How Simple Minds got their mojo back

Jim Kerr

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THE PAST is pretty hazy these days, like a familiar landscape viewed from the air, through clouds. Increasingly, my memory plays tricks on me, but going back 30 years, there are a few things I can remember clearly. Three decades ago, I was slim and pretty with lovely soft hair, and Simple Minds were huge. Not just biggish. Not middle-sized. Enormous. In fact, for a while there, these grandiose Glaswegians were as mega as U2. Both bands spent most of the 1980s as globe-trotting musical behemoths, plying their trade in vast stadia, with the drums and bass mixed loud as Armageddon and immoderate guitars clanging away righteously behind lead singers determined to sound bigger than God.

But then their paths diverged. In the 1990s, U2 kept on getting bigger, and Simple Minds, well, they just kept on. Formed by childhood friends Charlie Burchill and Jim Kerr and initially called Johnny and The Self-Abusers, they've now been together for over three decades, and hit Auckland in a few weeks with their "30 Years Live" tour. U2 have long since eclipsed them in sales and critical acclaim, constantly reinventing themselves to attract new audiences, while Simple Minds have spent the last decade or two in the creative wilderness and consequently still seem snap-frozen in the 80s.

It's a strange turn of events, because Simple Minds were once the better band. Stranger. Braver. Less pompous, at least initially, and considerably more fun. Brilliant early 80s' albums such as New Gold Dream sounded like German disco producers trying to make new wave records and getting it wrong in the best possible way. I recall one dark night in 1982, driving through a dodgy part of Edinburgh in a cab, and a new song called "Promised You A Miracle" came on the radio for the very first time. The cabbie was from Glasgow, and turned it up loud. We drove through the sooty streets, mouths agape, gliding along inside our own mobile nightclub of gleaming synthesisers and shuddering funk bass. When the driver dropped me off, he refused to let me pay.

"Ah, that's great to hear," says a very amiable Jim Kerr, now 50, from his home in Sicily. "And you're right – they were pretty unusual songs at that time. We first came to New Zealand in 1984, and someone down there told us they sounded like songs from the future. It was true! Back then we tried so many things, you know? When people say they like Simple Minds, I say: which one? Do you mean the early new wave stuff, or the new romantic stuff, or the stadium rock? Is it nine-minute folk songs like `Belfast Child'? Are you talkin' about the ambient stuff, or the art rock period?"

Truth be told, some of the music Kerr mentions was dreadful. Overblown protest songs such as "Belfast Child" and "Mandela Day" are only for the strong of stomach, and the less said about the band's recent cover of the Beach Boy's "Sloop John B", the better.

For every great early song the band has done, there are 10 later ones you immediately want to un-hear. Even Simple Minds' biggest song, "Don't You (Forget About Me)", is a tad whiffy, though it has aged into an 80s' pop classic and something of a guilty pleasure. On paper, the song was so formulaic that both Bryan Ferry and Billy Idol had already declined to sing it before it was offered to Simple Minds by the makers of teen movie The Breakfast Club in 1985. Thinking it was sentimental rubbish, Kerr initially refused to sing it as well, then reconsidered. It remains the band's only American chart-topper.

Their adventurous streak deserted them in the late 80s, a time when Kerr's bombastic melodies, brooding baritone, thousand-yard stare and ludicrous leather jodhpurs tipped over into self parody. By the early 90s, grunge, Brit-pop and acid house had rendered Simple Minds all but irrelevant.

Jim Kerr is the first to admit that the last decade, in particular, has seen some very shabby Simple Minds records being released, though he believes last year's Soul Graffiti was a return to form.

"In our first 15 years, we were so imaginative, so hungry, so driven. Then from 1995 until about the middle of last year, things started to fragment. We lost our mojo. There were arguments and line-up changes, and making music was like getting blood out of a stone.

"But if you're gonna make music for 30 years, it's not always gonna run smoothly. Everyone goes through rough patches, even the real greats. At one point, John Lennon stayed home baking bread for five years. I mean, talk about losing your mojo!"

In Kerr's view, occasional dry periods are inevitable in any creative occupation. "Neil Young once said that what you did when you're young doesn't matter so much, because everything's easy. There's nothing else in your life except your skinny jeans, your guitar and a burning need to prove yourself. What you do later on, when you're tight on energy, when you're a bit beaten up, when you've had a few divorces, that's the stuff that counts."

Kerr himself has been twice divorced, and has adult children with both his exes: a daughter, Yasmin, 23, with Pretenders singer Chrissie Hynde, and a son, James, 17, with actress Patsy Kensit, who went on to marry Liam Gallagher of Oasis. "Back then getting divorced more than once only happened to people in the entertainment business. Not any more. I've got mates who are plumbers that have had more marriages than me!"

THE MARRIAGE that refuses to break down is with his old schoolfriend Charlie Burchill. They've known each other since they were eight, growing up on the same tough Glasgow housing estate. Other band members have come and gone, but the bond between Burchill and Kerr seems unbreakable, though not everyone believes this is a good thing. Writing for British music mag the NME, John Doran cuts to the chase: "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'."

Unsurprisingly, Kerr disagrees. "Look, we've stayed together for the simple reason that there was always a song in our head, and as long as you got a song in your head, even just one, then there's a tomorrow. And besides, we're not just doing this because it's a business, or because we don't know what else to do. We're born to this. In the early days of rock 'n'roll, the only people that had a career beyond the age of 45 were the old blues guys. No one said to them, why are you still doing this? It was clear that making music was a deep part of who they were. It's similar with us. That's why we go out and do it every night for decades, even though it gets in the way of relationships and raising kids and marriages and other bits of your life. You go out there, selfishly, and do this, because you have no choice."

Softly spoken and dryly funny, Kerr lives a calm, restful life whenever he's not touring. He is a teetotal vegetarian, "the only non-drinker in Scotland" as he puts it, and gave up drugs years ago. "I did my experimenting in the early days and I loved it, to be honest, but I realised it would stop me doing what I needed to do. If I was gonna stay up all night, I wouldn't be able to deliver the next day. A lot of people recognise that over time. Lou Reed was supposed to be this New York street junkie that was gonna die before he hit 30. Same with Iggy Pop, but now they're both health nuts. They discovered that there are many ways to get high. You can get high via a decadent bohemian wasted lifestyle, but you can also get high lifting weights."

Simple Minds previously played in New Zealand in 1984, 1987 and 2006. Kerr prepared for shows in a resoundingly wimpy fashion, checking out local galleries, wandering around our parks and botanical gardens, reading and relaxing. "It doesn't sound very rock'n'roll, does it?" he laughs. "But doing that helps me give everything when I go on stage. Your audience deserves that, because your music has been important at some point in their lives; that's why they're there. If you've still got an audience after 30 years, that's because your story is tied up with their story. Whether you're Paul McCartney, or Bono, or Springsteen, people come along to hear songs from a period of your career that meant the most to them, and that's fair enough.

"The trick is to give people more than they expect. You might come along to hear `Promised You A Miracle' because it blew you away in an Edinburgh taxi all those years ago, but we want to make that song sound extraordinary all over again. When we're on stage, we know we've only got one crack at blowing you away. After 30 years playing together, our philosophy is the same as ever: OK, we're Simple Minds, here's our music, this is our world, let's go."

Jim Kerr

Born: 1959 in Glasgow

Parents: Jimmy, a brickie's labourer, and Irene, a machinist

Personal fortune: Estimated 50 million

Owns homes: Nice, London, Edinburgh, Glasgow and a luxury hotel called Villa Angela in Sicily

Simple Mind albums: More than 40 million sold worldwide since 1979

Simple Minds' "30 Years Live" tour plays Auckland's Aotea Centre Civic Theatre on Tuesday March 30. Tickets from www.buytickets.co.nz or 0800-BUYTICKETS

- © Fairfax NZ News