Simple Minds
Trinity College Dublin
★★★☆☆
The familiar Waterfront bassline ringing out over Trinity College Dublin is akin to a tank rolling across the cricket pitch. While that may well be the groundskeeper’s worst nightmare, it’s the perfect way to kick off a celebratory night in the company of Simple Minds, seasoned pros at this kind of party. “We’re going to have a good time – I can tell already,” Jim Kerr, the band’s frontman, says in his Scottish burr. He turns out to be right.
There are, as every Minds fan knows, two distinct periods to the group’s career. There are the first five albums, on which they were an angular and Eurocentric dance band, and then everything after that thunderous Waterfront bassline first rang out, back in 1984.
It’s that “big music” period, specifically the stadium-tailored Once Upon a Time, from 1985, that they go with on Tuesday night, but it’s music made for punching the open air to, so, aside from the odd grumbler, everybody’s happy.
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After a sparkling Glittering Prize, Oh Jungleland has a guitar sound from Charlie Burchill big enough to devour most of Dublin 2. Kerr gets down on his knees – no mean feat in skinny jeans – and then leans all the way back until he’s horizontal, which is good going for a gent of his years. “Don’t try that at home,” he cautions. “Try it in someone else’s home.”
The same man, giving his all, is down touching hands in the pit for most of Let There Be Love. Then he’s up on the drum riser, but singing from below his boots with a voice that’s lost little if anything over the years, for a welcome run at the title track from the still mesmerising masterpiece New Gold Dream (81/82/83/84), although that subtitle’s reminder that it has been fortysomething years is a bit cruel.
The jangling, echoey guitar intro to Ghost Dancing sounds uncharacteristically thin until the evening’s star player, bassist Ged Grimes – whose fluid lines drive the best moments – joins in to give it some appropriate heft. Kerr, meanwhile, wonders if he’s too old for this stuff, almost goes into Van Morrison’s Gloria before thinking better of it and then reveals this as his favourite song because he gets to sit down.
Next he nips off altogether, possibly a bit flustered from all the lunging he’s been doing, as the band go through Theme for Great Cities. Even though it was released in 1981, this instrumental sounds as if it could have been recorded yesterday, thanks to the ferocious attack of the rhythm section of Grimes and Cherisse Osei, the band’s drummer. She then unleashes that rarest of beasts the drum solo, assaulting with great skill a kit that has more Toms than the Mayo phone book.
After that it’s hits all the way, with the perennial Don’t You (Forget About Me) prompting a mass outbreak of frugging from the crowd. Kerr, who still resembles Liam Brady’s artier brother, milks it for all it’s worth, asking the crowd to sing it in French, Italian and Irish, as “la, la, la” doesn’t require much translation, despite his smiling assertion that it’s a hard song to sing.
By the time they finish with Alive and Kicking, everyone in this admirably up-for-it audience is grinning and roaring along as one. “I could tell you how much Ireland means to us, how much we appreciate it every time we play here, but I think you know that,” Kerr says. “I’ll say it anyway. Thanks for coming to see Simple Minds.” Always a pleasure, never a chore.
