Music has such a capacity to uplift, to inspire, to recognise, to connect, and Graeme Thomson’s latest book explores how the work of Simple Minds captures those possibilities. Here, in the introduction to Themes for Great Cities: A New History of Simple Minds, he ponders on the band’s legacy.

Extract taken from Themes for Great Cities: A New History of Simple Minds
By Graeme Thomson
Published by Constable

Some Promised Land

There is a much-quoted maxim usually attributed to the late Scottish writer, artist, activist and polymath Alasdair Gray: ‘Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.’

It appears in Lanark, Gray’s remarkable modernist dystopian novel, published in 1981. Although it is often credited to him, Gray always made clear that he was paraphrasing from ‘Civil Elegies’, the 1972 poem by the Canadian writer Dennis Lee. The line has travelled. It has many uses. In the early days of the new millennium it was engraved on the outer wall of the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh.

It has loftier affiliations, certainly – yet whenever I think of those words, I hear Simple Minds.

I hear the otherworldly pulse of ‘In Trance as Mission’, with its ‘holy backbeat’ and the hopscotch skip of the bassline, like a loved-up heart murmur, or a dog running on three legs, forever slipping off the pavement edge.

I hear the hot prowl of ‘Premonition’, padding like some rough beast over high ground, a crackle of bad vibes and dark disco thrills.

I hear the modernist primitivism of ‘This Fear of Gods’, at once an ancient ritualistic blues and a catechism beamed in from an uncertain future.

I hear the dizzying pre-rave euphoria of ‘Theme for Great Cities’, and the gossamer opening bars to ‘Hunter and the Hunted’, redolent somehow both of soft-focus snowfall and the ripple of heat haze playing over some far horizon.

These are the sounds of a newly independent creative democ­racy, still engaged in the process of imagining itself. Self-made, improvising the outlines of its borders, in thrall to the excitement of instinctive combustion, the thrill of exploration. Heaving the guy ropes and erecting the scaffolding around its civic structures.

This five-headed writing machine is eccentric, built from neces­sity, of varying competences, each part imperfectly locked into the other, leaving room for the accidental miracle, the magic of chance (sometimes chance is all there is). The standard definitions melt into invisibility. Time signatures slip. What sound is keyboard, what sound guitar? Verse or chorus? Is this even a song? Does it matter?

Hard to break it apart, but let’s try.

At the root, the bass work of Derek Forbes, one of the great British musicians. A man who plays with the dexterity and invention of someone who, ideally, would like to have more strings – and perhaps a couple more fingers – at his disposal, but who also values the art of simplicity, repetition, mood, motion. Any German band of the 1970s would have been fortunate to have had Forbes. Praise scarcely comes any higher.

Locked to Forbes, the powerful tracking trance beat of Brian McGee, selfless in his pursuit of a rippling lucidity, a calibrated surge and swell. A percussive drummer who understands the allure of the glitterball as keenly as the relentless rhythm of the night train, McGee turns the key on the motorik engine.

If Forbes and McGee lay down the foundations, Mick MacNeil and Charlie Burchill paint in the colour and melody, providing shape, creasing the unyielding rhythmic line.

Burchill trades in immaculate understatement. Subtle, soulful, cerebral, a guitar hero in mufti, a sound-shaper and song servant willing to do whatever is necessary in order to make the thing work. Often you don’t quite know if he’s there or not. Often his aim is for the guitar not to sound like a guitar. Just occasionally, because he can, he unleashes a lightning strike.

The impeccable Mick MacNeil, the future’s dream of a classicist, introduces subtly insistent melodies, ambiguous textures on the keyboard. He is an avatar of good taste, an engineer in sound, shunning faux-orchestral bombast for spare formalism. The results are forensic yet instinctive, a relentless exploration of possibilities.

In the thick of it all I hear Jim Kerr’s voice, an open channel between the music and the swirl of moods and emotions it throws up. I see his words as snatched Polaroids, each line a new picture, apart yet connected to the whole. Evocative and ethereal, unearthly yet profoundly human, Kerr pulls focus on music that he envisioned as ‘soundtracks to films that didn’t exist, but which existed in my head’. Mine too.

Some years ago I spoke to Paul Buchanan, the singer and songwriter in another great Scottish band, The Blue Nile. ‘We tried to surrender to being a group, to get out of the way of the music,’ he said. ‘That gives you a fighting chance of once in a while doing something worthwhile.’ It seems to me that this aspiration holds true for Simple Minds in their early days of music building. They did not care to impose distinct personalities on their work. There is a refreshing absence of any fixed stance or specific cause. It is all mystery and muddle. One can’t break it down, prise it apart. It just is. Their music was a unified projection of something more potent and profound than the sum of their individual contributions. ‘Sometimes,’ says Kerr, ‘it was just, “Get out of the picture.”’ I hear a better version of them, of us. A better nation? Why not.

Themes for Great Cities: A New History of Simple Minds by Graeme Thomson is published by Constable, priced £20.00.