Over the decades, Scottish musicians have made many classic, cult or under-appreciated albums that have stood the test of time. Today, we look back at Simple Minds' UK chart-topping album, Sparkle in the Rain.

WHEN Simple Minds released their sixth studio album, Sparkle in the Rain, in early February 1984, it won much critical acclaim. Not every reviewer, however, was blown away.

Some of them sniped, for example, that the Glasgow band had become pale shadows of U2. The two bands had become good friends ever since the Minds guitarist, Charlie Burchill, had met Bono, The Edge, Larry Mullen Jnr and Adam Clayton at a north of England radio station in 1980. Over time, each group had a tangible influence on the other.

Simple Minds’ new album, a follow-up to 1982’s groundbreaking New Gold Dream 81-82-83-84, was, moreover, produced by Steve Lillywhite, who had produced U2’s first three studio albums: Boy, October, and War. The associations were too much for some critics. “It should be no surprise that Simple Minds don’t, on the evidence of this LP, know precisely where they are — to varying degrees they never have done”, began the review in the NME. “Since Empires & Dance [1980], they’ve seemed to be staggering ever forward towards an unspecified but entrancing final goal; staring wide-eyed at their surroundings, amazed both by their success and by the wild poetic fission of sound they seemed to have struck on.

Read more

“Perhaps it was inevitable that the flirtation with perfection that was New Gold Dream would leave them struggling to re-establish their identities. What is disturbing, though, is that in this process they appear to have fallen under the unfortunate delusion that they actually are U2”.

Another prominent British music magazine dismissed Lillywhite’s “preposterously bouffant production style”. As for the album itself, “it was all so arch” and “reeks of calculation”.

In Canada, a critic at the Toronto Globe and Mail said: “….once you slide past the apparent surface monotony, this Scottish band’s kaleidoscopic, poetically charged Doors-meets-Roxy [Music] grandeur can reach a dazzling level of emotional intensity. So, what do we do with this record then? Producer Steve Lillywhite, just known as a guitarist’s producer, has pushed an impressive keyboard band toward something that suggests the overwrought martial bluster of Big Country…”

Some reviewers also carped that the Glasgow band had moved away from their ‘art-pop’ beginnings to the point where they could fill huge stadia.

Simple Minds, who had played its first gig under that name at Satellite City, above the Glasgow Apollo, in January 1978, had released several albums – Life in a Day, Real to Real Cacophony, Empires & Dance, and Sons & Fascination/Sister Feelings Call – between 1979 and 1981. These, as Kerr acknowleged in a Daily Telegraph interview last December, were “the cooler, blurrier, druggy art school ones that get all the acclaim. Everybody shouts about them, but no ——- bought them”. Sons & Fascination/Sister Feelings Call did, however, get to number 11 in the UK charts.

The band then found what Kerr describes as “a wee bit of focus”, as well as a persuasive new sound. New Gold Dream peaked at number three in the UK, was a commercial success abroad, and gave rise to three Top 40 singles – Promised You a Miracle, Glittering Prize and Someone Somewhere in Summertime.

Read more On the Record

Sparkle in the Rain was the work of Kerr, Burchill, bassist Derek Forbes, Mick MacNeil on keyboards and the newest arrival, drummer Mel Gaynor. It went to number one in the UK, achieving double platinum status, and charted in numerous countries overseas, while three of its tracks – Waterfront, Speed Your Love to Me, Up on the Catwalk – all went Top Thirty in Britain.

Those songs, and Book of Brilliant Things, together form an impassioned, intoxicating, skyscraping start to the album. They sound great in record: live, in concert, they really got crowds up on their feet, as they  do to this day. “Name another album with 4 better tracks on side 1”, is how one ardent fan puts it on Facebook.

Speed Your Love to Me, writes Graeme Thomson in Themes for Great Cities, his book about Simple Minds, is an “extraordinarily affecting synthesis of power, emotion, dynamism, melody and innovation”, while the studio recording of Waterfront – a show-stopper that the band had opened with at an event at Dublin’s Phoenix Park the previous summer, headlined by U2 – is, in Thomson’s words, “immense”. With Gaynor’s powerhouse drumming integral to all the arrangements, he adds, it’s little wonder that almost every track on Sparkle in the Rain is “launched with all the subtlety of a ground-to-air missile”.

The video for Waterfront, incidentally, was shot at the Barrowland Ballroom in November 1983, which had just reopened. (An audio recording of a Minds gig there the following February unfolds over two discs of a 4-CD box marking the 40th anniversary of the parent album). 

Brian Hogg, in his liner notes to the band’s Glittering Prize 81/92 compilation, makes the point that Sparkle in the Rain captures the sheer bravura of their in-concert sound.

Other tracks range from East at Easter and ‘C’ Moon Cry Like a Baby to a cover of Lou Reed’s Street Hassle. Every song has its enthusiasts amongst the present-day fanbase, though Kerr himself has voiced disappointment over the second half of the album, telling Thomson that he thought Lillywhite’s production was “a bit one-dimensional” and that the record “really ran out of steam”.

Looking back on it after 40 years, however, the album's power remains undimmed, especially in that self-confident swagger of the opening four songs. It is a significant calling-card. An article in Record Collector in 2015 puts it thus: “Critics accuse [the album] of being the beginning of the era when Simple Minds’ material became bombastic and insincere, ignoring the masterful mix of sounds, ideas and influences on display here. As if the band should care… This proved the perfect springboard for their next, even more successful chapter”.

Indeed. In 1985, surfing the crest of a wave, the band played Live Aid, topped the US Billboard charts with Don’t You (Forget About Me), and saw their next album, Once Upon a Time, top the UK lists; it also yielded such hit singles as Alive and Kicking and All the Things She Said. Three of their subsequent albums all reached number one in this country.

It’s not known, at this distance of time, exactly which critics Jim Kerr is referring to in a Facebook post a week or so ago. But the memory of them still seems to rankle.

In the post he alludes to Bob Dylan’s controversial tour of 1966, when he was barracked by fans who were irate that he had ‘gone electric’. Sparkle in the Rain, Kerr said, had similarly met “boos and ‘rotten tomatoes’ on release … from critics who mostly gave it a resounding thumbs down. The main fault apparently being that the sound of the music bore little resemblance to the sultry sound of our previous album ‘New Gold Dream 81-82-83-84.’

“Simple Minds’ crime therefore? With no thought or desire to repeat what we had done before - we were also guilty - of doing what we wanted to do.  As opposed to what was expected.

“And how did I feel as a result of that reaction? I didn’t need to stifle my laughter! Neither would you, knowing that your new record was headed for the top spots in more countries than most people will ever get the chance to visit. Decades later I’m humbled still in the knowledge that a whole generation of young kids, believing in us, had seemingly run out and bought ‘Sparkle In The Rain’ immediately on release!

“Meanwhile, not much later, very few of those critics were still making a living from writing. It’s a brutal game that we are in sometimes…But what a life it’s been!”

The 40th anniversary of Sparkle in the Rain is being marked by the release of special edition boxsets on CD or vinyl on November 22. Full details at simpleminds.com
Next week: High Land, Hard Rain, by Aztec Camera