Wednesday May 7th 2008
Simple Minds Confirmed to perform at '46664 Concert Honouring Nelson Mandela at 90' >

Sunday April 13th 2008
'Someone, Somewhere (In Summertime)' Cover Version >

Friday March 7th 2008
'Simple Minds Celebrate 30 Years Live' TOUR 2008 > 'Night Of The Proms' Dates Announced >

Monday February 4th 2008
Jim Kerr Pop Art Painting For Sale >

Tuesday September 11th 2007
'Crashing Beats & Fantasy' now on 'Facebook' >

Sunday May 6th 2007
Keyboard Player Required For Minds Tribute Band, Simple Minded >

Monday January 8th 2007
Simple Minds Footage Required > Minds To Tour Australia & New Zealand >

Simple Minds To Tour Down Under?

Simple Minds are considering a surprise return to live concerts in Australia and New Zealand early next year.

Although as of yet no contracts have been signed and therefore no dates absolutely confirmed, serious negotiations are however underway.

Despite the fact that some agencies are already announcing dates currently, we can asssure again that as from today nothing has been 100% confirmed.

simpleminds.com

Sunday November 19th 2006
'Q The Essential Music Quiz Interactive DVD' > Links page updated >

Q The Essential Music Quiz Interactive DVD

Demon Vision has teamed up with EMAP to create their first interactive DVD “Q: The Essential Music Quiz”.

The iDVD will have a very limited pre-release, in the form of table gifts to the artists and celebrities attending the Q Awards on the 30th October, prior to the nationwide release on 27th November.

The interactive DVD features Simple Minds amongst other all-time favourite artists with more than 800 questions in 8 sections. All the artists and clips featured were vetted by Q’s editorial team, and are organised around eight different sections based on the key features from the magazine (Words Of Wisdom, Excess All Areas, Cash For Questions, Q Radio, Rewind, Rising, Undercover and Behind The Song).

For a chance to win a Electric Epiphone Guitar then visit the Q Interactive DVD website http://www.qtheessentialmusicquiz.com.

Release Date: 27th November 2006

Noble PR

Tuesday October 10th 2006
James Dean Bradfield - The Guardian 'Music's Secret Weapons' October 6th 2006 >

James Dean Bradfield (Manic Street Preachers) - Simple Minds 'Empires & Dance'

I bought it because I heard [the song] I Travel on an old Radio 1 session and I couldn't reconcile it with the band that had done Don't You Forget About Me.

You've got this vaguely soul voice making a cold, glacial, European album. There's hardly any machinery on it. It's one of the truly futurist organic records, cold-sounding but engaged - a massive contradiction but it works. It has the courage of its convictions from the first track to the last. I tried referencing it so many times on The Holy Bible and it didn't work out.

You can't understand what Simple Minds were after they made this or what they were before they made it - it came out of nowhere. It's like if somebody saw Robert De Niro in The Fan, they'd never assume he'd made Taxi Driver.

It really is one of the lost British albums but nobody will ever quote it because they can't stand the idea of a fashionable Simple Minds record.

The Guardian 6th October 2006

Tuesday September 19th 2006
Simple Minded Tribute band > Sparkle Through The Years vzw Fanclubday 18th November 2006 >

T on the Fringe, Edinburgh Review, The Sunday Times

In the usual scheme of things, any band that could be described as a nostalgia act will find itself subject to the laws of diminishing returns. Where once they stayed in the best hotels and hit arena stages running, heroes of bygone may find themselves booked into a last-minute B&B on the edge of town and shuffling into small-scale venues to face dozens of fans whose interest in popular music died many years ago.

By this admittedly narrow definition, Simple Minds cannot be discounted as a nostalgia act. While their recording career was put on hold towards the end of the 1990s, to take time out of a changed musical landscape and to concentrate on family, the band’s broad and memorable back catalogue ensures that, as a live act, they remain much in demand. Add to that the success of two recent albums — Cry from 2002 and Black & White 050505 in 2005 — and you get large and appreciative crowds still turning out to see them.

While recent dates around America and Europe have attracted healthy ticket sales, it is surely in Scotland that the Glasgow outfit find their most emphatically dedicated crowds. Jim Kerr, the lead singer, realises this and made a point of noting it here. This is the last night of our tour, he told us breathlessly. What a place to end it. What a crowd to end it with.

Further comments about Scottish audiences being the best in the world somehow didn’t seem like empty platitudes and there’s no denying there was something suitably epic about the surroundings.

On the last day of the fringe and in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, a set by one of Scotland’s most successful bands reverberating over the packed-out crowd and around Princes Street felt like both a noisy send-off to the Edinburgh festival and a welcome back to normality for the city’s natives.

The years haven’t diminished Simple Minds as a live act. Kerr was never the most glamorous frontman, eschewing the leather-jacketed rock-star posturing of their contemporaries U2 in favour of a far more endearing blokey casualness.

In jeans and a T-shirt, he looks as if he has just stepped out of the bookies round the corner. But there’s still something rabble-rousing about the way he struts across the stage and pumps his fist in the air at all the best bits.

While the rest of the band are even less attention-seeking than Kerr, they also approach their music-making with a zestful immediacy.

Charlie Burchill, guitarist and the other fulcrum in the Simple Minds songwriting axis, has a flair for guitar riffs that are almost as memorable as choruses in their own right, while Eddy Duffy, a recent addition on bass, steals a few minutes in the limelight with the hammering, nerve-tingling bassline of Waterfront.

At a show like this, it is always a pleasure to recall just how many great songs a band you haven’t listened to for a while have produced. Kerr turns and points his mike stand out over the crowd as the familiar intro to Don’t You Forget About Me kicks in, but this song was only one of the lesser highlights of a show played with energy and excitement.

Waterfront was another, as was the medley of Ghost Dancing and Gloria, but Sanctify Yourself sounded the most fresh and energising.

Amid the traditional anthems (Alive & Kicking, Glittering Prize), the Giorgio Moroder-like synthesizer stab of New Gold Dream also reminded one of Simple Minds’s beginnings as part of the new wave movement. Given the style’s rediscovery in modern music today, there are far worse candidates than the Minds for a full-scale revival.

David Pollock, The Sunday Times 3rd September 2006

Monday August 28th 2006
New Simple Minds Tribute Band > 'Big Issue' August 24th - 30th >

The Big Issue In Scotland August 24th - 30th

He’s no longer the firebrand he once was, but Simple Minds’ front man Jim Kerr has left his comfortable house in Sicily to hit the road – and it’s feeling good, he tells Leon McDermott Back in the 1980s, when such thingswere in vogue, there were two bands who defined politicised, commercial rock music.

One was U2 – you can still picture Bono, waving that white flag, or saying “fuck the revolution” during the live renditions of ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’, the righteous young man come to speak truth to power.

(Today, of course, Bono is the self-styled saviour of the developing world, who’s moving from Ireland to avoid paying tax.)

The other band was Simple Minds. Jim Kerr – the Scottish Bono, as he was inevitably dubbed – was every bit the firebrand that Bono was, singing about apartheid and the Troubles, glorying in the celtic bond across the Irish Sea.

These days, though, Kerr allows politics to take a back seat. There are no meetings with George Bush or the Pope for him; no joint press conferences with Geldof calling the masses to make poverty history, but it’s for the better. You can only play the iconoclast rock star here to save the world for so long, before you descend into self parody. Which Kerr was guilty of when ‘Belfast Child’ became Simple Minds’ first number one in 1989.

“We were so drenched in Labour, because of my dad, we were soaked in that working class industrial culture of Scotland,” he explains now.

The 1990s were quiet times for Simple Minds, the last half-decade less so. The band – Kerr, his schoolfriend and cofounder Charlie Burchill, long-time drummer Mel Gaynor and bass player Eddie Duffy – released a new album last year, Black & White 050505. It was more of a success than its dismally-selling predecessor, 2002’s Cry. So, with a massive gig at Edinburgh’s Princes Street Gardens approaching, is this a comeback?

“To an extent I suppose it is,” says Kerr. “It’s always a bit of a double-edged thing, the comeback: if you’re making a comeback it implies you’re coming back from somewhere. You might be coming back from making material which didn’t work so well, or won’t hold up.” He admits that for most of the 1990s, music took a backseat for the members but adds that “by the time we get to Edinburgh, we’ll have done a year of solid touring, which is something we’ve not done in quite a while, and it feels good.”

These days – when he’s not touring – Kerr lives in Sicily, far removed from the kind of tabloid circus which defined his life in the 1980s. He was married, first, to The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde, and then to Patsy Kensit.

Kerr speaks in long, clause-filled sentences, full of asides and qualifications – it’s as if he wants to make sure he’s always understood. But he’s a realist about the past 30 years, which have seen him go from a kid in Toryglen, on Glasgow’s south side, to a restaurant-owning expat, fluent in Italian and happily settled. “It’s a fringe place, it’s still the badlands, it’s parched and it’s dry and it isn’t manicured,” Kerr says of Sicily. “It’s between Africa and Europe, it’s where the trade winds come together, and those places are always the most interesting to me. There are places you can go in Sicily where the diet is Arabic, and then there’s a tiny church at the end of the road I live on, and the back wall of it is the original wall from a temple to Apollo. Now, this might sound like I’m being a wanky pseud, but I can’t take that sort of thing for granted, you know? It’s very enriching.”

Back in the late 1970s, when Simple Minds were finding their way, emerging as a band whose cold, European modernism was gradually being forged into something more heartfelt – not to mention more pop – Kerr wasn’t thinking of longevity, of being a middle-aged rock star.

“I just don’t think we had any conception of what was going to happen,” he says. “I mean back then, words like ‘career’ – they just didn’t even enter into it. You just thought about your next single, or your next album, or the tour you were about to start.

“And we were young, we were 18 or 19- year-old kids and that’s the way you think anyway: you just want to get stuck into it and you don’t necessarily think about where it’s going to take you.”

The years of the band’s initial, moderate, success saw them produce a series of albums that still stand up. They were filled with sleek electronic melodies, enchanted by the driving rhythms of Kraftwerk and full of wild experimentation. In fact their second album, Real To Real Cacophony, was originally rejected by their label as “the most uncommercial record we’ve ever been given”.

They were also far removed from the stadium-filling hits that saw Simple Minds play the Philadelphia leg of Live Aid in 1985. That show came on the back of the success of ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’, the song they recorded (after it had been rejected by both Bryan Ferry and Billy Idol) for the soundtrack to teen movie par excellence The Breakfast Club.

Kerr has recently been interviewed for a documentary about director John Hughes’ teen films, named after the song. Still, in their early albums there were the kernels of the sound which would see them sell 25 million records – not that they knew what was in the offing. “In some senses, we knew we were growing towards it but at the same time, there’s a defining day where you walk in and it dawns on you that your band is not your band anymore, or it’s not just your band. That your band, rather than being part of an industry, has become an industry in itself, and I don’t think there’s any way you can prepare for that.”

At the same time as this explosion – Live Aid, The Breakfast Club, the huge success of 1985’s Once Upon A Time album – Kerr increasingly became a media presence, though he’s sanguine about the gossip columnists’ modus operandi. “I would complain,” he says, “but I’m not going to because first, it’d be pointless, and second, it’s part of the deal.”

As Simple Minds were working to become the biggest band in the world and using their platform to further political causes, a creative rot started to set in; their songs became vehicles for politics. But politics, says Kerr, has changed so much since then, Scottish politics particularly so. “That working class industrial culture in Scotland doesn’t exist anymore. Whatever has replaced it I don’t relate to,” he says. “And I have to say I’ve lost faith with the political process, in the sense that I think what a politician has to do, to even get voted in, negates the endgame. Any sort of idealism has to be beaten out of people.”

Of course, Kerr, a multimillionaire with property all over Glasgow and a nice house in Sicily, can say this without consequence. Until he starts thinking about it. “I was going to say that I can afford to run up to the hills and fucking forget about it, but I don’t know if I can.

My family are there. My ma and da are getting old. My kids [two with Hynde, another son with Kensit] are growing up there. You might think that because you’ve got two bob in your pocket, you can escape, but you cannae.”

Politics, which was once “a party thing – you voted and whenever the conversation came up in the pub, you made it clear for whom” is now something bigger. “With globalisation, politics is what you have for your breakfast; if you have this coffee rather than that coffee, it can make a difference. “And if you buy a T-shirt from this place as opposed to that place… that’s something that’s worth far more consideration than some local skirmish.”

Kerr’s Scottishness, though, remains intact. “We’re Glasgow through and through,” he says, with a hint of defiance, “having said that I think it’s interesting that we’re one of that bands that have least played the Scottish card.” The clichéd perception of Glasgow’s past – the No Mean City of ill-repute – meant “journalists assumed that the band was a means of escaping”.

In truth, says Kerr, “we enjoyed every minute of our upbringing in Glasgow. It’s a rock and roll city, and we loved that environment. But right from the early years, we realised there was a bigger world out there, and it wasn’t so much about conquering that world, but experiencing it.”

At 47, happy to plough his own furrow, rather than protest in public about how others should, Kerr seems restful. No longer the youthful idealist, but someone who has been there and done that, and recognises things for what they are.

Saturday August 19th 2006
'Orange Ashton Court Festival', Bristol 23rd July review > Don't You Forget About Me Documentary > Top Ten Scottish Punk Singles > 'Seven Magazine' Article >

Orange Ashton Court Festival Review, Bristol Evening Post

Eighties Rock Icons Hold Their Own With Young Guns

After two days that were dominated by the young guns of the local music scene it was left to a bloke in his late 40s to finish off the weekend and show the younger bands just how it is done.

It may be some years since Jim Kerr and Simple Minds were filling massive stadiums and arenas, but they showed that they were still more than capable of putting on the big show.

And the adulation from the huge crowd was obvious.

But Simple Minds didn't go for the easy option. It wasn't a set completely dominated by nostalgia for their 80s heyday.

The Scottish band are experiencing something of a revival thanks to their current album, Black & White 050505, and a number of newer songs, including a powerful version of Home were given an airing. And a large section of the crowd knew all the words. But it was the classics that we had all come to hear.

And the gems from the past like Sanctify Yourself and a spellbinding version of Waterfront.

Inevitably it was their big hit Don't You (Forget About Me) that had the audience singing along with real enthusiasm.

Kerr looked in good shape and still does all the dance moves and the full gambit of extravagant rock singer poses but his voice no longer has the full strength of the old days and it was sometimes difficult to hear him against Charlie Burchill's big guitar riffs.

The set closed with Alive & Kicking and that summed it all up. Simple Minds may not be the big hitters that they once were but they are still very much alive and kicking.

(5 out of 5)

Keith Clark, Bristol Evening Post July 24th 2006

Seven Magazine, Bristol Evening Post

Alive & Kicking

Simple Minds, who are headlining this year's Orange Ashton Court Festival, have been on a year-long tour that has taken them across the world. And they are thoroughly enjoying being back on the road again, as frontman Jim Kerr told Keith Clark After a three-year hiatus, Simple Minds returned with their highly successful album Black And White 050505 last September, and it has been business as usual ever since.

For the Scottish band embarked on a year-long tour of the world's arenas and festivals playing to massive crowds of devoted fans who showed that the band needn't have worried when they sang Don't You (Forget About Me) all those years ago.

One of the gigs on this tour will see them headlining the Orange Ashton Court Festival this weekend and, special though this will be, we just can't hope to compete with one of their recent shows - playing beneath Berlin's Brandenburg Gate in a concert to herald the start of the World Cup.

"We love playing anyway but to combine that with the football, and we are obviously huge football fans, made that something not to be missed once we were asked," said frontman Jim Kerr.

"It was kind of overwhelming because the stage was literally under the Brandenburg Gate. It brought back memories of the first time I went to Berlin in 1979 and going to the Brandenburg Gate and seeing the wall. We couldn't have imagined then what was to be.

"This World Cup event was more a TV event than a rock 'n' roll event, it was like Top Of The Pops from the Brandenburg Gate, but it was something not to be missed."

For three decades - during which time they scored more than 20 Top 20 hits, including All The Things She Said and Alive And Kicking, sold 30 million records, had five number one albums, a number one single in America and three American Top 10 singles - Simple Minds have been major worldwide attractions, gaining them the accolade from Q magazine as "the world's best live act".

But despite relentless touring for so many years, Jim says he still enjoys being out on the road with the band.

"Thankfully, I still enjoy touring; in fact I enjoy it immensely. I'm probably enjoying it more now. For a while, although we hadn't actually quit, we had certainly stepped back from any real momentum and although we did occasional gigs here and there this has been a real bona fide tour, a year long and we will have played on almost every continent, and I think you can only do that if you enjoy it.

"It must be hell for the people I've come across who love playing but don't love touring. Even if you work in a bank you can go home at the end of the day and get weekends off and holidays, but on a tour you have to wave goodbye to things like that. It is part of the deal."

Many bands will tell you that the worst part of touring is the hours they spend just waiting around with nothing to do, but Jim doesn't see this as a problem.

"You do spend so much time hanging around waiting, but if you've got three hours to spare and you're in, say, Amsterdam and you choose to spend it in your hotel room rather than visiting one of the museums around the corner then you've only got yourself to blame. Many people would kill to do that."

The latest album has a big, sweeping, multi-layered sound that recalls everything you ever liked about Simple Minds. However, despite the size of their sound, Jim says they always felt confident that they could translate this onto the live stage.

"We are a band who have toured a lot and, even if I say it myself, we're pretty good at it, and we've always been pretty good at not only getting stuff translated onto stage but actually making it better, because inherently I think Simple Minds are a live band.

"For this album the approach to the recordings was like the early days. It was band-like, with everyone in the same room as opposed to lots of computers, and because the album was recorded almost in a live way it meant that the translation was much more immediate.

"We then used the computers to enhance it and stuff, but fundamentally it was four or five guys in a room playing, and that is what it is live."

The Eighties was a time when so much new technology was introduced and the music world took it all on board, especially in the studio. The feeling was that because it was there it had to be used, sometimes to excess. Jim feels that Simple Minds went through a period when they were as guilty as any of them in relying too much on technology.

"The technology has been both a blessing and a curse for us. I suppose we embraced it at a point when we had got bored with the band, which was about eight or nine albums in. The technology came out and we went 'wow' and embraced it. But then you began to see after a while that there are gains and losses.

"However, once we got to these songs and writing them they seemed to suggest that they should be approached in a live way.

"We got all excited and went 'let's do it as a band, just plug in and make it just sound like a band'. In a way it is easier said than done but I think the songs were really good to begin with and the dynamics were great and the band pulled it off with aplomb."

The result was some of the best reviews that Simple Minds have had for years; even some of the trendiest music papers, who in the past probably would have written off a band this well established, had to admit that, while it was classic Simple Minds, they had come up with something that is every bit as relevant as all the modern bands who have been influenced by them.

"Yes, I think we got a fair crack of the whip, people got behind it and said the kind of things we would have hoped they would say.

"I think the net result of the album and the live tour, and the commitment by the band to both those aspects, has been that even our biggest critics would hesitate a wee bit before writing us off as some Eighties band that was just churning it out. For that reason alone, I have to be happy."

Keith Clark, Seven Magazine, Bristol Evening Post July 20th

Monday June 5th 2006
Orange Ashton Court Festival, Bristol > New Gold Dream (81,82,83,84) DVD-Audio review >

Carling Academy, Birmingham 9th February 2006 review

People remember disasters, not triumphs. Back in 1981, when Simple Minds played the Birmingham Odeon, Jim Kerr lost his voice. That memory is whispered from punter to punter tonight. They've forgotten the later success, the sold out nights at the NEC, the top ten hits, the glory years. They just remember feeling embarrassed for Kerr one warm September night some 25 years ago. They forget that this is a band that sold albums by the million. They forget that Simple Minds were the biggest Scottish band of their time. Don't you forget about me? Sorry, gentlemen - there's a few thousand Brummies having a memory blank tonight, sitting at home, watching Corrers.

It's the success of that song which continues to hang round the band's collective neck like an albatross. Played over and over on the radio, no wonder the youngsters think they're sick of Simple Minds before they've tried to listen. That mid-80s hit, which had Molly Ringwald kicking up her heels in The Breakfast Club, wiped out all they did previously and overshadows all they've done since. Earlier gems such as 'New Gold Dream' and 'Sons & Fascination' are buried away in the lofts of James Blunt listening middle-aged fathers all over Britain. If they hadn't played 'Don't You' tonight, heads would have rolled, yet they manage to leave their biggest hit, 'Belfast Child', off the set and no one even raises an eyebrow.

Having released albums for the last four decades, Simple Minds have an abundance of other spine-tingling rock anthems to choose from, and the choices are good. Opening with 'Sleeping Girl' from their 2002 album, 'Cry', they're soon alternating oldies such as 'Love Song', 'East at Easter', and 'Big Sleep', with new tunes such as 'Home', 'Stay Visible', and 'A Life Shot in Black & White'. Kerr's energy is infectious, his voice gruffer, grittier and fuller than in production. Charlie Burchill is a solid guitarist, nothing too fancy, nothing overlooked. The new tunes are delivered with true affection, the band obviously love the songs, and they want us to love them too. The climatic 'Dolphins' rounds off the set perfectly, and the crowd go mad for more. Encores include their latest release, 'Stranger', and the exquisite, never-aging 'Seeing Out The Angel' - a song which never saw a single release, but screams "hit" as much now as it did then.

The mainstream used to view Simple Minds as a "poor man's U2". A bit too teenyrock, a bit too attractive, a bit too light-hearted to compete with their Irish brothers. Now, whilst U2 are grossing over $250million for a tour, Simple Minds are playing the modest Carling Academy. A reflection of times and tastes, marketing and madness - Kerr proved himself as good a front man as Bono tonight, Burchill as competent as The Edge. The band are 'Alive & Kicking', getting better and better with age.

Sarah Eaglesfield, www.gigwise.com

Tuesday May 30th 2006
BBC Breakfast News May 31st > New Gold Dream (81,82,83,84) DVD-Audio review >