The remarkable performance of Simple Minds’ album ‘New Gold Dream Live From Paisley Abbey’ enables one to feel the ineffable directly within one’s own experience as they transcend time and space in this 2023 live recording of their 1982 classic.

‘New Gold Dream – Live From Paisley Abbey’ – Simple Minds

It was in a late summer and early autumn of 1982 when I first heard the alternative world that Simple Minds offered in their remarkably translucent and captivating album New Gold Dream (81–82–83–84), an LP with an indelible impact on the history of British pop and through their ingenuity in synth and electronica. More so, this particular album within the oeuvre of Simple Minds is entirely transformative as to the epoch of its particular time, and how it feels so utterly contemporary in 2023 as it looms within its own shadows. To feel this particular LP performed live in 2023 at the 12th Century Paisley Abbey as the music weeps and rejoices across the years, leaves one breathless. As Jim Kerr stated on Instagram on 18 August 2023, “New Gold Dream is the record when Simple Minds really became Simple Minds.”

New Gold Dream (81–82–83–84) - Simple Minds — New Gold Dream (81–82–83–84) – Simple Minds

I recall many moments in my experience when this particular album by Simple Minds intensely appeared across my life in providing the most exceptional form of disengagement from the world in fostering a liberation of self. I’m reminded of the dimensions of my bedroom as New Gold Dream resounded in carving the pathways in which I could redesign the fabric of my own existence. As a lost teen without any compass of bearing, I was adrift in the world.

New Gold Dream (81–82–83–84) provided me with an inspired passion of life, and simultaneously a means in which to imagine a perspective on existence in which life could always be otherwise. The awareness of an otherwise in one’s life opens possibilities of being that might have never been recognized and that particular sense of awareness only becomes fostered through exposures to difference.

Forms of difference through friendship and love transform how one figures the self in the world as the unknown becomes deeply felt and learned to be a new habitual that transcends feeling on the outside. This particularity revolves around the indelible nature of cross-cultural friendships and forms of love across national boundaries which enable us to understand ourselves as the outer other within our own register of consciousness.

One needed imagination when growing up in a rather removed small city in western Canada, and in turning to the art form of music, this spurred imaginings of life which fostered an expansion of consciousness that was immeasurable.

Simple Minds’ New Gold Dream provided this remarkable platform and became the soundtrack of youth within the glittering promise of an imaginary life wherein one feels forever young as was traced in Alphaville’s dream song, “Forever Young.”

This album by Simple Minds enables one to feel the world in an entirely different manner, and in a way that continually refreshes consciousness itself. This LP simultaneously feels like the sweet resolving ache of late summer as the horizon opens up beyond one’s self before settling into the clarity that arrives with the crisp chill of autumn. The patina of this illustrious album shines beyond the years as one of the most entrancing and lustrous albums in electro-pop history.

The remarkable performance of Simple Minds’ album New Gold Dream – Live From Paisley Abbey enables one to feel the ineffable directly within one’s own experience as they transcend time and space in this 2023 live recording of their 1982 classic. The tracing of the self in relation to the world that is perpetuated in this album continually astounds as one contemplates the passing of time amidst looming mortality.

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