Still here, and, yes, definitely still kicking.
“We’re genuinely looking forward to this, and feel blessed to be having the chance,” says Simple Minds frontman Jim Kerr, discussing his band’s current tour of North America – their first extensive run of shows on this continent in forty years. (They’re set to play PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, New Jersey on June 11.)
Kerr promises they’ll play all the songs that made them famous in the 1980s, including “Alive and Kicking” and “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” (the theme song to the hit 1985 film The Breakfast Club). “The set will do a lot to conjure up that period,” he says, “but we will be going all the way back, and we’ll be also playing something from where we are right now. Essentially, you want to tick all those boxes.”
This return to the U.S. and Canada came about after Simple Minds did a one-off performance at the prestigious Cruel World festival in Pasadena, California last year. “To say that it went well would be a gross understatement, because within days, the promoters were already having conversations about, ‘Ok, Simple Minds have to come and work much more extensively here,’” Kerr says. As a result, he promises, “We’re going to try to re-engage again, in terms of regularly playing in America.”
Although it’s been four decades since Simple Minds toured here, the band have never stopped performing throughout the rest of the world, which means that they’ve played some of their hits thousands of times – but Kerr admits that they don’t mind doing so again for these upcoming shows.
“Here’s the thing: we’re not doing it for us – we’re there to be of service. The audience isn’t hearing it two thousand times. For many of them, it might be the only time, and that’s the song they wanted to hear. It takes them back to whatever it takes them back to. You have to be engaged. You have to play it with heart and soul. If you do that, we all get to forget the problems of the day. Before you know it, the whole place is energized. That’s our approach. The challenge Simple Minds set for ourselves, above all, is to send people home at the end of the night thinking, ‘God, that was so much better than I thought it would be, even though I thought it would be good.’”
Fans already got a preview of what a Simple Minds show is like lately thanks to Live in the City of Diamonds, a live concert album that was just released at the end of April. The band recorded it at a show in Amsterdam during the European leg of this tour last year. “Some nights, it was just a particular kind of magic in the air, and we thought, ‘Let’s try and capture this,’” Kerr says of the decision to make this album.
Simple Minds have always had a reputation for putting on a remarkable show, though – and that includes their debut one, which they did shortly after forming in 1977 in Glasgow, Scotland. “From our very first gig, we walked on to the sound of our own feet, and within 20 minutes, people were jumping up and down,” Kerr says. “We got this thing in our heads of, ‘Wow, wouldn’t it be great to get a life out of this?’”
When they formed the band, Kerr says, “We were caught up in the madness of punk. This great wind took over Britain in 1977, where working class kids suddenly got it in their heads that you didn’t need to study in Vienna or Paris to be an artist, that you could start your own little record label, you could start your own fashion label, you could start your own band. It might not go on forever, you might not be a superstar, but you could give it a go. And we got swept up in that.”
Their sound soon veered away from punk and into their own distinctive melodic pop rock, with Kerr’s expressive, soaring vocals giving the songs a dramatic edge. This unique sound was the result of the band members’ love for artists such as David Bowie, Marc Bolan, The Doors, Kraftwerk, and Roxy Music. “We were so bad at emulating them that by default, something of our own emerged,” he says, “and we thought, ‘This actually sounds pretty good.’ It felt like we had morphed into our own thing.”
They released their debut album, Life in a Day, in 1979, and the title track made it into the upper reaches of the UK music charts. They had several other singles that charted there and in other countries – and finally, in 1985, they got their first taste of success in the USA with “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” which went all the way to No. 1 on the Billboard charts. That same year, the band was lauded for a memorable performance at the Live Aid charity concert.
Simple Minds had further success with the singles “Alive and Kicking,” “Sanctify Yourself,” and “All the Things She Said,” among others. In all, they’ve sold more than 60 million albums around the world.
Growing up in Scotland, Kerr certainly could never have imagined that he’d one day become a professional singer: “At school, as a kid I had a really, really, really pronounced stammer, so I didn’t really talk much unless I was in a safe environment, for obvious reasons, because people would laugh. I realize now that if you’re not talking, you notice things maybe a lot more than if you were talking nonstop. You’re kind of taking things in.” He says this later had a direct impact on his songwriting skills.
He eventually overcame that stammer, and then he met guitarist Charlie Burchill, with whom he formed Simple Minds, and who is still in the lineup today. It was, Kerr says, immediately clear to him that Burchill had what it took to make the band a success. “At the rehearsal before the gig, Charlie sounded so good, and I thought, ‘Well, I’m just going to hang on to him – he’s probably got a career.’”
Now, nearly five decades later, Kerr shares that he hasn’t lost his passion for writing and performing songs with Simple Minds. “There’s still something intrinsically magical about music,” he says. “It’s so long now, it’s not even a band to us – it’s just a way of being. It’s who we are. It’s what we do.”
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