21 Jul, 2006 Alive and Kicking / Bristol Evening Post
Alive and Kicking / Bristol Evening Post.
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 one other American Top 10 single – 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.”