“Keep the Faith” says Jim Kerr on his latest (and now rather rarified) post on the SM Facebook page. Oh, my dear fellow, that ship sailed long ago.
“It’s doesn’t always work like that” he says in general terms of things becoming easier the more you do them. Sometimes it can be “like dragging a wrecked car across town at midnight” – erm, yeah, because that’s a universally experienced simile. I’ll give him credit for coming up with an original one (well, at least I’ve not heard this strange one before). I think the more recognisiable and apt one to have used here might have been “like flogging a dead horse.”
For many a Simple Minds fan, be it through sheer blind loyalty, overt sychophany, or overly optomistic hope – the notion of them being on the verge of releasing new music is an exciting prospect. For me though, the shine faded with the release of Direction of the Heart in 2022. I too was in that flock a few short years ago. In retrospect, I guess the first clue that things were of the “flogging a dead horse” nature should have been the release of ‘Act of Love.’ The band that prides itself with its “we don’t look back, we always move forwards” attitude was once again raiding its back catalogue for something to bring to the world kicking and screaming with renewed vitality. Except, it came across exactly as it was, some guys who were never very punk in the first place resurrecting a song from sounding vaguely punk to not sounding anything like a punk (or even post punk) song. Admittedly it didn’t need to, but it certainly needed more than some eerily weak backing vocals and a load of kiddie synths stuck on it. The only thing left of it was Charlie Burchill’s riff which then lost all of its bite due to Kerr’s weak warblings and the infantile synths.
I loved ‘First You Jump’ especially while I was still in the belief that Jim Kerr knows how to be empathetic. It was a delusion I held onto for the longest time. The song now sounds like a hoodwink and is far too painful to endure.
A friend described ‘Solstice Kiss’ as “Simple Minds by numbers” and I can’t help but understand their point whenever I have the accidental cause to hear it.
‘Who Killed Truth?’ just feels so laced with irony to me now, it genuinely makes me laugh out loud.
Heck, there was even a time I loved ‘Vision Thing.’ I really was under a spell, man!
I’d be intrigued to do a straw poll on any of the SM groups to know how often the “real fans” play the album. How often since its release in October 2022 have they played the album and where, 3.5 years down the line, do they place it in the canon of Simple Minds output? How many would even rate it in their Top 5 SM albums?
Most recently there was “this song is shite” … ahem I mean ‘Your Name in Lights.’ And I can’t help but think if that is the calibre of what Simple Minds have coming then … no thank you.
I don’t know if I have said it recently, most likely not because I try to avoid even discussing Simple Minds these days which I know is a pretty bad confession for a website that I run under the guise of a Simple Minds fan site, but I don’t listen to them at the moment. I was about to say “any more” but changed it to “at the moment” at the last second. I do hope there will come a time when I will willingly listen to Simple Minds’ music once more.
I have heard some stuff lately. Either tracks played by Ronnie McGhie on his radio shows or by the odd track slipping through the cracks on Spotify listening. Ronnie recently played ‘Space.’ I can’t tell you how much I used to love that song. It always felt like a piece from Jim Kerr to me which it obviously couldn’t have been – I mean I wasn’t even a fan when the song was composed. But it spoke to me. He spoke to me through it. It used to be painful to listen to it. A different kind of pain – a beautiful pain – an anguish. When Ronnie played it on his show this time I felt indifferent to it. It didn’t feel painful. I didn’t feel anything at all. It was just a song. Only afterwards, feeling so unaffected by it did I think “Woah! That was not meant to be like that. I really am over this band.”
In the wee hours of this morning I couldn’t sleep so I put the Spotify DJ on. Eventually it started to play the odd SM song. It played ’20th Century Promised Land’ and declared to myself that I had missed it. Some time later it played ‘Someone Somewhere in Summertime’ and I almost went to skip the song but decided to let it play. I said yes, the music is exquisite and bloody hell I can see why there were some critics saying that Jim Kerr sounded like Bryan Ferry on the record. Aye, I hear it now. Then, lastly, the DJ played ‘Seeing Out The Angel’ and initially I kept saying let it be the instrumental, let it be the instrumental! Then his voice appeared. Bugger! But I was in a dwam and I drifted back off to sleep, soothed by the music and his voice like I had been so many – countless – times in the past. It used to be the best tonic. Oh, how I loved them. How I loved him!
People say “you need to seperate the art from the artist” but if your whole love of the art was predominantly pinned on the belief that the artist’s whole heart was in it, that everything of substance that they were was woven into their art and then that becomes painfully demystified, then that seperation is nigh on impossible to achieve.
But I will at least try to have faith in that. “Keep the faith” in the notion that although I don’t give a flying fig about any new Simple Minds material and I may not feel much affinity to the more recent output from the band, that one day I’ll be able to get back to avidly listening to the stuff that I did once love more than anything in the world.
And to those fans out there able to “keep the faith” about the new stuff coming? I hope it meets your expectations or even more so surpasses them.