Utah Saints look back at their version of Simple Minds’ “New Gold Dream”

In 1992, electronic duo Utah Saints released a cover of the Simple Minds song “New Gold Dream.”  There wasn’t an official video, but below is a YouTube clip with the audio, as well as a recent Simple Minds live version for comparison.  We reached out to Utah Saints to ask about why they chose to cover the song, as well as their approach. Their comments can be found beneath the video.

“We’d always been fans of Simple Minds early, groundbreaking work – they were/are such an exciting hybrid electronic rock band, way ahead of their time.

When we covered ‘New Gold Dream’ we were looking to do a big song cover that would work live.

Originally we were thinking of doing a version of either ‘I Travel,’ or ‘Theme From Great Cities,’ but ‘I Travel’ was pretty fast, had the electro snare on the downbeat, and we didn’t think we could make a version were were happy with (although we got to remix it a few years later, which we were really honoured to do!). ‘Theme from Great Cities’ is an instrumental, and when we got into it, it was sounding too close to the original – co-incidentally, our good friend Grum from the studio next door has done a great version of this which has just come out, called ‘The Theme.’

So, we went for ‘New Gold Dream’ partly because we realized there was a lot of tension in the intro, and live we could open with it, and put the ‘U U U Utah’ chant over the top of it. It was a really exciting way to start our sets at the time, and really helped us when we opened for U2 on the Zooropa tour, as it bridged the rock/electronic genres perfectly for us.

When we approached it musically, we were hoping to pay homage to the original, make it exciting with more of a club feel with some metal elements, all of which we thought fitted the song. We were so happy when we found out that Simple Minds liked our version!”

Be sure to read our interviews with Utah Saints from 1993 and 2002, as well as our 2014 interview with Jim Kerr of Simple Minds.

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