Simple Minds: Acoustic in Concert Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

Simple Minds: Acoustic in Concert Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman December 6, 2023

There's a popular meme that shows a scene from The Breakfast Club with the aggregated "truants" in front of lockers, but with various labels for each of them supposedly linking the characters' personalities to other phenonmena (one that made the round in my neck of the woods had various names of Portland suburbs for the labels). It might be fun to adapt that meme to use the names of the band members of Simple Minds, since many people probably most instantly associate the band with their appropriately memorable song "Don't You (Forget About Me)" from that very film. I'll leave it to others to decide whether, for example, Jim Kerr is more Andrew, Brian or John, but in the meantime, BBC Music and Mercury Studios are offering this appealing "unplugged" concert from Simple Minds. That "unplugged" aspect may seem a bit unusual for a band whose arguable heyday was virtually awash in synthesizers, but other 80s hitmakers like A-Ha have rather brilliantly remade some of their synthesizer drenched hits into acoustic versions (and that A-Ha link is actually to MTV's Unplugged series). In this particular case, Simple Minds gave this concert for BBC Radio 2's In Concert series in support of their then nascent Acoustic album from 2016.

The band's set list for this concert is:

1. New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84)
2. See the Lights
3. Glittering Prize
4. Stand By Love
5. Waterfront
6. Andy Warhol
7. Chelsea Girl
8. Someone Somewhere in Summertime
9. Dancing Barefoot
10. Speed Your Love to Me
11. Promised You a Miracle
12. Don't You (Forget About Me)
13. Sanctify Yourself
14. Long Black Train
15. Alive and Kicking
16. Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)

Simple Minds: Acoustic in Concert Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Simple Minds: Acoustic In Concert is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of BBC Music and Mercury Studios with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer in 1.78:1. This is a nicely sharp and well detailed effort for the most part, aided and abetted by a glut of coverage that includes relatively "normal" framings but also some kind of weird shots taken from what might be the "pit" in front of the stage. Close-ups often offer great fine detail, to the point you can see poor Jim Kerr start to sweat pretty profusely as the night progresses. A tendency to light things in a deep cobalt blue may lead to some deficits in fine detail, especially in wider framings. Occasional combing artifacts intrude in items like fast moving drumsticks.

Simple Minds: Acoustic in Concert Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Simple Minds: Acoustic in Concert features DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and LPCM 2.0 options. The surround track nicely reproduces the ambient hall experience at the wonderfully named Hackney Empire, to the point that some may feel, like I do, that a little less audience clamor in the mix might have been helpful. That said, the music is reproduced flawlessly and with considerable spaciousness, and one of my personal bugaboos about surround mixes when compared to stereo version (folddowns or otherwise), namely that vocals tend to be pushed too far backward in the mix, never arises here. There's not any real extremes in dynamic range, perhaps due to the "unplugged" format, but fidelity is excellent and there are no problems of any kind to report.

Simple Minds: Acoustic in Concert Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The Blu-ray disc sports no supplemental content. The package includes a CD of the concert and an essay (in incredibly small print) on the inside of the DigiPack.

Simple Minds: Acoustic in Concert Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There's surprising power to a number of these renditions that might belie what many people think of as an "unplugged" performance. The band is uniformly high energy (there's a virtual parlor game available simply watching the incredible hair of Cherisse Osei bobbing in time as she pounds her drumkit), and the arrangement deliver some of the band's better known material in an at least somewhat unusual manner. Technical merits are generally solid, and Simple Minds: Acoustic In Concert comes Recommended.