"Hello in the Utrecht"

In the early eighties - a time when I was passionate about music with only a handful of other distractions but also a reasonable amount of (hard-earned) disposable income to hand - I used to buy a magazine called 'Record Collector'.

To be honest, the magazine itself wasn't that interesting to me - lots of articles about Bob Dylan and other ancient nonsense - but in the back pages were classified ads, where you could, amongst other things, buy bootleg tapes of gigs.

It's almost impossible for me now, in 2016, to tell you what an impossibly cool band Simple Minds were back then. We'd almost have to pretend that they were a different outfit altogether. And whilst their studio albums were carefully crafted masterpieces, live their work took on a whole new and riveting aspect.

Of course, buying these bootleg tapes was a bit of a lottery; sometimes the sound quality was pretty poor. The ones to look for were the ones graded 'A', often taken from the (FM) radio. Simple Minds were a lot more popular on the continent than they were in the UK - just one more compelling anti-Brexit argument as far as I'm concerned - so these tapes cropped up more often than you might think, although still not *that* often.

This came to my mind today when the Minx and I visited Utrecht. I could distinctly remember - from over thirty years ago - Jim Kerr saying "Hello in the Utrecht" on the opening of one of these bootleg tapes. The funny thing was that I could also remember the music he was talking over (I must have listened to it a lot) but it wasn't a song with which they typically opened gigs.

So as the Minx and I sat in a bar having a 'small beer' in Utrecht, today, I Googled "Simple Minds Utrecht" and - guess what?! - up popped the gig and set list. And, yes, they did open that gig, 16/06/1982, with 'Changeling', just as I remembered it!

How weird it must have been for those Glaswegian lads to find themselves touring the continent, an experience much like that of The Beatles in Hamburg. A whole different world, a long, long way from home, with no Internet to connect them. Mind you, it still felt different to me, today.

I found myself wondering if this is what the UK would be like without our Tory and New Labour governments. Somewhere egalitarian, perhaps. Certainly somewhere better.