Simple Minds alive and kicking
When the Scottish band play here in February, they’ll be on the verge of celebrating 40 years on stage, writes
As Simple Minds create a number of special, secret projects to celebrate 40 years on the stage, frontman Jim Kerr reflects on the dark times, when the band could have packed it in.
One of the biggest stadium acts of the 1980s, Simple Minds pounded out a new kind of rock music, delivering several charttopping hits like Don’t You (Forget about Me), Belfast Child, Alive and Kicking, and Waterfront, songs that have endured today. Around the globe, the Glasgow quintet was hailed as the Scottish U2.
But Simple Minds hit rockbottom in the early 1990s, taking a lengthy break from producing and performing songs. ‘‘The wheels came off,’’ reflects Kerr, speaking in a Glaswegian drawl on the phone from London.
‘‘It was tough. But I don’t know anyone who has a 40-year music career who doesn’t have a period where it all goes pearshaped.’’
At the time, Kerr was living in Sicily, where he was producing and performing with local musicians, and also running his four-star hotel, Villa Angela, in Taormina. Esconsed on the island, Simple Minds didn’t play a single gig for an entire year. The face of this rock star still beams out from the hotel website, where Kerr writes about the magical influence the place had on him when he first visited in 1982.
The band that had formed and fractured and reformed over the years was scattered over the globe, and Charlie Burchill, another founding member, was living in Rome.
Says Kerr: ‘‘I realised I still loved doing this, so I got in touch with Charlie and we decided to get back into it, and to give it 100 per cent commitment. We thought, let’s see if we can get the engine going again. And that’s what the last 10 years have been about.’’
Next year, when Simple Minds tour New Zealand with the B-52s, the British rock band will play the greatest hits from some of their 16 albums, including five UK charttoppers.
Kerr and Burchill first met in a housing estate on a Glasgow street when they were 8, and their friendship has endured for almost five decades. In 1977, they had their first band rehearsal in Glasgow with the short-lived punk band, Johnny and the SelfAbusers. In January 1978, Simple Minds belted out its first gig, playing serious, dark music that influenced bands like Manic Street Preachers and Primal Scream.
The band’s fifth studio album, New Gold Dream, released by Virgin, propelled them to commercial and critical success in Europe and the United Kingdom.
While the band might be going through a renaissance, not everyone is delighted. Writing for British music magazine NME, John Doran cried: ‘‘No band in the last 30 years has done more to inflict grievous harm on its own body of work by refusing to call it a f-----day than Simple Minds. Despite initially turning in a wheelbarrow full of astounding albums they’ve been air-brushed from critical history because of two decades of fly-blown dung such as `Mandela Day’.’’
But Kerr, Burchill and the current line-up – Ged Grimes, Mel Gaynor and Andy Gillespie – have projects in the pipelines for the next five years, and have no plans to pack it in.
Some of the new music coming
Sarah Catherall.
will be another shift again.
‘‘We’ll be doing things we haven’t done before,’’ says Kerr, whose voice has been likened to a cross between David Bowie’s rich baritone melded with Bryan Ferry’s velvety croon. ‘‘If you’re going to have a 40-year anniversary, you can’t just put out an album. That’s not enough. You want to make a splash.
‘‘What matters is making quality stuff too, and we need to create a new chapter.’’
Kerr has also mellowed with time. Gone are the leather jodhpurs he was renowned for in the 80s. He’s now a teetotal vegetarian with a personal fortune estimated at $50 million.
His daughter, Yasmin, spoke out once about her father and his absence in her life when she was growing up. Not long after she was born, her 25-year-old father reportedly took off on a two-year tour of the United States, and when he returned, his marriage to The Pretenders singer Chrissie Hynde broke up. Kerr later met the actress Patsy Kensit, to whom he had a second child, son James.
Today, family is important to him. He has recently returned from holidaying in the Scottish lochs with Yasmin, an actress, and her young twin sons. ‘‘I’ve never felt more shattered,’’ he says drily. ‘‘I don’t know how people look after young kids every day.’’
Kerr doesn’t usually mine his own life for inspiration when he’s
'If you're going to have a 40-year anniversary, you can't just put out an album. That's not enough. You want to make a splash.' Jim Kerr
writing lyrics. Simple Minds tend to put out abstract tunes, along with protest songs like Belfast Child and Mandela Day. The musician has sung about the British poll tax and the Soweto riots. But one song, Honest Town, is a touching nod to his mother, Irene. Featuring in the band’s 16th album, Big Music, Kerr co-wrote the song with Iain Cook, and the result is a dream-like piece wandering through Kerr’s childhood stomping grounds in Glasgow’s south side.
About a week before she died, his mother came down the stairs and told him she wanted to go out for the afternoon. A vicious snowstorm battered the house as her son agreed, despite his father’s wild protests. ‘‘It was quite a magical scene,’’ Kerr recalls. ‘‘The snowstorm created this silence all around us, and we took this route into town that seemed to pass all these landmarks that were part of her life, and of my life. Mum was a factory girl and we watched her life passing by. Then she turned to me, and she said, ‘Glasgow is an honest town’. The title of that song came from her lips. There was an element of celebration to it.’’
They drove past Toryglenn, the council estate where Kerr and Burchill grew up, Hampden Park, the Gorbals, where his mother was born, and the Merchant City where she worked as factory girl. A week later, she passed away.
‘‘Glasgow was a big industrial city and as we were growing up a lot of those industries were closing. That was the backdrop that we grew up in. Charlie and I are Glasgow through and through. Simple Minds is so homemade – we made it on the street, from our housing scheme. There was no guy or mentor, we built it ourselves.’’
For now, between other projects and touring, Simple Minds are working on their 17th studio album, which they hopes to release next year. The band has performed in New Zealand several times, first playing here in 1984, and most recently in 2012, at Villa Maria Winery. The February gig will put them alongside another band with longevity, the B-52s, the American new wave band that’s also renowned for jaw-dropping live performances.
At the age of 17, Kerr hoped he might be part of a great live band, although he reveals he was struck by stage fright when he first stepped behind the microphone.
‘‘I was terrified back then,’’ he says, laughing. ’’When I play live now it’s great fun. Some of the big ones like the Mandela concert and playing at Wembley for the first time are unforgettable.
‘‘But I remember playing a small gig in Auckland and it was intimate and iconic. New Zealand was one of the first places that really welcomed Simple Minds and we will never forget that either.’’
Simple Minds will join the B-52s at Auckland’s Vector Arena and Horncastle Arena in Christchurch in February 2017.