Interview with Jim Kerr of Simple Minds in the Shropshire Star on 5 April 2013

New songs and surprises
among the greatest hits

Simple Minds singer Jim Kerr told Stephen Taylor why fans can
expect two gigs in one tomorrow night

Jim Kerr is promising some surprises on the set list when the Simple Minds Greatest Hits tour rolls into Wolverhampton tomorrow.

“Songs like ‘Celebrate,’ and obscurities like ‘This Fear Of Gods’ now line up beside songs like ‘(Don’t You) Forget About Me’ and ‘Alive and Kicking,’ and they work,” said Jim Kerr, the Scottish band’s frontman.

This time last year, Simple Minds had just finished a tour that took the band back to their late 1970s/early ‘80s roots. The experience had a lasting effect on Kerr.

“We did this ‘5X5 [Live]’ tour, where we played five songs from each of our first five albums, a sort of non-greatest hits tour, in the sense that we didn’t really break through until the fifth album.

“We were a wee bit nervous about it, because you can’t go back – that was then, this is now – and we didn’t want to be our own tribute band to those days, so we were trying to call up the ghosts of that period, and I think it worked.

“People really raved about it and we discovered songs that we had forgotten how powerful some of them were,” he said.

And it seems that Simple Minds’ trip down memory lane has triggered a shift in direction for the group as they work on their new album, due for release, according to Kerr, early next year.

“We’ve been in that world of those early days – the early sounds of Simple Minds – and it’s probably no surprise that that is influencing what we’re working on just now, so [the album is] not the big rock sound of Graffiti Soul, it’s probably more in an electro, art rock [style] that the band came out of.

“But what’s more important is that it’s great. We think it’s already shaping up great.”

So, with this year set aside for touring, what can the Civic Hall audience expect to hear?

 

“Two sets. The second set is pretty much a greatest hits, all the big songs, and the first set, let’s see how we feel on the night,” the 53-year-old said, adding that they’ll be slipping in some new material.

“We’re playing two new songs. A song called ‘Broken Glass Park,’ that we’ve played live, and a song that we’ve never played called ‘Blood Diamonds,’” he said.