Producer stories

“Pete has stripped a ton of stuff out of the recordings, but don’t worry, it sounds killer. You’ll love it”. Charlie Burchill had no doubts about the job Walsh had done on the 12″ version of “Sweat In Bullet”, and he was keen to reassure Kerr. The caution was warranted: the remix favoured a leaner guitar setup and a heavier rhythmic structure, with bass and drums pushed well to the fore compared to the album's title track. It was a fairly bold statement of personality for a young engineer whose experience up to that point had only included work on Heaven 17's “Penthouse and Pavement” and a couple of Stevie Wonder albums.

Burchill trusted him, even though he himself stood to lose the most in sonic terms, and he felt that the innovations brought by that 12″ would be the right prelude to reaching a wider audience.

By the end of 1981, and after only four albums, Simple Minds found themselves at the classic crossroads: keep riding the wave of innovation for its own sake (and stay in the good graces of the music press, despite meagre commercial returns), or chase a bigger, more expansive sound, the kind that had already brought fortune to direct rivals such as U2, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Associates, Teardrop Explodes and Abc.

What tipped the scales in particular was the November tour of Australia, where the band scored its first number one hit with “Love Song”; whereas up through “Sons And Fascination/Sister Feelings Call” the Minds had been ambassadors of a compelling new wave pulse, poised between synthetic grooves and cinematic suggestion, the success on the Australian charts now offered a taste of far more lucrative opportunities, and gave the band the self-confidence needed to actually make the leap. All that positive energy needed to be committed to tape.

1 – Golden Dreams and a Promised Miracle

In January 1982 the band booked ten days at their usual home base, Rockfield Studios (Wales), intending to empty out their bag of ideas and find a possible track to kick off the new phase.

Advances in technology (amplifiers, effects) had allowed them to take the pulse of the new thing and try out possible coordinates from which to set off again.

At the end of the brainstorming, Kerr and co. walked away with three demos in hand: “Promised You A Miracle”, “The Low Song” (which later became “Hunter And The Hunted”) and “King Is White And In The Crowd”. The first of the three, a statement of intent from its title alone, was earmarked as a potential hit and previewed during a session on Radio 1 with David “Kid” Jensen, drawing widespread enthusiasm, not least from Virgin, who decided to release it as a single.

Burchill then got back in touch with Walsh, inviting him to the upcoming show in Liège to discuss a possible new collaboration. Peter turned up in Belgium with a professional WM-D6 Walkman and recorded everything he could onto that little tape, but what he came away with was something far bigger: the atmosphere and the crowd were quite goth, with a strange electricity in the air and a certain colour to the Simple Minds sound, vivid and moody. He noticed that some of the new songs were already fairly solid, yet buried under arrangements that ran too long; his first instinct was to push them towards a more conventional structure.

After the show, Peter met with Kerr and confessed his impressions: “During the conversation, Jim struck me from the start as a bit more elusive than Charlie. Beneath the quieter manner, he spoke softly and made clear that, to him, the Minds were a family to be protected from overly intrusive outside influences. It was obvious I could contribute my own ideas, but also that I'd have to respect certain limits, especially if I were to push the band towards overly commercial territory”.

And yet, to give Simple Minds a new identity, Walsh felt he had to start with Jim himself, setting the bar on the vocal front against direct competitors (Heaven 17, Human League, Spandau Ballet, Talking Heads, Roxy Music).

That was the starting point that led to “Promised You A Miracle”.

The single was recorded in three days at London's Townhouse Studio (owned by Virgin) with Kenny Hyslop on drums, who had joined the lineup after the departure of longtime drummer Brian McGee. Kenny had also helped promote “Sons And Fascination”, appearing in the videos for “Love Song” and “Sweat In Bullet”, though no one in the band was yet ready to consider him an official replacement.

The rhythm section still had its essential anchor in the funky lines of Derek Forbes' Fender Precision, which Walsh chose to double with a Moog on the verses, further thickening the already substantial synthetic textures laid down by Mick MacNeil's keyboards.

To give body to Kerr's vocals, Peter fearlessly used reverb and delay, recreating in this way the exact sensation he'd felt seeing the band live in Liège.

“Promised You A Miracle” came out on 2 April 1982 and earned the band their first entry into the UK top 20, along with a debut appearance on Top Of The Pops; that "Everything is possible" uttered by Kerr was becoming much more than a golden dream.

Truth be told, success had caught Simple Minds a little off guard. Despite never having hidden their intention to broaden their audience, Burchill defended the band: “We didn't put this band together necessarily to have singles in the charts. What matters to us is having a sound with international appeal. At Arista (the previous label, ed.) we were doomed to be a kind of cult act, with the press constantly labelling us cold/industrial, and that actually bothered us, because we've always thought we were making music that deserved to be heard by everyone.”

Kerr: “All our previous records sounded great in clubs, but were pretty tepid on the radio. The first time I heard 'Promised You A Miracle' on the radio, though, I couldn't hold back a laugh of pure joy. But if we'd set out at the start of our career with the intention of writing hits, we would have missed the point entirely. People like British Electric Foundation or Heaven 17 have studied the pop encyclopedia in depth and know exactly how to produce records tailor-made for radio; Simple Minds never did that kind of homework.”

Virgin wasted no time: now that it was time to get serious and storm the charts with an album worthy of the single, it was essential to choose the right producer.

2 – Everything is possible

There was considerable pressure to hire Steve Lillywhite (who had already worked with Xtc, Ultravox and U2) or Martin Rushent (Buzzcocks, Stranglers, Human League), but Simple Minds wouldn't budge: they wanted to keep working with Walsh. The band liked his idea of recreating a live atmosphere on record, and Peter, despite his age (he'd just turned twenty-two), seemed to have found the right formula.

Simple Minds then organised a retreat on a farm in Fife, Scotland, to shape the new material and try out another drummer, Mike Ogletree. When Walsh arrived, he immediately suggested improvising for at least a couple of hours on each track, then listening back to the tapes to pick out the best parts: the final arrangement would grow from those snapshots and take definitive shape once again back at Townhouse.

The whole recording period, which began in May, was a steady stream of inspired ideas from Burchill, Forbes and MacNeil, who poured a huge amount of ideas into the Studer Tape Machine.

Forbes was locked in a kind of trance as he wove rhythmic pulses directly descended from Peter Hook's work in Joy Division/New Order (among the bassist's various standout moments on the record, in terms of sheer personality, there's certainly the closing “King Is White And In The Crowd”, whose groove is driven by the same note for the entire length of the track). Mick and Charlie paid meticulous attention to never letting their parts overlap.

As if in some kind of enlightened moment, everything seemed to happen with extreme ease. There were no arguments, and even the weather did its part, offering up its best.

Kerr watched it all through the glass of the control room, scribbling reams of notes in his notebooks, then listened back to the tapes the following morning during his usual walk to the studio.

Walsh felt very much at ease with the band members: “I was younger than them, though not by much, and yet they treated me with respect and encouraged me to experiment. Jim was particularly demanding but always pushed me on, telling me I was great and that I'd pull it off. There was also a friendly rivalry, since I was English and they were Scottish, but the overall atmosphere was very good.”

The working schedule ran from noon to 10pm, with no major breaks. Then came leisure time, though not always in the form of clubbing or pub crawling; Kerr's favourite pastime, for instance, was watching films at London's great arthouse cinemas of the day, in search of inspiration for lyrics.

“I've always loved the German director Werner Herzog, and at the time 'Fitzcarraldo' had just come out, the story of a deranged attempt to haul a steamship over a mountain in the Amazon basin. In the film, the antihero played by Klaus Kinski declares: 'Sono solo i sognatori che spostano le montagne'. And that line took me completely out of this world. It had just the right dose of romanticism, of madness, entirely in keeping with our 'Everything is possible'. Then there were films like Godard's 'Alphaville', Fassbinder's 'Berlin Alexanderplatz', the films of Fellini, of Pasolini, huge works. All European productions that made sense of what was happening out there, and which most of the time had gone unnoticed right above our heads.”

During the recording sessions, a problem eventually surfaced: Ogletree's style simply wasn't right for the album.

Although he'd come up with the idea for the drum-machine intro on the title track, Ogletree seemed rather slow and ill at ease with the dynamics of a recording studio. Walsh reached out to a trusted session player he'd worked with before, Mel Gaynor, hoping to inject a bit more personality into the tracks. It was a delicate situation, but Walsh handled the handover with real empathy right in the middle of recording the title track: he sat the two drummers facing each other, surrounded by a forest of microphones, and had them trade off playing alternate verses (one taking the first, the other the second) and the drum cymbals, orchestrating the whole thing himself.

In the end, Ogletree's contribution survived on "New Gold Dream", "Somebody Up There Likes You" and "Colours Fly And Catherine Wheel", while Gaynor took care of everything else, drawing on experience gained with some fairly well-established British funk bands (hence the start of a long collaboration: Gaynor became the band's official drummer and stayed in the lineup until 2016).

3 – The sound of the Eighties

It was precisely the sound the drums produced in that room at Townhouse (today converted into a luxury residence) that became one of the reference points for making the record, together with the feel of the first recording of "King Is White And In The Crowd" back in January, and the one captured by Walsh's ghettoblaster in Fife.

Peter also had other personal reference points at the time, things like the guitars on Bowie's "Heroes", the drums on Quincy Jones's records, the keyboards of Kraftwerk and Jean-Michel Jarre, but his main goal was to keep the band inside a kind of sonic bubble where outside influences were kept to a minimum.

Following exactly the same approach he'd already tried out on "Promised You A Miracle", Walsh stripped away a good deal of what Simple Minds had put down during pre-production, focusing instead on contributions in keeping with open, light-filled, fresh landscapes, capable of evoking both the wind over the cliffs of the Isle of Skye and an afternoon on a white beach somewhere in the middle of the Mediterranean.

To offset his mild, gentle nature, "Walshy" (as he was affectionately known in the business) often showed signs of struggling with the psychological pressure. Burchill: "Pete had initially set out to quit smoking and drinking, he kept saying 'I hardly drink these days now'… but by the end of the sessions he was back to chain-smoking, with bloody bottles everywhere".

During the recording period, the band often used weekends to play festivals and test out how the new material worked live. On stage, the sound came across as much more aggressive, leading much of the entourage to worry that Walsh's lack of experience might backfire (the producer stood accused of having focused on just one side of Simple Minds — the more atmospheric, ethereal one — rather than taking in the bigger picture, which also included their rockier side).

The studio work wrapped up not before one final cherry on top, added on the day Herbie Hancock booked Townhouse to record his new album ("Lite Me Up"). Quick off the mark, the Minds turned up in the adjoining room and asked if he'd be willing to record a keyboard solo, which added a precious finishing touch to the already-complete "Hunter And The Hunted".

The album hit stores on September 1st, 1982, and quickly climbed the UK charts to number 3, buoyed once again by strong reviews. Even while acknowledging the quality of the work, the band initially remained cautious about the result. At the time, Kerr said: "I'm really pleased we managed to win over the audience without losing ourselves. We chose to bring in a producer who wasn't famous, because we felt we could pull it off anyway, but in the end we put the whole thing in his hands regardless. A lot of nice things have been said about the album, and I like that, but there are also people who find it ethereal, watered-down, and honestly that doesn't bother me".

Looking back now, it's easier to see that it was the band's own perfectionist stubbornness, rather than the producer's choices, that created that initial coolness towards the album. All Walsh did was capture the essence of a very specific moment in Simple Minds' history (one in which they needed to chart new paths), giving it a clarity of purpose greater than anything on their previous records.

"New Gold Dream" was the watershed record in the band's career. Where previously the best response had come mainly from the specialist press (and later, thanks to their arena-rock turn, would come only from the fans), with this new album the Minds won everyone over, staying on the charts for practically a whole year (helped along by the other two singles, "Glittering Prize" and "Someone Somewhere In Summertime"), helping to define the iconic sound of Eighties pop/rock.

It wasn't just the ceremony marking the Minds' entry into the pantheon of the UK's major new bands, but also the launchpad for Walsh's career as a producer: from that point on he racked up an impressive string of credits, from live albums curated for Peter Gabriel to production work for China Crisis, Alphaville, Pulp (and the Minds again on "Neapolis" in 1999), from the more recent Scott Walker albums (above all "Tilt" and "Bisch Bosch") to collaborations on Italian soil with Cristina Donà, Fiamma Fiumana and PGR.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google