DON’T FORGET-THEBIGINTERVIEW

DON’T FORGET-THEBIGINTERVIEW

DON’T FORGET
THEBIGINTERVIEW
www.bigissuescotland.com
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.

Simple Minds play Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh, on August 28. For tickets, see www.tonthefringe.com