What the song is about
On 8 November 1987 a bomb planted by the IRA went off at the Remembrance Day service in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, killing eleven people gathered at the town's war memorial. A few days later Jim Kerr heard the melody of “She Moved Through the Fair” for the first time. “Like everybody when you see the images I was sick,” he said later. “I'm trying to relate to people in Northern Ireland who lost loved ones. I'm trying to talk about the madness, the sadness and the emptiness.”
That is the whole of the song's argument, and its restraint is deliberate. The lyric mourns a place where the streets have emptied and the young have left or been taken, and it asks the “Belfast child” of the title when the singing will come back. It names no faction and blames no side. Simple Minds were a Glasgow band, with the city's own Catholic and Protestant fault line, and Kerr wrote as an outsider who declined to lecture: the song asks for peace on behalf of the people burying their dead, and leaves the politics to others. That is why it could be a No. 1 across the whole of the UK and in Ireland at the same time, in 1989, when almost nothing else about the Troubles could be.
The tune it borrows
“She Moved Through the Fair” is a traditional Irish song, collected in County Donegal and first published with words by Padraic Colum in 1909, about a lover who appears to the singer after her death. Simple Minds took the melody, credited it as traditional, and wrote their own words over it; Kerr, Charlie Burchill and Mick MacNeil are the credited lyricists. The choice carries meaning of its own. The original is a ghost song about a wedding that never happened, and its tune, sung slowly over MacNeil's keyboards for the first three minutes, already sounds like grief before a word of the new lyric arrives.
The second half is where the band's own sound takes over. AllMusic's Dave Thompson described it as “an epic, heartstring-tugging song” that “gains even more power in its second half, when the drums and guitar kick in, and the arrangement billows out with instrumentation”. At 6:39 it was an unusual length for a hit single and an even more unusual one for a No. 1, and radio played it whole.
How it was made and what it did
The song was produced by Trevor Horn and Stephen Lipson and released on 6 February 1989 as the lead track of the Ballad of the Streets EP, ahead of the album Street Fighting Years, which followed in May. The EP's other songs are political too: “Mandela Day”, written for the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute at Wembley in June 1988, and, on the CD and 12-inch, a cover of Peter Gabriel's “Biko”.
It became Simple Minds' only UK No. 1 single, in February 1989, and went to No. 1 in Ireland and the Netherlands as well, with top-ten peaks in Belgium, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Switzerland and West Germany. Q gave it five stars. It is certified Silver in the UK. The band have played it with Sinéad O'Connor, at the Night of the Proms, and it has stayed in their set for thirty-five years.
Who are Simple Minds?
Formed in Glasgow in 1977 around Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill, Simple Minds went from post-punk art rock to stadium anthems over the course of the 1980s, with “Don't You (Forget About Me)”, from The Breakfast Club, as their American No. 1 and “Belfast Child” as their British one. Street Fighting Years was the most political record of their career, made in the same years as U2's “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and, later, the Cranberries' “Zombie”, the other two rock songs most people know about the Troubles.
The video
The video was directed by Andy Morahan and cut together by Mark Alchin from black-and-white footage of children and poverty in Belfast, intercut with the band. There is no narrative; the city is the subject.
The official video, on SimpleMindsVEVO.