered by his white Gretsch Falcon (we saw one of those strapped to Billy Duffy of The Cult at Kino Šiška at the start of this July), as well as his Gibson Les Pauls. Burchill is a man who, in harmony with keyboardist Gillespie, knows how to give Simple Minds’ music a vivid ambient element that clings tightly to the band’s musical output throughout its career. A master of bending guitar tones through a whole constellation of effects, using a guitar synthesizer and generous amounts of sustain, he is a great guru of guitar sound manipulation, once again far more sophisticated, provocatively stimulating and expressively perceptive than U2’s The Edge, his contemporary. It’s exactly this element of Simple Minds’ music that influenced later generations of musicians, including those who deepened later elements of the post-rock genre, led by Radiohead. And the contrasting of expression isn’t finished yet. There’s also the whole rhythm line. It follows the unique rhythms kept up by Mel Gaynor’s strong hand, firmly backed by the rattling pulse of the bass pedal. In fact the bass line is often the creator of the basic melodic forms in filling out the spectrum of the band’s sonic picture, and in many cases serves as an exceptionally contrasting counterweight to Jim Kerr’s trademark vocal. In fact, alongside Kerr’s presence and voice, it quite openly deepens the sex appeal of Simple Minds’ music itself.
And all these elements reached an extremely amplified, contrasting peak in Grado that evening, and along with it came yet another magnificent get-together with this refined art rock band, whose presence completely enchanted the sold-out venue.
That the crowd was made of the right stuff was proven by the tight interaction with the band even during the lesser-known songs, which, precisely because of that, were the cherry on top of the cake. Waterfront, for instance, drew massive ovations and singalongs, and no less so did the moments when In Trance As Mission, See The Lights and The American followed one another on stage. The intensity never let up through the whole show. The performance of the mega hit Don’t You (Forget About Me) heralded the closing concert crescendo, with hair standing on end and airways cleared all around. The intensity of the collective participation of 1,500 heads kept climbing through the closing Someone Somewhere in Summertime and New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84), as the band left the stage. Many times all Kerr had to do was point the mic at the crowd and leave the choruses to the audience, while he merely “marked” the more important parts of the tunes, keeping up the basic healthy chemistry of the stage execution of the material.
Simple Minds return to the stage as a quartet without the incorrigible ladies’ man Jim Kerr, and show off their exceptional art quality as they start building a superb atmospheric backdrop in the opening minutes of the hit Sanctify Yourself. And what do you know! It happens: »Woooinkkkkk!!!«, and the band is left without the main PA. The stage goes silent, the crowd goes silent. The guys just exchange glances with heads bowed. Gaynor and Grimes had the hardest time coming to terms with it, still tidying up the basic stage gear behind them for a few moments. It’s an awkward situation where the band drew the short straw, about the nastiest thing that can happen when you go to gigs. And this time it was no bolt from the blue. I’d really love to know how the band members fumed in those moments, forced into standstill backstage. After a few minutes that crawled by like the Mesozoic, things get sorted and Simple Minds come back. This time with Jim Kerr. They pick the show up pretty much right where they had to stop it. The crowd comes alive to the sounds of the evergreen Sanctify Yourself, and then, in a triumphant finish, builds on it with Alive And Kicking, the song everyone had been impatiently waiting for all night, which the band saved for the final act and the closing crescendo, getting all 1,500 heads to raise their hands and sing the chorus with fervor. I should also mention that Simple Minds had Themes Of Great Cities, Glittering Price and Ghost Dancing written down for the encore, but it ended with the folk-anthem Alive And Kicking.
The greats stay great. Concerts confirm that (and sometimes disprove it too, hehehe). The Simple Minds show in Grado was one of those unforgettable nostalgic experiences that charged everyone at the gig that evening with energy. Jim Kerr fired up the crowd even more with comments in Italian, which he, as a freshly baked Sicilian hotelier, has had to get used to over time. And with correctly clipped accents, too, which added up to extra emotional outbursts from the already temperamental Italian crowd. Simple Minds obviously work brilliantly together, which means the relationships in the camp are healthy. The energy flux was extraordinary. An exceptional bond in the playing, an outstanding working temperature and untamed, magnetic chemistry. Add Kerr’s total immersion and superb communication with the crowd, plus the audience’s wildness, and a guarantee of a one-of-a-kind concert adventure was by no means missing! Next time, let’s hope a tour in support of the new studio album, their 16th overall and announced for 2013, brings them to Slovenia again, where they last played on the »Black And White« tour on April 8, 2006 – RockLine report HERE. With this show in Grado, Simple Minds remain one of the great bands of retro eighties nostalgia, graced by the exceptional charisma of art culture. Over the years it only gains in grandeur and in the sophistication of subtle musical expression. So we can’t wait for the new Simple Minds studio album! And it will surely be followed by yet another tour.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist:
1. I Travel
2. Love Song
3. Celebrate
4. Waterfront
5. In Trance as Mission
6. This Fear of Gods
7. Hunter and the Hunted
8. The American
9. Big Sleep
10. See The Lights
11. 70 Cities as Love Brings the Fall
12. Don’t You (Forget About Me)
13. Someone Somewhere in Summertime
14. New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84)
—encore—
15. Theme For Great Cities
16. Sanctify Yourself
17. Glittering Prize
18. Alive and Kicking
19. Ghostdancing / Gloria (Them cover)
