The sixth album by Simple Minds, Sparkle in the Rain went to #1 in the UK album charts in February 1984.
The album, produced by Steve Lillywhite, is one of their finest and is one of those albums that truly captures the essence of what made music so exciting in the 1980s.
Of Sparkle in the Rain, Parke Puterbaugh, former senior editor for Rolling Stone, had this to say in April 1984: "It's a perfect match-up: Simple Minds aspire to music of a trancelike otherworldliness, and Lillywhite has the knack to lead them up that proverbial stairway to heaven."
The band, says Puterbaugh, "find religious illumination in the vertigo of their fertile imaginations, and it comes out as psychedelic testifying - all fast movement and kaleidoscopic repetition - that builds to a crescendo of ecstasy and release."
The Simple Minds line up at the time of the recording was Jim Kerr, Charles Burchill, Derek Forbes, Mel Gaynor, and Michael MacNeil.
Sparkle in the Rain features the magnificent and otherworldly: "Book of Brilliant Things," "Waterfront," "Speed Your Love to Me," "Up on the Catwalk," and "East at Easter."
