Would you rather have two dollars in your pocket or a Simple Minds greatest hits CD in your player? This is the dilemma that recently confronted me at the Fyshwick Market charity stall. My philanthropy got the better of me and I took home the Simple Minds. A lot of thoughts followed. This is the fourth attempt at getting them down. It’s no better than any of the others, but it is short. And it’s the one you’re getting.
1. Simple Minds started off by putting out a few fair to middling albums without ever really standing out during what was, admittedly, a pretty fertile period in UK music.
2. Against all expectations, they came out with the lush, polished, (ahem) glittering “New Gold Dream 81-82-83-84” album, which was, and would remain, their crowning achievement.
3. They released the single “Waterfront”.
4. It all went wrong.
It must be difficult to know how to deal with success if you have been striving for so long for it, but of all the directions they could have gone in, did they really have to turn into a bad imitation of U2? The prisoners at Abu Ghraib must have been grateful to have been spared the ultimate instrument of torture, an endless loop of “Belfast Child”.
But I keep coming back to “Waterfront”, a very strange attempt at a follow-up to a string of hit singles and critical success: more like a collection of unrelated ideas searching for a unifying theme or structure, and failing. A lot of the individual bits sound perfectly okay, but we also had to deal with the bombastic, overblown guitars, and the is-there-a-Bono-in-the-house vocal histrionics, enployed in the service of lyrics that were total nonsense, even by pop music standards. “Waterfront” always left me scratching my head. I’m really none the wiser now, listening to it in the context of the awfulness that followed, but what, I think, continues to fascinate me is how it pinpoints, in a way possibly no other song in rock history does, the precise moment when a band went off the rails.
And in that context, doesn’t it strike you as a rather odd choice as opening track for a greatest-hits collection?
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