Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Grado / Diga Nazario Sauro / Italy
Concert date: July 28, 2012
Attendance: 1,500
Ticket price: €35.00
Simple Minds are one of those sonic grandees who carried their musical craft over from the »golden eighties«, the decade that crowned them with huge commercial success, and they have never stopped being active! They are still evolving artistically today. There are still quite a few dinosaurs rolling around on this planet who started their careers in the late seventies, fired up by the punk explosion of the time. At the turn of the eighties they founded the new wave movement, and with a dash of brains added, the post-punk genre too. These are bands that developed an authentic originality in their musical expression, and it’s instantly recognizable. Each went in its own musical direction, which is why the art component is very strong in every one of them. The spectrum of that original authorial expression is wide and hugely rich in message, I’d even say downright provocative. If we leave aside U2, who to this day have been thoroughly licked into shape by every corporation going and lost their art intellect ages ago, and lean only on those (remaining) Simple Minds contemporaries who are still active today, we get the wave of bands from the British Isles, from The Cure to the again-active Ultravox and Kajagoogoo, to Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran and New Order. We can toss in Depeche Mode too, while the US caught the moment with bands like The Cars and (retired) Talking Heads. What they all had in common, besides commercial success in the eighties, was the integration of synthesizers. And each of those bands pulled it off in its own way. To the original »banality« of punk, these lineups added brains and developed a distinctive face of artistry in their musical craft.
Simple Minds, of course, walked their own path of musical preaching among the bands listed. These bands, Simple Minds included, are often marked by a sharp engagement with the rhetoric of pop music in the age of eighties trends. What we back then treated as Simple Minds’ commercial success has, over the years and up to this very day, grown in quality into a cherished work of art expression. And the price of that work only keeps rising with the years.
As part of this year’s “Grado Festival Ospiti d’Autore 2012”, held every year in the little town of Grado on a peninsula in the Gulf of Trieste in Italy, the legendary British new wave rockers Simple Minds stopped by for a show on July 28, 2012. We can safely say the great Simple Minds, a band that has sold over 40 million albums in its career. Their show actually wrapped up this year’s edition of the festival.
The tour was dubbed “5×5 Live” back in February and March of this year, because Simple Minds promised to play five songs from each of their first five albums in the concert repertoire. It wasn’t quite that “heavy” in the end, which means shorter setlists. The “extended” tour for the summer festival shows, renamed »5×5 Live plus Hits«, hit Italy on July 26, 2012 with the band’s first stop in Modena. Two days later Simple Minds arrived in the seaside resort town of Grado, a stone’s throw from the Slovenian border, near the town of Monfalcone.
So Simple Minds dedicated the summer leg of their new European tour as well to promoting the release of the six-CD box set “Simple Minds X5”, which came out via EMI Records on February 20, 2012, and 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 of this release is a compilation of unreleased material and B-sides of released singles.
It’s 9:25 PM when the spectacle kicks off. The place was packed to the rafters. The concert had actually been completely sold out a good month before the event, which confirmed Simple Minds’ incredible popularity in Italy throughout all the years of the band’s activity. That’s partly backed up by Kerr’s permanent move to Sicily, where he has lived for many years as a naturalized Italian in the town of Taormina (one of the songs on the Simple Minds album »Black and White 050505« (2005) takes its title from the town too). There Kerr runs the hotel »Villa Angela« as its owner, with a gorgeous view of the Ionian Sea. That Simple Minds shows in Italy are no cheap gimmick is also proven 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! They managed to fill the local town square to the last corner with a boiling Italian crowd back then too – RockLine report HERE.
The setlist at the Simple Minds show in Grado was truly a dream one, too. It’s precisely the constant shuffling of setlists, even within a single tour, that keeps Simple Minds shows so appealing. From the start to the end of the set, they keep you in check with a magic of their own that only they can create. The dream of every true Simple Minds fanatic comes true in an instant when they find themselves in the band’s 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 without a care, from the first beat and note to the last sonic structure and spotlight beam of this magical evening. The feelings, loaded with emotion, were reminiscent of the ones we experienced in Ljubljana at the show by the “wild boys” of 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 (keyboards) and the newest member of the lineup, the seasoned bassist Ged Grimes, who replaced Eddie Duffy in the Simple Minds ranks in September 2011. Hearing Celebrate and I Travel (»Empires And Dance«, 1980) or Love Song (from the debut »Life in a Day«, 1979) was of course a quiet, sinful dream, and it finally came true. But that was only the beginning of the show.
The band is in exceptional form. You can tell Simple Minds play constantly. Jim Kerr once again grabbed all the attention in an instant, because he’s an outstanding stage figure with fulfilled, chiseled charisma. Not only his voice, recognizable from a mile away, and his vocal approach, but the way he runs the stage show itself, which is defined by a kind of »tribal, personal-meditative singer’s dance«. It rounds off a spontaneous winding made up of a host of relaxed, flowing moves and an almost model-like posture, which emphasize the musician’s sex appeal and incredibly contagious charm, and of course most of the women present were left breathless without any reservations. In this department Kerr is a real contender alongside Bryan Ferry and the sadly prematurely departed INXS singer Michael Hutchence! Kerr repeatedly stepped right up to the edge of the stage and shook hands with fans in the front rows, struck his signature half-crouching, half-kneeling theatrical pose, and wrapped himself in the cable of his mic. At one point Kerr didn’t forget to drop to a kneeling position from which he even lay back onto the stage floor, arms raised in the air. His vocal delivery, of course, keeps up the level of Simple Minds’ preaching, only deepening and upgrading it with maturity. In this galaxy, Kerr is perhaps even the only fitting replacement for Bono in U2! Let’s hope it never comes to that, but still, it’s an interesting thesis. Bono, mind you, can only learn from the finesse of Kerr’s gentlemanliness, or rather stage gentility, in communicating with the audience.
Kerr’s inseparable partner Charlie Burchill is an exceptional guitar master who fascinates with short but concise moves of remarkable flexibility in sonic structures. They are still faithfully triggered today by his white Gretsch “falcon” (we saw one at the start of this July at Kino Šiška, strapped to Billy Duffy’s body – The Cult – RockLine report HERE), as well as by his Gibson Les Pauls. Burchill is a man who, in harmony with keyboardist Gillespie, knows how to give Simple Minds’ music a picturesque ambient element, which sticks closely to the band’s musical hallmark throughout its career. A master of bending guitar tones through a host of sound effects from the guitar synthesizer and generous use of the »sustain« effect, he is simply a great guru of guitar sound manipulation. If we quickly glance at the comparison with U2 again, Burchill is once more the far more sophisticated, provocatively stimulating and more expressively insightful instrumentalist than his exact age-mate, U2’s The Edge. It’s precisely this element of Simple Minds’ music that influenced later generations of musicians, including the one that deepened the post-rock genre (headed by Radiohead). But the contrasting of the Simple Minds sound’s vocabulary isn’t over yet. There’s the whole rhythm section too. It follows the unique rhythms kept up by Mel Gaynor’s firm hand, strongly backed by the rattling pulse of the kick drum. 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 it acts as an extremely contrasting counterweight to Jim Kerr’s trademark vocal. With Kerr’s presence and voice, the bass guitar in fact deepens the very sex appeal of Simple Minds’ music most openly of all.
And all these elements of Simple Minds’ music pushed the contrasting zenith to its peak in Grado that evening. A magnificent get-together with a refined art rock lineup, whose presence completely bewitched the sold-out venue, simply couldn’t be missed.
That the crowd was made of the right stuff was proven by the exceptionally tight interaction with the band even during the lesser-known songs, which for that very reason were the cherry on top of the cake. Waterfront, for instance, drew tremendous ovations and singing along, and no less so the moments when In Trance As Mission, See The Lights or The American came up on stage. The intensity never let up through the 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 clearing for everyone present. The intensity of the collective participation of 1,500 heads kept growing in the closing Someone Somewhere in Summertime and New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84), when the band left the stage. Kerr often needed to do nothing more than point the mic at the audience and leave the choruses to the crowd, only »marking« the more important parts of the melodies himself and so keeping up the basis of a healthy chemistry in the stage execution of the material.
Simple Minds return to the stage as a quartet! So, without the “incorrigible charmer” Jim Kerr! Once again they showcase their exceptional art quality as they begin building a gripping, moody backdrop in the opening minutes of the hit Sanctify Yourself. And then, damn it, it happens: »Woooinkkkkk!!!«, and the band is left without the main PA. The stage goes dumb, the crowd goes dumb. The guys just exchange glances with their heads bowed. Gaynor and Grimes had the hardest time accepting it, tidying up their basic stage gear behind them for a few more moments. It’s an awkward situation in which the band drew the short straw, about the most unpleasant thing that can happen at all when you attend concerts. And this time it wasn’t a bolt from the blue that took the band’s main PA away. I really wonder how the band members fumed in those moments when they had to sit out in the backstage. After a few minutes that crawled by slow as the Mesozoic (the Middle Earth Age), things get sorted out and Simple Minds return. This time with Jim Kerr right away. They pick the show up pretty much exactly where they had to stop it. The crowd comes alive to the sounds of the evergreen Sanctify Yourself, and in a triumphant finish tops it off with Alive And Kicking, impatiently awaited all through the show, which the band saved for the final act. With the final crescendo, Simple Minds get all 1,500 heads to raise their hands and sing the chorus with fervor. The crowd literally drowns out the band in the chorus! I should also mention that Simple Minds had Theme For Great Cities, Glittering Price and Ghost Dancing written down for the encore as well, but it all ended with the folk-anthem-by-now Alive And Kicking.
The greats simply stay great. Concerts confirm that (and also refute it, he he he). The Simple Minds show in Grado was one of those unforgettable nostalgic experiences that charged absolutely everyone at the concert that evening with energy. Jim Kerr fired up the audience even more with comments in Italian, which he had to get used to over time as a freshly baked Sicilian restaurateur. And with properly clipped accent, too, which in the grand total set off further emotional outbursts from the already temperamental Italian crowd. Simple Minds obviously function superbly, which means the relationships within the team are healthy. The energy flux was extraordinary. An exceptional bond in the performance. The working temperature the band builds up on stage is incredible, and the chemistry of its playing is untamedly attractive. Add Kerr’s total immersion and exceptional communication with the audience, the crowd’s abandon, and a guaranteed one-of-a-kind concert adventure is here!
Next time, let’s hope that a tour in support of a new studio album, their 16th overall and announced for 2013, brings them back to Slovenia, where they last played as part of the »Black And White« tour, in Ljubljana on April 8, 2006 – RockLine report HERE. With this show in Grado, Simple Minds remain one of those 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 that will be followed by yet another tour.And another concert visit.
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. Sanctify Yourself
16. Alive And Kicking
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