Ottilenghi Simple

Neon Lights is Simple Minds' covers album. Frankly, these projects often serve little purpose beyond announcing that the artists concerned have run out of original ideas. With the Simple Minds' new album of freshly composed material, Our Secrets Are the Same, now shelved due to legal complications, the Minds have opted to doff their caps in the direction of the heroes of their youth, such as David Bowie, Lou Reed, and the Doors. This is the material the band performed when they were scrawny Glaswegian punks called Johnny & the Self-Abusers. The arrangements here are slightly dated techno-rock efforts, albeit without the expansive pomp and bluster of their stadium-straddling 1980s heyday. Even so, Neon Lights is probably too respectful. Many of these numbers–Echo & the Bunnymen's "Bring on the Dancing Horses," Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World"–are identikit presentations, while electro-rock assaults on Them's "Gloria" and the Doors "Hello I Love You" are monotonous and misguided. A very interesting revision of Pete Shelley's "Homosapien" and a faithful, powerful reading of the Velvet Underground's "All Tomorrow's Parties" are much better.

This new 4CD / 1DVD Super Deluxe Box Set version comprises a host of bonus material including; B-sides and extended mixes; BBC sessions; a previously unreleased Glasgow Barrowlands concert; promo videos; Top Of The Pops and Oxford Road Show footage; a booklet containing sleeve notes and interviews plus track by track annotation and a reproduction concert programme…

Originally released in October 1985, and coming hot on the heels of the global smash single ‘(Don’t You) Forget About Me’ , ‘Once Upon A Time’ was to prove the album that propelled Simple Minds to stratospheric heights of artistic and commercial success. Containing the classic hit singles ‘Alive And Kicking’, ‘All The Things She Said’, ‘Sanctify Yourself’, and ‘Ghostdancing’ the original era-defining Number 1 album now comes as part of this incredible 5CD / 1DVD box set…

Their first proper new release since the commercial breakthrough of Once Upon a Time (a live album intervened) and Simple Minds makes a decidedly, noncommercial follow-up. Street Fighting Years is a moody, dark affair. The music is yearning and most of the songs are politically charged lyrically…

That the opening bars to Cry finds Jim Kerr opining "It's difficult to love you when you do the things you do time and time again" almost implies that the hideously unfashionable Simple Minds are once again anticipating getting stabbed in the buttocks by poison pens and have decided to save their critics the bother by writing the reviews for them. Well, if that's the case, they've done themselves a little bit of an injustice. The good news–and from this world, not the next–is that Jim Kerr has not reneged on his commitment to making an indecently modest pop record, one where any delusional notions of stadium rock empires are held in check and where melody is a stronger currency than reverb and hot air. Although the cleaner-than-a-kitchen-showroom production is out of step with the contemporary, scuffed-up sounds of "now"–Simple Minds remain hamstrung by their own outmoded brand of professionalism–Cry has more than enough decent tunes to entice persons beyond the well-creased folds of their fan base.