Not So Simple

Ronnie Gurr - Record Mirror (UK)

Ca Va! Sitting in limbo on the back of a cab in Edinburgh's Prince Street pondering on what might have been.

Three or four thousand miles north of said cab the raison d'etre for this northerly jaunt are onstage. Simple Minds - for tis they - trip the light fantastic in the granite city of Aberdeen and I am slumped and slumming in Edinburgh. Ca Va! So it goes.

"Come back tomorrow," said the teen dream pig of an airline career lady. "All flights to Aberdeen are cancelled."

She shoots the crap loquaciously and leaves the live Simple Minds experience as but a mere memory in a young lad's past. Ca Va! So it goes...

...Some three months back the tiresome Generation X hit the homelands. A local contact walked into my office, threw his aquamarine trilby at the stand and sidled over my desk. I took another hit on the depleted bottle of bourbon, lit up another Marlboro, my seventy eighth of the day, and tilted my own leatherette titfer to its jauntiest angle.

"This dude looks as if he's just trod on a landmine," I mused as I delicately cleaned the motorbike grease that lurked under my fingernails with my trusty switchblade Hiram.

"Hey man," the cat exploded, "yuh... yuh... gotta see...", he wheezed as he pole-axed to the floor, dripping blood on the polished pine floorboards. I grabbed the punk by the throat and tried to wring the last vital phrase from his wilting body.

"Who? Who?" I murdered as my brogues thudded into his kidneys. "Simple Minds... they're straight outta the refrigerator man," he informed me with his dying breath. I let the cadaver thud to the floor, grabbed my mac, and went cruisin'.

Simple Minds trooped on to a pre-recorded tape, the blanket of total night exploded into magnificent professionalism and they looked like they wanted, no, already owned the world. They had the magical aura of a band who were destined for greater things and they knew it.

Descriptions bandied about read like a director of rock history's most esoteric moments, Viz. Roxy Music, Velvet Underground, Bowie and anyone who ever got kicked out of art school. Other selective souls with more power, influence and effervescence than I also checked out the Simps. They got signed a few weeks ago and now they've taken the first steps on the road to wherever it is. With the ink on a record company contract barely dry the band find themselves in the studios trotting out demos. Which is where I came in.

Down in the cellar in St Vincent Street in Glasgow is Ca Va Recording Studios, arguably the best facility of its kind in La belle Ecosse.

While drummer Brian McGee, bassist Derek Forbes, keyboardsman Michael MacNeil and guitarist Charlie Burchill lay down the day's backing tracks, Jim Kerr, the band's vocalist, and I find an eaterie and talk. We begin by discussing skeletons in cupboards and the past.

A potted history of Simple Minds has to include the fact that three of the band were in the mighty, in name only, Johnny and The Self Abusers were one of the pioneers of the original plook infested punk thing in Jock-Strap land.

Kerr explained over a bowl of soup: "The Abusers for us was just a way of getting up and playing in a band without months and months of rehearsals. At this time the whole punk thing was happening in Glasgow and a guy that worked in a local record shop persuaded his boss to put up money for us to do a single, Then he let Chiswick hear a tape and they agreed to put it out."

I mentioned the long delay in the single's hitting the shops. A delay which had rancid safety-pinned Scots frothing in anticipation.

"If it hadn't been for that the Abusers wouldn't have lasted more than two months. Chiswick promised that it would be out in August (1977) but it didn't come out until late November. We just stayed together 'cos we thought it would be great to have a record out. Then on the day it came out we spilt up," relates the Thin White Duke's wee brother,

Was that planning or simply irony?

"It wasn't planned," Kerr continues, "the thing was that our intial gigs were a pure joke we were doing Damned and Ramones stuff, really we were just a living jukebox. The first songs we ever wrote were 'Saints And Sinners' and 'Dead Vandals' and from July to November it became apparent that we had nothing in common with the others apart from the fact that we wanted to be in a band."

At this juncture I think I should point out that the royal 'we' obviously refers to Kerr and his writing partner Charlie Burchill, a self-taught guitarist and occasional violin-scraper who, live, cuts a noble dash with his Flying V axe.

Then came the anonymity of finding a new band and rehearsing it, nay, honing it to perfection. The six month period of lying low was fully justified. As Jim states, when Bruce Finlay, head of local independent label Zoom Records checked da boize out he "saw a band that was together and not one which looked as if it become together."

Finlay, a fellow Simple Minds raver, a record company boss, and most importantly a real fan of good music was so impressed that he approached Arista, the company to which Zoom is licensed, to give him the mighty moolah which would secure the services of the Minds. Brucie baby convinced the big A of the band's true worth and has been a permanent part of a Simple Minds audience ever since.

Why, I wondered, did Arista give Zoom the money for a large advance when they could have signed the band direct to their own outlet?

"Basically Bruce conned them and you can print that," he joked. He told them we wouldn't sign to them, only to Zoom."

We then broach the subject of the numerous influences which subliminally appear throughout the Simple Minds set. Straight question. Who do you think you sound like? "I wouldn't like to say who we sound like but we draw from everywhere... things as wild as Supertramp to Roxy to the Velvets and even... the first gig that Charlie and I went to was a Genesis gig about the time of 'Foxtrot' and I still listen to their albums and I still like them. When people say Roxy and Ultravox I can see why, I definitely can," opines Kerr.

However, the reason Simple Minds will be huge is their ability to take their multifarious roots and infuse them with their own unique depth and feel, sound qualities which make them unique and give them the magic aura.

How abour your writing Jim? You have a song called 'Cocteau Twins' which, along with your intense theatrics - more on that later - could provoke critical daggers on the score of pretension.

"Well the ting is, I didn't say I'll go out and get a good book by Jean Cocteau. I just read a book of his plays and there was one called 'Les Enfants Terribles' and I related it back to one of my own experiences where I was staying in a flat with two out and out gays and so it's really about them."

Kerr then goes on to credit his English teacher at school as being a huge influence on him because he was not the formal strict teacher type. This gent taught the young Kerr to write compositions around a given title and this he says remains in his songwriting. Hence people mistake the band's 'Chelsea Girl' as being on the Nico connection when in actual fact the song was written because those words had "atmosphere."

"Every song I write has either got 'he', 'she' or 'they' in it simply because I find people fascinating and I think that characters are a great subject to write about," says Kerr without a snigger. "I can see why people might say we're contrived or pretentious but to me the songs are no more pretentious than 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand' because most of them are about experiences I've gone through," he concludes.

Onstage the band exude all the intense charm of five psychopathic killers. Especially Jim Kerr who comes on like Frank Sinatra, all hands buried deep in trouser pockets and shuffling on tip toes. He is rock's Anthony Perkins.

"Originally I would have liked to have gone into drama but I had no access to it. I would have liked to have done some acting lessons, and now that I'm on a wage I'm going to put a bit of money away so that, when I get a bit of time, I can maybe pay my way through theatrical school. We wear make-up because it's a kind of mask to hide behind and we'd like to think it's theatrical rather than gimmicky".

The words of a man who knows where he's going. Simple Minds, mark my words kiddies, will succeed. It's going to be a long time before acting lessons are attended. Ca Va and so it goes.

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