Songfacts®:

• After producing five critically acclaimed art-rock albums, Simple Minds decided to adopt a more radio-friendly sound. This was one of the first results and it became their first UK Top 20 hit. This new slick, sophisticated sound caused the band to be lumped together with other bands such as Duran Duran, as part of the New Romantic movement.
• Simple Minds lead singer Jim Kerr calls this song "a story of ambition." It was crafted for hit potential.
  
  "I needed not much more than a short blast of inspiration to find some words that could act in summing up perfectly the positive feel of the music," he explained on the band's website. "In addition I needed a melody to dance around the structure. Having grown up fascinated with pop music, studying it all the time - unaware as I did - as a kid with imagination, meant I was automatically equipped to write 'Miracle' and many other lyrics of a similar nature. More than anything what I needed there and then as I attempted to write our first bona-fide hit song, was to discover something that would strike clearly and was obviously catchy enough to lodge in the brain of any casual listeners who came across it on radio."
• Musically, "Promised You a Miracle" was inspired by an obscure 1981 dance song called "Too Through" by Bad Girls, with lead vocals by Jocelyn Brown, best known for singing "I've got the Power!" in the Snap! hit. The band was in New York City when the song came on the radio station Kiss FM. Simple Minds drummer Kenny Hyslop recorded it on his Walkman and played it for the band, which loved the sound. During a jam session, they used it as a jumping off point and came up with their own groove that formed the track.
• "Promised You A Miracle" was released as a single five months ahead of their fifth album, New Gold Dream. It was their first big hit, charting at #13 in their native UK. It also earned them their first appearance on Top Of The Pops.
• This is the only Simple Minds studio track recorded with drummer Kenny Hyslop, formerly of Slik and Skids. He joined Simple Minds in 1981 but his time with the band was brief.
• This featured on the soundtrack of the 2005 Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst movie Elizabethtown.
• The album title New Gold Dream was taken from the headline on a magazine review for the hit art-house movie Fitzcarraldo. Frontman Jim Kerr explained to the Daily Mirror May 23, 2008: "Our previous albums had a darkness. Traveling through Europe at that time there was the Red Brigade in Italy and the neo-Nazis in Germany. We passed through Paris and a bomb had just gone off in a synagogue - it all made a big impression. New Gold Dream was a new dawn."
• Simple Minds recorded this at Rockfield Studios in rural Wales, where a few years earlier the band ended up singing with Iggy Pop and David Bowie on Pop's song "Play It Safe."
• Steve Barron directed the music video, which like many from the era, is a rather disjointed series of images. There's a girl apparently going through airport security, and lots of composited shots of the band members at the time when compositing wasn't very good.
• Simple Minds played this to close out their set at Live Aid, where they performed from the Philadelphia stage. Unfortunately, their UK fans didn't see it because the feed conked out.
• The New Gold Dream album didn't get much attention in America, where Simple Minds' broke out in 1985 when "Don't You (Forget About Me)" was used in the movie The Breakfast Club, but it marked a musical shift and earned them a much wider fan base in Europe. The group revisited the album from time to time throughout their impressively long career. In 2022, they played it in its entirety at Paisley Abbey, near where they formed in Glasgow, as a sort of homecoming. This performance was later released on multiple formats under the title New Gold Dream – Live from Paisley Abbey.