Simple Minds — Alive And Kicking

JUL 01 1985 · 12:00

Simple Minds — Alive And Kicking (1985) Director: Zbigniew Rybczyński Era: Mid-80s MTV New Wave Peak (1985) - Scottish post-punk band at commercial zenith, riding transatlantic success from The Breakfast Club soundtrack into arena-scale anthemic rock with cinematic outdoor production values High curatorial value as a confirmed-director artefact from one of the most decorated music video filmmakers of the 1980s, capturing a Scottish new wave band at the precise moment of their global commercial peak. The video's combination of Academy Award-winning direction, iconic location, and culturally significant single makes it an essential document of mid-decade MTV aesthetics and the art-music video intersection of 1985. Context: Released in September 1985 as the lead single from Simple Minds' seventh album Once Upon a Time, 'Alive and Kicking' arrived on the immediate wave of the band's American breakthrough via 'Don't You (Forget About Me)' from The Breakfast Club soundtrack. The song peaked at #3 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and #7 in the UK. The choice of the Catskill Mountains as location — a site of 19th-century American Romantic landscape painting — lends the video a deliberate grandeur that mirrors the song's anthemic scale, positioning Simple Minds within an aspirational, arena-rock visual tradition uncommon for UK new wave acts of the period. The video's outdoor realism contrasted sharply with the era's dominant studio-bound or conceptual clip aesthetics, signalling the band's commercial maturation and cross-genre appeal. Director notes: The music video for 'Alive and Kicking' was filmed on location near the town of Hunter, at North–South Lake in the Catskill Mountains of Upstate New York. A portion was filmed on the overlook at the site of the old Catskill Mountain House (previously demolished). The video was produced by Kris Puszkiewicz under the studio name Doublevision. Rybczyński shot the video in 1985, the same year he launched his ZBIG VISION studio in New York and was simultaneously directing videos for Propaganda ('p:Machinery') and Pet Shop Boys ('Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)'). He also directed the follow-up Simple Minds single 'All the Things She Said' from the same Once Upon a Time album. The production is an outdoor performance piece set across multiple daylight hours, incorporating waterfalls, autumnal forests, cliff-top overlooks, and mountain lake scenery.