photo courtesy of Big Hassle PR
By the mid-‘80s, Scottish post-punk band Simple Minds had already released six albums, one of which had even gone to No. 1 in the U.K., but Stateside success still eluded them. “In America, there was scant promotion for [the band’s fifth album] New Gold Dream, which had been a hit everywhere else, and the record company came to us and said something that record companies rarely say,” recalls frontman Jim Kerr. “They said, ‘We blew it! We should have really promoted you America. It was yours for the taking. The next record, we’re going to promote.’
“And then they said, ‘But there’s this one thing in the interim that would be great. There’s this movie coming out… and the director loves the band and would love for you to be involved…’”
That movie, of course, was John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club, which came out in America on Feb. 15, 1985. Simple Minds’ soundtrack single, “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” turned them into U.S. superstars overnight, but at first they declined Hughes’s offer, even after watching a private screening of the coming-of-age Brat Pack film — not only because they didn’t relate to its premise (“We don’t have school detention in fucking Glasgow!”), but because they hadn’t written the song themselves.
“We were like, ‘Cool, great!’ And then they went, ‘We’ll send you the song.’ And we went, ‘Um, what song? Hang on a minute! We write our own songs! They want us because they like us, but they don’t want our songs?’”
Kerr says he and his bandmates were “were dragging our feet about it, up until the last minute,” right up until the moment that they met with Keith Forsey, who co-wrote the song with Steve Schiff. But Simple Minds eventually agreed to record “Don’t You,” and Kerr shockingly reveals that they actually turned down an offer to share publishing on what would soon become the biggest surprise hit of their career.
“Our manager at the time, Bruce [Findlay], said, ‘Look, they’re really keen. I think they’ll give you some of the publishing as well,’” says Kerr. “But it was so not like us to even think about taking someone’s song. I don’t even think I mentioned it to the band. I said, ‘We’re not going to take a guy’s song. If we’re going to do it, we’re just going to do it.’ And that was that.”
Incredibly, however, Kerr insists that he and the band have “never regretted” missing out on untold millions in songwriting royalties. “No, no it was their song — and just look what we got out of it, anyway. We’ve gained so much from it.”
“The big mistake we made was to not put it on the album!” laughs Simple Minds co-founder Charlie Burchill, who’s sitting with Kerr at Hollywood’s Roosevelt Hotel the morning after performing “Don’t You” on Jimmy Kimmel Live and announcing Simple Minds’ biggest U.S. tour in decades. That tour will celebrate the 40th anniversary of Simple Minds’ post-Breakfast Club American breakthrough, Once Upon a Time — the new reissue of which actually features “Don’t You” on the tracklist, which surprisingly wasn’t the case back in 1985.
“The word is ‘daft,’” Kerr chucklingly says of the band’s odd decision to leave “Don’t You” off Once Upon a Time. “But that’s how much we saw The Breakfast Club as an outside thing!” However, as Kerr notes gratefully, “The Breakfast Club smashed the door wide open. I think we were coming through the door anyway, but for this art-rock band to become mainstream, I think no one could have predicted such a thing.”
Such a thing almost didn’t happen. When Forsey first handed the “Don’t You” demo to Simple Minds’ keyboardist at the time, Mick MacNeil, “it was after a gig and Mick had had a few drinks, and he never listened to the cassette. I think Keith had a few drinks as well. It was a backstage moment and they weren’t introduced properly, is what I’m getting to,” laughs Kerr. Once the band finally heard the tape, they thought it was “a bit generic” and that Forsey’s demo vocal ironically sounded too much like another John Hughes-popularized new wave singer, the Psychedelic Furs’ Richard Butler. “It just didn’t sound like a Simple Minds song,” Kerr explains.
Kerr jokes that he “tried to turn it into an arthouse movie” by writing “a load of existentialist rubbish” lyrics to replace the “la-la-la-la” refrain at the end of the anthem, but he eventually scrapped that idea. (That famous “hey-hey-hey-HEY!” intro was Kerr’s ad-lib, however.) “There wasn’t really one moment where we went, ’OK, we’re sold,’ until we were in the studio. We were like, ‘Let’s just go in and see what happens.’ But it took only three hours to do the song. It’s such a cliche, but you know how someone will walk into a studio session and go, ‘That sounds good’? Well, our road crew guys, who didn’t know any of the backstory, came in and went, ‘Ohhh, that sounds amazing.’ And then you think, ‘Hmmm, maybe there’s something here…’”
And so, the Glaswegian art-rock group — who, as amusingly revealed in their recent documentary Everything Is Possible, had once wanted to entirely re-record their John Leckie-produced 1979 debut album because they thought it sounded too much like “shiny pop” — went full-on mainstream. They teamed with superstar producer Jimmy Iovine for Once Upon a Time, which cracked the top 10 in U.S. and featured several other Billboard Hot 100 hits, including “Alive and Kicking” (No. 3), “Sanctify Yourself” (No. 14), and “All the Things She Said” (No. 28) — all of which the band wrote, of course.
Simple Minds also played the massive Philadelphia edition of Live Aid that year, with Kerr wearing what he now cringingly describes as “yacht-rock trousers… like, the kind of trousers someone who’s gone yachting in Cape Cod would wear. I could feel them flapping like sailboats. Any time I see a picture from Live Aid, there’s a voice in my head that’s saying, ‘Wrong trousers!’ They were like Dumbo’s ears. … But hey, they’re coming back again! I mean, the [Live Aid] poster is essentially a poster of my ass now.”
“We really embraced it in America when we got that success,” says Burchill, although he admits “initially it was a worry for us” that Simple Minds would be accused of selling out, “because the perception in Europe, especially in those days, was always a bit precious about stuff, with the NME and Melody Maker and such. Looking back on it now, that is a real sort of sixth-form [high school] attitude. We wanted to work in America!”
“There was a real snobbery back then of anyone who seemed to be willfully trying to break in America,” adds Kerr. “But yes, we were going for it. Why wouldn’t we? I mean, fucking America invented the rock ‘n’ roll thing, so why wouldn’t you want to test your mettle there?” He does confess that he grappled with imposter syndrome at first, because his band’s breakout U.S. hit had been written by outsiders. “There was an element of me that thought, ‘We haven’t worked for this.’ But of course we had worked for it! We’d always been considered a good live band. We kind of did it old-school.”
However, after that rush of “uneasy” mainstream success, the band “had to get on and do our own thing, and we became awkward again,” Kerr quips. For starters, they made the ballsy decision to open their 15-minute Live Aid set with a song that hadn’t even been released yet, “Ghostdancing,” and then, by the time they followed up Once Upon a Time with 1989’s Trevor Horn-produced Street Fighting Years, “instead of doing ‘Don’t You Part 2,’ we came with this seven-minute-long Celtic thing called ‘Belfast Child’ and started singing songs about apartheid,” laughs Kerr. “And the label was like, ‘Oh, God, this wasn’t in the script!’ I do think the marketing guys were thinking that, and who could blame them? But you know, we were always moving on; none of our albums sounded the same, and we were always saying, ‘What’s next?’ But I think maybe for some people in the industry, we didn’t follow through on the promise.”
“There was a great moment where Jim and I, a few albums later, were traveling from New York to L.A., and we met with Jimmy [Iovine],” Burchill recalls. “He took us out to his fabulous house in Malibu, which was incredible, and he said to me, ‘Charlie, if you’d gotten me to produce your next album after [Once Upon a Time], this would’ve been your house. All this could’ve been yours!’”
But once again, Burchill and his longtime bandmate harbor no regrets. “When the success in America came, we were starting to run a bit on fumes. We had worked nonstop for eight or nine years. And also, we were growing up. You have to have a life outside of the music, and some of us were married, trying to set up a life, trying to have a house. There was a lot of things going on,” explains Kerr, who welcomed a daughter with then-wife Chrissie Hynde in the whirlwind year of 1985. “You have a success like that and the natural thing would be run and go with it, but I think we’d gotten a bit bored of ourselves. So, we were like, ‘No, let’s step back a bit and see what the next thing is.’ It just went on a wee bit too long, that hiatus.”
Simple Minds’ most recent studio album was 2022’s nostalgic Direction of the Heart, and the nostalgia will certainly be flowing when the band’s North American tour, featuring openers Soft Cell and Modern English, kicks off in May. “It almost seems as soon as the ‘80s ended, there was an ‘80s resurgence,” Kerr grins, as he recalls last year’s Cruel World festival in Pasadena — where, by most fans’ accounts, Simple Minds absolutely owned the day and thus created the demand for a full tour. (“We are fucking good,” he admits.) But while Kerr and Burchill are happy to crank out their ‘80s hits — including, of course, “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” — they’re still looking to the future, and also hoping to educate people about their lesser-known deep cuts.
“We’re just always pushing on, whenever the inspiration’s there. Charlie works every day, always working on stuff,” says Kerr when asked about the prospect of a new Simple Minds album. “But what we’re interested in doing, and it would help especially in America, is a compilation of the last couple of decades, because there’s a lot of good stuff that a lot of people don’t know. But the creativity, it always goes on. Even if the rewards of doing new stuff are limited, it’s still who we are. It’s still what we do.”
This interview originally ran on Gold Derby.
