Dreams, Dates and Global Dilemmas

I have been having some strange dreams of late. A few nights back I had a dream that I was with a friend. This friend I have never met in person and, of course, it was the music of Simple Minds that brought us together. I really admire this person greatly. She has such self-belief and … I’m struggling to find the right single word that would sum it up. All these others flashed through my mind, like; tenacity, strength – bingo! I just found it! Resolve! She has resolve, a resoluteness that I work hard to try and attain for myself.

Anyway, for the purposes of this post, let’s call her Bea. So, Bea and I were in a shopping mall together. We were just mooching about and window shopping when it became apparent that something was going on with the roof of this shopping mall. It was quite rainy and windy outside. I said to Bea that I was worried about the stability of the roof when water started gushing in. The roof was collapsing and we needed to get ourselves out of the shopping mall FAST! We hastily made our way to the front entrance of the mall but so many people had rushed that way that it was just blocked with people. There wasn’t going to be a quick escape through that exit.

Suddenly Bea saw what looked like a kind of laundry chute – like the kind of thing you see portrayed in films that seem to be in American houses and hotels, etc. We decided to open the hatch and go down the chute. It plunged us deep down into the ground and just kept on going and going. First deep down and then kind of levelled off a bit but still going deeper downwards. We could sense the water coming down the tunnel behind us and knew it wouldn’t be long before it caught up with us. Just as it started to get to us, we could see that we were nearing the exit. The momentum of our slide was beginning to slow and we could see daylight. We reached the end and the chute had taken us about a mile or so away from the location of the shopping mall to an industrial site – almost like an airport. That’s how it felt to me in the dream. Like we had arrived at the grounds of an airport. There were emergency service vehicles all around the exit of the chute, like they were waiting for us to arrive.

Really weird. I’ve never had a dream like it. I wasn’t super panicky or anything like that. Probably reassured by being with Bea. I mean, I was anxious and worried but not in the way I would be in real life. It was really odd. I mean it had a good ending. We survived!

Then last night, I had a weirdly ‘on topic’ dream. I had a dream about Simple Minds, which is happening more frequently at the moment than it ever did during the most ‘manic’ phases of my fandom. And, beyond it being topical that it was a dream about SM – it was about SM NOW…and I mean RIGHT NOW. In the dream they were in Australia…not sure exactly where. Maybe Sydney or Melbourne…that’s by the by anyway. They were performing a gig and it was being televised. I must have been using some VPN or something to get access to watching it because I was going to watch it live here in the UK.

Be warned, sycophants, all my prejudices are going to come to the fore here, okay?

So, the concert starts and Jim’s looking a little bit more portly than usual. He’d been having a good time down there – gastronomically speaking, you know. And he was doing his usual running about the stage…not of old, but how he is in the present day – which is still spritely enough, for sure. But he was struggling! Got almost immediately out of breath, was shouty and out-of-tune. I was cringing. Then he introduced the band and there were people on the stage I didn’t recognise. Like, there were two or three other people on the stage and he’s gesturing to them saying ‘this is so-and-so’ and I was saying out loud ‘who the fuck’s that?’ I remember seeing Charlie, Cherisse, Sarah, and the new dude Erik but then I was like who the fuck are the rest of these people. I think Ged may have been there as well, I’m not sure. I think he was.

Anyway, so after the first song which wasn’t a song I even recognised (what? I know every Simple Minds song there is, so I don’t know what the fuck he was slaughtering – but he was slaughtering it, okay), the TV ‘host’ of the concert starts waffling over the top of the coverage saying ‘next up the band are going to be performing the title track from their 1981 album, Sons and Fascination’. I was so filled with excitement, I couldn’t believe it. I was sitting there praying, thinking ‘please, Jim, don’t fuck this up! Please sing it really well and remember the words. For the love of God, REMEMBER THE WORDS!’ But…there’s no Jim on the stage. He’s disappeared, and one of these people I don’t know starts singing it! The words are totally different. The tune was the same but the words were not the words to SAF. I was starting to lose my shit at this point.

Then there was another song. Can’t remember what it was…or even if it was one I should have known. Then there’s a break. Then the TV host says, ‘We’ll be back with Simple Minds later.’ And, I was like….’but they’ve only done three songs. And Jim was only on the stage for one of them. What the fuck?’ Then I came round from the dream, scratching my head like, what in the fuck was that about? Why am I dreaming about them like this? What has happened to my band? I felt really unsettled by it. It was strange. I don’t know.

It just felt like my subconscious was letting me know how important I still find this stuff. How important this band still is to me. Perhaps it may have stemmed from doing work on ‘The Project’ yesterday and thinking about what I’m going to do with this blog in the interim. Or it was merely the fact that yesterday marked it being just one week until the ‘Global Tour’ starts. A ‘global’ tour that, so far, is only taking in 17 countries – 20 if you split the United Kingdom up into its individual countries. The total number of countries that are recognised as members of the UN is 193, and there are 2 more with non-member observer status – so that’s 195 countries in the world. And Simple Minds are currently booked to play in, let’s be generous and break up the UK, TWENTY of those ONE-HUNDRED AND NINTY-FIVE. That is barely 10% of the recognised countries of the world.

So, okay. Let’s be kind here and think…if they’re not referring to it as ‘Global’ in terms of the number of countries they are going to be performing in, then let’s look at the number of dates/shows of the tour. So far there are 60 shows listed (59 dates, as there are two Sydney shows in one day). They claim it is going to be their most extensive tour since the 80’s. The New Gold Dream Tour was a 120 date tour. Tour Du Monde in 1984 (for Sparkle In The Rain) was a 150 date tour! And I think the Once Upon A Time Tour is somewhere around those two figures as well. So, at a MINIMUM, there should be at least…40 dates to come? Because the last tour in 2022 – discounting the false start of 2020 and the whole Covid-19 affair was 81 dates. Jim has said they’ll be going to South America, Brazil particularly he singled out. So, they would have to do North America too. Perhaps Japan and other SE Asian countries? South Africa? Is there really another 60 dates coming – to bring the tour in line, at least date-wise, with the NGD Tour? I guess only time will tell! These dates are taking time to sort out, it has to be said!

Let’s see what the future holds…
In any case, this stuff is obviously playing on my mind and disturbing my sleep.