Interview: Jim Kerr

Alive & kicking

One of the most successful of UK bands, Simple Minds are back on the road for a Greatest Hits tour. Jeff Hemmings spoke with frontman Jim Kerr
Hugely successful, Simple Minds have topped America’s Billboard chart, released six number one albums in the UK and have hit the top spot in countless other countries around the globe. With over 60 million albums sold worldwide, they are one of the UK’s most successful bands. They are about to embark on a UK tour as well as releasing a new Greatest Hits package to coincide.

The core of the band are the remaining two original members (and childhood friends), singer Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill (guitars and keyboards), plus drummer Mel Gaynor who has been with them on and off since 1982. “That’s been the biggest reward, my long term relationship with Charlie Burchill,” says Jim Kerr. “Honestly, he called me yesterday and was jumping up and down because he had found this piece of music that had gone missing for about 12 years and he said, ‘I’ve got it and it sounds great’. I was equally as excited about it, and we could have been 17 or 18 again, this piece of a puzzle that was missing. In those moments we haven’t thought about what we’ve done or what we’re about to do, it’s just ‘oh, great!’ and off we go. In a world where things have changed so much it’s great to have something that hasn’t changed much at all.”

Of course, Kerr is the main focal point of the band, the frontman for so many years, and the one who has been a source of so much publicity, whether it’s the music of Simple Minds, or his love interest, including that Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders, whom he married in the ’80s. Still, kerr and Burchill have been pretty much equal partners over the years. “He’s a clever so and so,” says Kerr of Burchill. “He may be in the background, but he calls the shots as much as I do. If you met Charlie now he’d probably be more sociable than me off the bat, but he’s never really clicked with the promo stuff and he does what he does. He leaves it up to me to do the mythologising and analysing.”

Born out of the punk era, in the city of Glasgow, the band were originally called Johnny & The Abusers, eventually releasing one single, ‘Saints And Sinners’, and splitting on the actual day of the song’s release. The shadow of David Bowie loomed large over punk, post-punk and new wave, and the band took a lyric from his ‘Jean Genie’ song, re-christening themselves Simple Minds.

In 1979 they released their debut album Life In A Day, which revealed Magazine, Bowie and Roxy Music as major influences. Over the next few albums they strived to forge their own identity through experimental albums such as Real To Real Cacophony, Empires and Dance, Sons And Fascination and Sister Feelings Call.

Simple Minds recently toured, specifically performing tracks from these first five albums: “Yeah, we played tracks from the albums before the breakthrough [of New Gold Dreams, their commercial breakthrough, released in 1982], stuff we hadn’t played for years. We discovered that some of the songs we hadn’t played for 30 years! They were so long ago since we played them they were refreshing again. It’s amazing how cyclical they become – you look at a song and think: ‘well, that’s been and gone, we won’t be playing that again’, and then lo and behold, we hear and see it through new ears and eyes. That’s one of the big plusses of a big catalogue.”

“I never have a problem with getting motivated to get on stage…”

It was the release of ‘Promised You A Miracle’ and the subsequent New Gold Dreams album of 1982 that propelled the band to stardom, the rest of the decade marked by ever bigger tours and stadium gigs, as they moved away from new wave and new romanticism to commercial pop and rock. Kerr became a major celebrity, helped along by his marriage to Chrissie Hynde, and the band finally cracked the US thanks to the use of ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ in the smash film The Breakfast Club.

But, like so many of their contemporaries, things began to unravel during the late ’80s, including the dissolution of Kerr’s marriage, and the departure of key personnel, in effect reducing the band to the core of Kerr and Burchill. “We were knackered. We were desensitised. We were lads who had grown up together, but we were getting tired of each other,” Kerr has previously said. “I probably wasn’t the easiet to work with – I was always pushing – I was a bit anti-social and I had lead singeritis. Although they never again reached those heady heights of fame in the ’80s, they continued to operate throughout the ’90s and noughties, releasing well received albums such as 2005’s Black & White 050505 and Graffiti Soul in 2009 which became their first album in 14 years to make the UK top ten. Over the last couple of years the band have concentrated on their Greatest Hits tours including the 5X5 Tour where they played five tracks from each of their first five albums. At a time when many younger bands are exploring the music of the post punk era, it seems that Simple Minds’ music is being re-appraised and warmly welcomed for its inventive and futuristic touches that seemed so normal then.

Take ‘Life In A Day’: “When we were rehearsing that, one of the management team, albeit a bit younger than us, came in and said: ‘What’s that new song, it sounds great!’ And we’d go, ‘what new song? It’s 30 years ago’! It seems to be the way; you see that in design, in fashion, in architecture, in and out of fashion. If you wait long enough they become in fashion again, or someone current does a riff on them and makes them contemporary,” says Kerr, who spends most of his time divided between Sicily and France thses days.

As for the new material they are curently working on he says that revisiting their past is having an effect. “Because I spent so much time recently with those first albums, some of the stuff we have been coming out with seems inspired by those early electronic styles. The idea is to bridge that new stuff.”

The upcoming tour will feature the band playing two sets, the second set likely to be a run through all the singles that qualified for the UK top 40. “The opening set we’ll play songs from every period; one way or another that should keep most people happy.

“I never have a problem with getting motivated to get on stage and tour these days. I feel blessed to have had this opportunity. I’ve met so many people, other artists who don’t enjoy touring. I think deep down, they don’t appreciate what they’ve got and I realised a lot of them aren’t really cut out for it, for packing a suitcase and heading out year after years. We were born to do it. In terms of motivation, it’s very simple: we manage somehow to put ourselves into the ears of the audience. A lot of them may be seeing you for the first and never see you again. And then there are others who will be thinking, ‘it’ll be good, but not like the old days’, and that’s quite a challenge to leave people thinking, ‘that was much better than I thought it would be’. And I think that because we have those attitudes, it means we give it our all every night and hopefully they’ll tell their mates the next day and it gives us a future!”

Simple Minds, Monday 8 April, Concert Hall, Brighton Dome, 7pm, £49.50/£37.50
Simple Minds: Celebrate – The Greatest Hits +,out 25 March