Sparkle in the Rain - Simple Minds
If I get some parallels with Foggy, you know I'm going to take advantage of it.
I discovered this — as I did so much music I love — from my freshman year in college roommate Mack, who had an orange mohawk. He was later involved in the mid/late-80s Washington DC punk scene, and quickly tired of this, one of his many hundreds of records, and I bought the vinyl off him because for whatever reason it just stuck in my head. Unlike in the UK, where it went #1, “Sparkle In The Rain” was never really popular here, so like OMD, Peter Gabriel and (especially) New Order, I felt like I got on the bandwagon a bit earlier than my Yankee peers.
After listening to side 1 after a few times, I remembered where and when I first heard this album. It was just two years later and five hours down the road in college. ;-)
My freshman roommate was supposed to be this guy Mack too, but he became a Resident Advisor (RA), and my eventual roommate would play this album (and others I grew to like more) pretty much non-stop. I didn't own this one, and too wasn't the biggest fan of Simple Minds due to
The Breakfast Club overplay going on already at that later time. But as soon as I recognized "Book of Brilliant Things" and remembered it wasn't one of the two great songs here off of my
Glittering Prize CD, I kept asking myself how I knew that song and most of side 1. It then hit me, going back to the fall of 1985. I can also state that I later didn't buy the CD off of my roommate either.
The songs I like best here are “Waterfront”, “The Kick Inside Of Me”, “Up On The Catwalk” and two more unusual ones — the cover of Lou Reed’s “Street Hassle” and the closing instrumental “Shake Off The Ghosts”.
My favourites of those are "Waterfront”, and “Up On The Catwalk” off my
Glittering Prize CD, so they got the two best songs off of this album. Still, there's something about the flow of this album that I liked in its period of the band, right before they indeed "made it big" across the world. "East at Easter" in the beginning reminded me of Midge Ure vocally a bit too. The beginning of "Street Hassle" didn't do it for me, it just didn't sound true on the "sha la las", but the guitars later on were nice. "White Hot Day" sounded like the perfect mid-80s time period song that I didn't remember hearing prior, but was a nice tune. Roll back the years, indeed.
I also at various times heard similarities of U2 and Big Country (beginning of "Speed Your Love To Me") in various songs here, it wasn't hard to hear the Steve Lillywhite influences from those prior bands he produced as well. It was also interesting to read that Lillywhite was initially at the time hired by Rush to produce their album
Grace Under Pressure, but he withdrew from that to produce this. I'd only note that the band afterwards referred to Lillywhite as a man not of his word for not following through on what had already been scheduled, so there's our Rush connection for this week for anyone still waiting for it. ;-)
I'd still choose other albums over this from 1984, but in hearing this (again, this time deliberately) this week, I do have an appreciation for the band's album and it's ability to deliver some "great junk" from that time period. For the tie-ins and unintended memories going back to that relative time period, and all of the other earlier albums of theirs I'm going to listen to that I have missed save the singles, this is a
6.5/10 experience of listening for me.
(I'd be remiss if I didn't mention I was very sorry to hear the sad news on @FogBlueInSanFran's friend in Texas. Praying for his family and all affected over this past weekend's rain there, and just down the road from me from TS Chantal.)
