Simple Minds no longer forgotten band
It was a funny, accidental twist of fate that brought Don’t You (Forget About Me) to the door of Simple Minds.
At first, the band were at best ambivalent when approached about the song, aghast at the notion of recording a track not written by them. Eventually, after much badgering, they recorded it as a kind of charitable favour to the songwriter Keith Forsey who had been continuing to court them and whom they grew to like personally.
The song subsequently became the cornerstone of John Hughes’ classic 1985 teen movie The Breakfast Club, the song which broke them into the US and scored their first and only US No. 1. It remains one of the most enduring 80s pop anthems and an essential part of the Simple Minds repertoire.
‘‘It’s so much bigger than us. We call it the black swan,’’ says singer Jim Kerr, 57, who adds he would have put a bet on at the time it would have ended up just being a B-side. ‘‘It became this huge cultural thing for a certain generation, but then subsequent generations have picked it up and it now gets referenced in other movies and it goes on and on.
‘‘But you know, every time you play it, you just see people smile and sing along. It’s not bad to have something like that in your armoury.’’
Some 30 years later, it was another accidental foray down a path they initially resisted that has seen them garner a massive resurgence in their native Britain.
The BBC Radio 2 host and TV presenter Chris Evans got the band to perform a couple of songs acoustically on his breakfast radio show in 2014 while they were on the promotional circuit for their 16th studio album Big Music.
Kerr says they turned up thinking ‘‘let’s get this out of the way’’ but the reaction was overwhelmingly positive and led to radio stations across Europe putting in similar requests.
‘‘We still thought there’s a difference between doing two or three songs and doing a full album and a whole tour; do we really want to go in this deep, will we be any good at it, can we do it without it being boring?’’ Kerr says.
‘‘We kept prevaricating and the real catalyst was January this year when a wealthy man in Switzerland offered us a lot of money to go and play an acoustic festival up in some chi-chi ski resort and we thought, well you know what, how great is this, we’ll get paid, which when you’re a Scotsman is always important, and we’ll get to hide out of the way and try this thing out.’’
Having laid the groundwork, the band reinvigorated their back catalogue, emerging with a full album Simple Minds Acoustic, which includes their 1980s stadium rock classics such as Waterfront and Alive and Kicking and earlier tracks from their breakthrough album New Gold Dream (81–82–83–84), including Promised You a Miracle, the latter updated with the addition of Scots singer KT Tunstall. ’’It is a real challenge,’’ says Kerr of revisiting the songs, ‘‘Because in the world of Simple Minds they’re iconic songs and people don’t like you messing with the icons and all that stuff. And there’s the other thing of not only are you revisiting the songs, you’re revisiting yourself.’’
In a nod to things coming full circle, the album was recorded in Glasgow’s Gorbals Studio, where Kerr and co-founder and guitarist Charlie Burchill played their first gig.
‘‘We were emotionally, physically, artistically revisiting lots of stuff, lots of memories,’’ says Kerr.
Simple Minds sprang out of new wave in the late 70s, influenced by acts such as Roxy Music and David Bowie (the band’s name comes from a line in Bowie’s The Jean Genie).
They crested the wave of stadium rock during that period of live exuberance during the 80s as one of the biggest bands on the planet, but in the ‘90s, ‘‘the wheels came off’’, says Kerr, amid line-up changes, fatigue and suddenly appearing to be yesterday’s news.
‘‘It was going to be tough for us anyway because you had a whole new thing coming over the hill, the Stone Roses, the Happy Mondays, Madchester. If you’ve been the darlings of one generation, the next generation is going to give you it in the neck, because that’s just how it works.
‘‘We were kind of bamboozled by it and by that time we were terminally unhip. We were once hot, we were now in Alaska, we were in the Arctic.’’
The band didn’t split but ‘‘didn’t do much work’’ until the early 2000s saw a renewed commitment to the job, and a steady growth leading up to their critically acclaimed 16th album, Big Music, in 2014.
Simple Minds Acoustic, however, highlights the strength and longevity of their songs, that epic-in- scale, transportive feel that has remained the band’s signature sound.
‘‘I think within our music there is a real strong idea of search, search for identity, search for place, search for time, search for love, search for knowledge,’’ says Kerr.
‘‘There is this longing, this search and I think songwriters in general usually just have one or two themes that are theirs and they just dance around it throughout their careers, and that longing is part of our DNA.’’ – Fairfax
Simple Minds will be joined by The B52s for concerts at Christchurch’s Horncastle Arena (February 16) and Auckland’s Vector Arena (February 14) .