It's music, Jim, but not as we knew it........

I used to be a huge Simple Minds fan. I last saw them in concert a couple of years ago, and they are still one of the best live bands I have seen. I used to love the huge, expansive sound they had, with the weird and wonderful chord sequences.



When I was younger, and and in a band, we all used to spend
ages trying to play the chords in the latest Simple Minds single. They were always impossible to duplicate - we were convinced that Mick Macneil, the Minds' keyboard player, had an extra few fingers.
I often used to find our (extremely talented) keyboard player slumped over his DX7,
sobbing 'It doesn't exist, it just doesn't f***ing exist'.


It was those magic chords that gave Simple Minds' music its wonderful, other-worldly quality, and as soon as Mick left the band, the magic left the music. I tried to like the next few albums, but they just didn't have 'it' for me. They slipped another album out last October, which I heard a track from the other day, and well, it wasn't a happy experience.

I just love the Minds so much, and it grieves me not to like anything they do, but this song was really just pants. For those of you who have heard the album, it was 'Dolphins', which contained such memorable lyrics as 'Dolphins swim around'. Weeeeell, yep, they do, but is that the most profound comment you can make about them? Apparently not, as we go on to hear Jim Kerr warbling that 'Dolphins drag me down'. What, literally? Metaphorically? Either way, it was starting to leave me cold, and the music wasn't much better.

Later fans may not agree with me, and certainly I saw on the web that someone had been so moved by the song that they had made their own tribute video to it, so maybe I'm just being picky. Or maybe I just remember better days, when their music made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, for all the right reasons.

It crossed my mind that maybe they were coming up with such dreadful stuff to try and lure Mick out of hiding. I sincerely hope it works. Mick, if you're out there, please come back before things get any worse. At the very least, you could always mail them a couple of chords......