The strangest thing happened to Jim Kerr recently. He fell back in love with his band, Simple Minds. Or, at any rate, with the earnest, arena-rock version of Simple Minds that threatened, briefly, to be the biggest group on the planet.
This is, to say the least, a dramatic reversal. For 20 years, Kerr has sought to distance himself from Simple Minds’ ‘80s incarnation, a craw-thumping hit machine that succumbed ultimately to excess and inter-band feuding.
“I think enough time has passed. It’s okay to embrace that vision of the band once again,” explains Kerr, his Glasgow burr untainted by two decades of celebrity.
“We didn’t stop writing big epic songs because there was anything wrong with them. We wanted to evolve. You can’t spend your career making the same music, over and over. I couldn’t do that, at least.”
Kerr’s change of heart has yielded Black And White, a flag-waving blast of Simple Minds nostalgia and their most cohesive work since their New Gold Dream heyday.
Constructed upon Charlie Burchill’s dreamy, chugging riffs and Jim’s horizon-hugging vocals, the record cautiously revisits old platitudes.
“I’d been writing those kind of songs for a while,” explains Kerr, speaking from his holiday home in Sicily, “but we didn’t feel it was the right time to put them out. Now it is.”
Kerr spends most of his summers in southern Italy, glad, he says, to be free of the rock-star bubble. I ask whether it also offers an escape from the reminders of all the things he could have been.
In Sicily, nobody will point out that, while ‘80s contemporaries, such as U2 and REM, remain relevant and credible, Simple Minds are regarded as fit only for the nostalgia circuit.
“There is sometimes a suggestion that we are failures,” he responds, perhaps more tetchily than he intended, "which I don’t get at all. We’ve sold 200 million records. If that’s your idea of failure, I’m not sure what you imagine success looks like.”
Yet surely he winces whenever U2 and Simple Minds are mentioned in the same breath. Did he experience, for instance, a pang during Live 8, where Bono was pious ring-master and to which Simple Minds were not invited?
“U2 and us were contemporaries, so it’s natural that we’ll be mentioned together,” he avers. “It doesn’t bother me in the least. What I don’t like is this suggestion that we somehow screwed up just because we aren’t as big as U2.”
The reason Simple Minds stopped producing hits, explains Kerr, is that they allowed clashes of personality to derail the group.
“The contrast between us and U2, I feel, is that U2 always held it together whereas we went through some bad periods. In the late ‘80s, it was tough. We allowed things to get on top of us. We forgot that it was supposed to be us against the world.”
Previously, Kerr has said he regretted ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’, the US number one that served as the theme to the John Hughes movie The Breakfast Club and which the band recorded at the behest of a Hollywood studio.
A worldwide hit, it obliterated what remained of Simple Minds’ underground credibility (it had been written, by Keith Forsey, expressly for the film). Perhaps realising the damage caused Kerr declined to put the song on the follow-up album, Once Upon A Time.
Today, however, he is more sanguine.
“I’m sorry we didn’t put it on the record,” he chuckles. “We’d have sold a shit-load more. No, seriously. I know we got some flack at the time. But I don’t think you should dwell too much on these things. That song did a lot for us in America and I’m proud of that.”
Nor does he have misgivings about ‘Belfast Child’, a cloying ballad that cribbed the melody of traditional air ‘She Moves Through The Fair’ and arrived at the shocking conclusion that sectarian violence is a Bad Thing.
He disagrees that the song sermonised. As he sees it, their Glasgow roots gave Simple Minds an insight into the troubles too often absent from mainstream debate in the UK. The band were angry at the way the British establishment patronised the North and decided to show it.
“We’re from Glasgow. We understood. Not many other people in Britain did at that time.”
Kerr didn’t watch Live 8. Not, he insists, because he was bitter at being passed over.
“I was here in Italy at the time. Mostly, they were showing footage of the concert in Rome. There wasn’t much coverage of Hyde Park, so I’m afraid I didn’t really see much of it,” he concludes. “Was I pissed at not being asked? No. You can’t spend your life thinking about what might have been.“