Release date: 6 February
Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Not in 1984, but my next-door neighbour Richie had several of the group’s earlier albums, and someone else made me a tape of Sparkle in the Rain a few years later.
It was compulsory in 1984 to compare Simple Minds with U2, whether to dismiss both groups, or to elevate one of the two above the other. For example, Don Watson’s review of Sparkle in the Rain in the NME on 11 February has a splendid pun for its headline: ‘Give the Kerr a Bono’:
Perhaps it was inevitable that the flirtation with perfection that was [Simple Minds’s previous album] ‘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. … in recent releases [singer Jim] Kerr and Bono seem to have merged into some form of common entity.
First we saw Bono crouched in Kerr-like position on the cover of ‘Blood Red Sky’ (a Simple Minds title, if ever I heard one); now we see Simple Minds burying their subtle power of inspiration in the percussive huff and guitar grumble of U2 producer Steve Lillywhite. On occasions the result is a heaving and uncharacteristically self-celebratory affair in which, instead of carrying the listener upward, Simple Minds dump power chords on them from a great height. In its most affecting moments, though, it’s the grace of Simple Minds sound which saves the band from the ravages of the inelegant production.
Colin Irwin’s Melody Maker review was much more positive. Tellingly, the U2 comparisons here are, while still present, an afterthought, delivered in passing:
Electrifyingly determined, exhilaratingly [enormous], and so totally sure of themselves that it wounds, Simple Minds have come up with a stunner. They don’t mess around with [platitudes], they don’t waste their time on [aspirations], they just steam right in, sending misconceptions and reservations fleeing for mercy as they obliterate all opposition. You can’t stay non-committal for long listening to these boys. …
The ebullient “Up On The Catwalk”, all jangling guitars and crashing chords, and the superb singles “Waterfront” and “Speed Your Love To Me” represent the more traditional rock end of the band, but swirling keyboards also play an influential role in the mountainous drama “Book Of Brilliant Things” … [which] is rich, evocative and mighty – shades of U2 with its almost religious portent, while Kerr’s relatively restrained vocals still wield that overwhelming sense of purpose and destiny that at the end of the day always rises to the surface.
As these reviews suggest, there are several possible lines of comparison between Simple Minds and U2, beginning with the producer of Sparkle in the Rain, Steve Lillywhite, who also helmed U2’s first three albums. In fact, the sound most closely associated with his work from this period is not, as this track record might suggest, a guitar effect, but rather a technique for recording the drums, originally invented for Peter Gabriel’s third solo album in 1980, which Lillywhite also produced (the drummer was Phil Collins – credit for the recording innovation is disputed). One of my protagonists in The Angels of L19 describes this technique while listening to the Gabriel album:
[It] was recorded with two microphones: one close to the drum kit, the other farther away to capture the echo in the room. The sound from the drum lasts about half a second; the echo has a longer half-life as it bounces around the walls. A machine called a noise gate shuts off the room mic when the volume on the close mic drops below a certain threshold. So the sound’s multiplied, but there’s no natural decay: the echo’s chopped off.
Gated reverb.
This effect, in a more exaggerated form, is all over 80s stadium rock. It accounts for the ‘big’ sound of the drums on these records, a sound which is also, simultaneously, somehow flattened and compressed. It’s very noticeable on Springsteen’s Born in the USA from 1984, for example, and throughout Sparkle in the Rain:
It’s most apparent on the snare- and kick-drum sounds I think, the ones you hit with the hardest impact (and indeed I suspect it doesn’t work as well on tom-toms).
Sparkle in the Rain certainly represents a move towards a bigger sound for Simple Minds – perhaps also towards more conventional song structures (though they’d already shifted in that direction on their previous album, which featured their first two hit singles). For those more enamoured of the group’s earlier, experimental phase, Sparkle in the Rain therefore marks the point when they succumbed to bloated grandiosity, a direction rewarded when they hit it big after ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ was included on the Pretty in Pink soundtrack the following year. I follow the alternate line of thought, in which this is their last great album: its widescreen sound opening onto a world of excitement and possibility.
If Lillywhite was by this point associated with guitar bands, Simple Minds don’t actually fit that description: guitarist Charlie Burchill is part of an ensemble in which keyboards are arguably more important, and he usually plays what amounts to rhythm guitar. Mel Gaynor on drums and Derek Forbes on bass were also very talented musicians and their instruments are just as much a part of the Simple Minds sound.
Another point of comparison with U2 might be religious imagery and spiritual yearning. The Simple Minds album before this one, New Gold Dream (81/82/83/84) had a cross and a sacred heart on the cover, and single 'Promised You a Miracle' declared that ‘Belief is a beauty thing’, but, unlike Bono, singer Jim Kerr was uncomfortable in being identified as a Christian on this basis, and the lyrics for Sparkle in the Rain retreat even from these vague allusions to an entirely generalised invocation of awe, which may not even be spiritual. ‘Up on the Catwalk’ reels off an entertaining montage of inspirational figures, which includes Martin Luther, but also Nastassja Kinski and Robert De Niro. The imagined apotheosis here is entirely material: fame or celebrity. Or more specifically, perhaps the rush and ersatz communion of performing onstage, which Kerr certainly seemed to relish. By implicitly comparing himself to a fashion model, Kerr presents performance as something one does with the body as well as the voice – and his stage presence and mannerisms bore this out.
Simple Minds and U2. If we cast our net wider, we might also make comparisons to Big Country, whose first two albums were also produced by Lillywhite. And If we add some non-Lillywhite bands – The Waterboys, The Alarm, maybe the neo-psychedelic Liverpool groups – we have a roster of what is sometimes called ‘the big music’ after the song by The Waterboys of the same name on their 1984 album, A Pagan Place. All these groups came from Britain’s Celtic margins, or from Ireland. And they weren’t just ‘big’: they were reaching for the transcendent and the sublime. This might suggest the Romantic tradition: an engagement with nature, with weather and landscape. Certainly this is there in Big Country’s first album, The Crossing (‘Fields of Fire’, ‘Harvest Home’, ‘The Storm’). But their second album was called Steeltown, and this also points to something distinctive about Sparkle in the Rain.
The titular phrase comes from the song ‘Book of Brilliant Things’ – it’s tempting to read this as an allusion to the Bible, but the lyrics suggest a more literal interpretation: illuminated by light. What kind of light?
I thank you for the shadows
It takes two or three to make company
I thank you for the lightning that shoots up and sparkles in the rain
Some say this could be the great divide
Some day some of them say that our hearts will beat
Like the wheels of the fast train, all around the world
Insofar as this is a landscape at all, it’s not a natural one: it’s a cityscape, animated by global transport networks of trains and aeroplanes. There’s certainly a lot of rain in this world (from the album title on down), but things ‘sparkle in the rain’ at night when the city is lit by streetlights – which also create the deep shadows summoned in the first lines of this lyrical excerpt – so perhaps the ‘lightning’ here is actually a shorting bulb or cable. Similarly, the ‘Waterfront’ in the album’s lead single is not the same thing as a riverbank: rather, it’s a place where ships dock and unload.
All this is not Romantic then, so much as Modernist, even Futurist. Not an attachment to place, but an attachment to movement as an end in itself (‘Speed Your Love To Me’), and to experience mediated by technology (‘Thank you for the pictures of living in the beautiful black and the white’) – compare ‘I Travel’ and ‘Thirty Frames a Second’ on the group’s earlier album, Empires and Dance.
The lyrics are often rather simplistic, but they are treated as raw material for incantation: repeated over and over to acquire a faster and faster momentum, both forwards and upwards – particularly the ‘Just my imagination, You go to my head’ couplet on ‘Speed Your Love to Me’. The ‘wheels of the fast train’ on ‘Book of Brilliant Things’ are also summoned mimetically in the music after Kerr repeats the phrase later in the song (from 3:30), and for me this is the key passage on the album:
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