4.52am Issue: 006 30th October 2016

different with Street Fighting Years.
Was this deliberate?
“It wasn’t deliberate in terms of getting
back at the record company or anything, it
was just what we did – what we always do.
If you look back, all the way through every
album we have recorded has been different
to the one before it. I don’t think you could
ever say we have just found a formula and
stayed with it.”
Which is a good way of bringing us to
Acoustic all these years on. Aren’t you
about twenty years late, everybody
was doing their Unplugged albums
back in the early Nineties?
“I’ll be honest, I really don’t like the
stripped-down thing, I mean we wrote all
those songs to have this big sound and I
just hated all that Unplugged thing at the
time, and every time we got asked to do it
we just said, no, no chance. I mean, I
really dislike them with a passion, I’m not
kidding you.”
So how come you are doing one now?
“I must admit I was still reluctant, but I
guess we saw it as a challenge, something
we hadn’t done, and when we started
looking at some of the old songs which
have been coming into the live set in
recent years, they were really good songs
that had something special. They were the
ones we were looking forward to playing
each night. So we thought, why not give
them another chance, you know?”
When you are writing, are you
somebody who writes on guitar and
then builds it up?
“No, mostly I write on piano and we go
from there, so in a way however big they
ended-up there was always that feeling that
each song could be taken down to its basic
form, it’s essence if you like.”
I guess that helped when you came to
arrange something like Someone,
Somewhere, In Summertime ?
“With all of them really. I think we felt that
if we were going to do it, we would do it
right and so every song has been reworked
from scratch and the key lines and sounds
are there, just not with synths and big
effects, instead we have looked at what we
need to do it well and then just done it. It’s
why we have extra musicians involved, it is
all about doing the songs justice”
And he is totally right, in Acoustic Simple
Minds have definitely re-imagined each of
these songs, whether it is the epically pop
Promised You a Miracle or back to the very
beginning with their second ever single
Chelsea Girl – removing so many layers has
let the songs breathe and in a way made it
easier to compare them.
For once you have removed the constraints
of production quality dictated by the times
you can see that at every stage, the focus
was always on the song, and the songs
were always their real strength.
Acoustic is a genuinely brilliant album, and
whether you consider yourself a fan or not,
it is a collection that will ensure you class
yourself that way in future.
It may be twenty years late, but it was
definitely worth the wait.
Acoustic is released in the UK on the 11 th of
November and can be pre-ordered Here.