text: Blindfolded, The Return of Simple Minds & Some Psychedelic High-Rise Flats | For Malcontents Only
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  Blindfolded, The Return of Simple Minds & Some Psychedelic High-Rise Flats
  For Malcontents Only	Music	Billy Sloan, Charlie Burchill, Jim Kerr, Lola in Slacks	7 Comments
  There's a new Simple Minds album due out in November. Ten years ago this information wouldn't have really interested me very much. I'd largely given up on the band and doubted that any real return to form was ever very likely.
  Once though, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they'd been a favourite band of mine when their sound was like Neu meets the Velvet Underground by the banks of the river Clyde.
  I Travel, written about their experiences while touring Europe for the first time, was post-punk disco, arty but also accessible – it gave a lyrical nod to Eno's Music For Airports and used to fill the dance floor in Maestro's in a flash. Or listen to Theme For Great Cities for further evidence of just how fantastic they could sound, with the almost spectral, sometimes shimmering synth of Mick MacNeil and Derek Forbes' indestructable bassline.
  Like the high-rises in Toryglen where Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill had grown up, the music of Simple Minds gradually fell out of favour. The flats were demolished and at one point the band were left label-less.
  Jim Kerr appeared more concerned with opening sushi restaurants and following Glasgow Celtic than making music. Covers album Neon Lights was the nadir, failing to climb any higher than #141 in the UK charts. Simple Minds soldiered on though and, to their credit, refused to join any I Love the 80s money spinning nostalgia fests.
  With their 30th anniversary looming, Simple Minds began celebrating their past while also looking to the future, planning to make an album that as Jim Kerr put it: 'belied the fact we'd been together for three decades'.
  2009's Graffiti Soul, just about lived up to this hope and was their finest for a very long time. The newly recorded tracks on last year's Celebrate compilation kept up the good work. Although still a little too glossy for my liking, Broken Glass Park showed a revitalised band determined not to just go through the motions. Stagefright, a free download from 2011 also included in Celebrate was even better.
  I instantly liked new track Blindfolded when I heard it on Sunday night's Billy Sloan show on Clyde 2 (and the first live session by Glasgow band Lola In Slacks on the show was superb too incidentally). Anyway, see what you think, shot in Paris and Berlin by Damien Reeves of Noisebox, this is Blindfolded from the forthcoming album Big Music:
  For more on Simple Minds: Facebook
  And finally, seeing Toryglen from a distance on several bus journeys some years ago, I couldn't work out what had happened to the tower blocks there as they suddenly looked distinctly psychedelic.
  Nope, I wasn't on acid or magic mushrooms and I did later discover that, pre-demolition, they had been used for an award winning TV ad:
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  Sep 02, 2015 @ 10:55:26
  Oct 03, 2014 @ 20:37:57
  Reblogged this on Antipodean – The Right Side Up and commented:
  The groundswell of support is growing…
  Oct 03, 2014 @ 20:09:07
  The best Simple Minds song for years, Blindfolded is THE sound of the Simple Minds.
  Oct 03, 2014 @ 19:26:18
  The groundswell of excitement is growing with this album. I'm very excited about the next period of the Simple Minds journey. I think I've joined the "love train" right at the right time 🙂
  Sep 12, 2014 @ 21:14:56
  Fingers crossed, they've not released a decent album for many years now…
  Sep 11, 2014 @ 21:47:47
  This is a real return to form for The Minds. I would probably have ignored a new Simple Minds single, but glad I didn't. Reminds me a bit of "Shadowplay" which is no bad thing.