Simple Minds frontman Jim Kerr talks about their new album, Direction of the Heart
Simple Minds frontman Jim Kerr joins me on the phone from his home in Taormina, Sicily, just a few days after ending the band’s latest 40 Years of Hits tour.
“It’s nice to be back here,” he says of his home of over 20 years, and who can blame him as he relaxes back into the Sicilian sunshine at the home and hotel he owns, excited over the prospect of Simple Mind’s 19th studio album’s release this week.
“Actually, it’s not sunny today,” he says. “It’s a bit cloudy - but still warm, when I tell him his homeland is full-on dreich.
“You’ll laugh, but I do miss the weather in Scotland,” he adds, for Kerr is an amenable conversationalist and you get the sense he doesn’t want to rub your face in his enviable lifestyle.
“I do! But I still have my place in the Trossachs - I’m a hillwalker, all around Loch Earn, Callander, Comrie, Crieff, and I’ve no’ been able to do a lot of that recently, so I’m really looking forward to a chance to get some of that again now the tour’s over.”
Forty years on from their debut and having sold 60 million records and scored five UK number one albums, Simple Minds are still playing to tens of thousands every year all over the world. Hits such as Don't You (Forget About Me), Promised You a Miracle, Glittering Prize and Alive and Kicking are ubiquitous and the new gold dream is still burning bright as the last decade has seen their resurgence as new generations embrace their anthemic, feel-good electro rock. MOJO magazine described 2015’s Big Music as “their best album in 30 years” while 2018’s Walk Between Worlds was their most successful album in two decades and saw their biggest US tour to date.
Kerr is due a break as Simple Minds have been on the road on and off since restrictions lifted and they were able to continue the tour that was interrupted by the outbreak of Covid.
“We were about ten dates into what was meant to be a year-long tour, and suddenly it came crashing to a halt,” he says. “At least we could go on with this music.”
This music being the new nine-track album, Direction of the Heart, including the single Act of Love, a reworking of one of Kerr and Burchill’s first ever songs from the late 1970s. Born of Covid, Direction of the Heart reflects the band’s reaction to the pandemic.
“Like a lot of people putting stuff out just now, whether it’s films, books or music, it was made during this mad pandemic. For the first few months it was ‘people are never gonna travel again, go to gigs, do this, do that, and like everyone else we were scratching our heads trying to make sense of something that seemed to have very little sense. So we did the only thing we could do.”
The album embodies the restrictions imposed, with Kerr and six string maestro Burchill working from their bases in Sicily, bassist Ged Grimes in Dundee, Gordy Goudie on acoustic guitar, drummer Cherisse Osei, Berenice Scott on keyboards and vocalist Sarah Brown in London and the UK, all recording their parts separately before heading to a studio in Germany.
“Thankfully we’ve got this great thing that when we’re not touring, by and large we are in a bubble anyway. We go to the studio, work in this little tight-knit group, pretty much don’t do anything else when we’re in that mode, so we could fit into that thing we’ve done for most of our lives.”
“All we could do was follow our own intuition and disappear into our own world. That’s the greatest thing about having an art. Especially when you go in deep, you really can shut out everything that’s going on and follow your own muse, follow your own direction of the heart basically.”
Hence the name of the album.
“When you’re working, time just disappears. It’s the same on stage. You can put everything on hold and fall into it. When you’re doing five days a week, six or seven hours a day, everything else is on the outside and you almost have this parallel existence.”
With the gruelling days and nights, extensive travelling, performing live, watching Kerr doing his trademark sideways stage traverse and lunge moves at their storming final gig of the tour in Edinburgh’s Princes Street Gardens in August, you wonder if it’s hard work being a rockstar at 63.
“Well we’re so comfortable on stage,” he says. “When we were young I used to suffer terribly from stage fright but not now. And it’s so important for a rock band to still have energy. People are still coming to the gigs, and they know we’re all getting on, but they want you to have the energy. Because if they see ‘aw they’ve still got it’ somewhere in their heads a wee voice goes ‘you know what, I’ve still got it as well.”
This is said with conviction, which he then undercuts with a self-deprecating laugh and says:
“When people ask me how I do it, I say I can’t do it in real life! It’s happened a few times that someone says ‘my man put his back out at a wedding trying to do the Jim Kerr thing’ and I think well, I would put my back out as well! But on stage something happens with the music. I think it’s adrenalin. I get all bendy.
“I try to keep fit but I could be fitter. We laugh, the band, because we don’t think people want you to look too good. It’s alienating. They don’t want to think you’ve been in the gym all day, doing pilates with Sting or somebody. Who can relate to that? So a cheer goes up when I do those moves. But it’s a wee bit ominous - one day I might get stretchered off, so I wouldn’t be too gallus about it.”
“We had a ball everywhere this tour and finishing in Edinburgh was a great feeling, beyond expectations. I managed to go into the crowd for a few minutes during an instrumental and it was a lovely feeling: the summer, the music, people being outdoors again, so yeah, we were ecstatic.”
In aid of UNICEF, the concert continued the Simple Minds’ tradition of benefits gigs for causes they believe in. In the late 1980s and 1990s, after appearing at Live Aid, they toured for Amnesty International and performed at concerts celebrating Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday and the ANC.
"You know that’s the way we were brought up, to have empathy, and if you can help, you help. Every tour we feel it’s right to try and make some kind of gesture.”
Kerr is very approachable and for all his rock star lifestyle and famous ex-wives - Chrissie Hynde and Patsy Kensit - he has an air of not straying too far from his roots.
Born in Rottenrow in Glasgow in 1959 to brickie’s labourer James and factory machinist Irene, he lived in the Gorbals until he was eight then in the Toryglen high flats. In 1977 he and childhood friend Charlie Burchill formed punk band Johnny and the Self Abusers, reforming it into Simple Minds and performing their first gig in Glasgow in 1978. Kerr never considered whether he’d still be making music for a living 40 years on, longevity being the last thing on the young punks’ minds.
“Of course we didn’t know, we didn’t even know anyone who was 40 years old when we started. My mum wasn’t even 40, my dad might have just turned 40. Even the Rolling Stones weren’t 40 then!”
However, a scrapbook he discovered recently hinted at the aspirations of Kerr as a young musician.
“My dad passed away recently and we were cleaning out the house, and there’s scrap books mum and dad put together of the early days. One of the first interviews is in there. Everything was so innocent and naive and no-one knew about the rewards or the riches, and I said we want to be in a great live band. Not just ‘a band’, because we knew the difference. We wanted to take it around the world because we had just started hitch hiking and had a sense of the world beyond. I said we wanted to try and get a life out of it. So that was right at the start, and here we are all these years later.”
“We’ve been incredibly fortunate. Never mind all the trinkets and the beautiful experiences, those three things that we wanted - a great live band - we have been able to have. Certainly we’ve been able to spend our lives working around them. We’re so grateful for people coming to see us, the people that have supported us and given us this great life.”
“I’m very fortunate and there’s a mountain of gratitude, but the thing I most feel lucky about is we realise it. We don’t take it for granted. It might be an exaggeration to say every day you wake up and say, ‘my God, what is this?’ but probably every second day I do.”
One of the joys of playing live for Kerr is the commonality of experience shared by performer and audience and the immediate feedback that entails.
“We turn up on stage and haven’t even played a note and people are going mental, like, ‘you’re great and we’re so happy to see you. Can you imagine if everybody, even just once, walked into the office in the morning, turned up for work and you’ve no’ even taken yer jaeket aff and people are going mental. The national productivity would rocket. I cannae tell you what that does for you and we get that every night, times ten. I wish everybody could have it in their lives. That kind of encouragement, that’s the biggest reward.”
“Although sometimes I go online and there will be a million posts saying I’m a dickhead,” he laughs.
In retrospect it seems Kerr was destined to be a rock star but if the new gold dream had tarnished, he reckons he would have been a builder.
“In my family it was all builders and even the first couple of years I was on building sites to get the money for equipment. Now all these years later in Sicily because I bought the land and developed the hotel and house, people come to me and say ‘here, can you build my house?’, ‘can you get your guys to do it for me?’ and I’ve thought my god I’m back in the building trade again.”
When Kerr isn’t on the road, or in Sicily at his hotel, Villa Angela, he’s in Nice with his Japanese partner Yumi.
“I’ve been with Yumi for about 20 years. She works in Nice, where we have a place, and she’s a wonderful woman. My kids love her and my mum and dad did, she’s fantastic.”
Happy with Yumi, Kerr has also stayed on good terms with Chrissie Hynde (mother to his daughter Yasmin), and Patsy Kensit (mother to son James). What’s the secret?
“Well I guess, particularly when there’s kids involved, what’s that expression, ca’ canny. You have to have a lot of patience because there’s been this fracture and dreams have dissolved and there can be hurt and pain, but there’s kids there. And time passes and things heal a bit more and you see people as they are in their own lives, and especially for me, because I’m old-fashioned, if the mothers are good then the chances are the kids are good and I kind of work on that. You can all say well that was unfair and that shouldnae have been like that and it wisnae my fault, but it is what it is, and so I think having that attitude, it’s been good.”
And it’s not just children who are watching his example…
“It’s the grandkids now too. My daughter has twin boys, who’ve just gone to big school. They’re in London, but in Sicily and Scotland a lot too.”
Thinking about them, he laughs.
“It’s funny… I was talking to them last week - they’re mad on football - and I said ‘did you see the game?’ because usually they’ll text but there was nothing. And my grandsons - their granny’s Chrissie Hynde - said no, we couldnae see the game. We HAD to go with gran, she was singing with Paul McCartney,” he laughs. “Other than that, they’re normal boys, they wanted to see the game.”
As befits someone whose life has involved a lot of travel Kerr’s family is widely spread.
“I’ve got a French nephew and my nephew who works for me here is married to a local girl, so we’re having the first Sicilian Kerr, fingers crossed, about to be born any day.”
Kerr feels relatively integrated into Sicilian life, having lived there since the 1980s and become fluent in the language.
“I learned Italian in Sicily and there’s quite a lot of Arabic words because that’s the history and culture. On our last tour I went into a wee Italian barber’s in Sydney and the sons pointed to their dad sitting in the corner, saying he’s Sicilian, so I spoke to him and he said to me ‘where the hell did you get that accent?’ He knew straight away.” He laughs.
After 40 years as a rock star Kerr has stories to tell and has been working on an autobiography for several years, enjoying the process and taking his time.
“I want it to be really good and funny and inspiring and I havenae quite got there yet. I could have put out the usual rock and roll tome, but I want it to be much more than that, so maybe another couple of years.”
As for the title, he’s been through a few, but there’s one that’s stuck.
“The great German director Werner Herzog did this film called Fitzcarraldo and his whole thing was ‘only dreamers move mountains’. It might be a mouthful but I’ve always liked that.”
What the book won’t be full of is big regrets, as Kerr looks back over his life.
“Not the kind of regrets that weigh you down,” he says. “But yeah, what we do is a pretty selfish existence and sometimes that’s no’ very nice. You can get self absorbed or everything else gets put on hold and sometimes that’s a drag for other people.
“Also it can be kind of brutal and you maybe tell somebody ‘you’re oot the band’. So I regret the way things were done as opposed to the need to do them. We never had experience when we were young and it was a boys’ club, a gang, a’ a bit jousting males. Looking back I think ‘that could have been handled a lot better’, so I have some regrets on those things. But if you think about regrets in terms of mistakes, mistakes are valuable if you learn from them.”
At 63 how much longer does Kerr think he’ll be touring the world and putting out new albums?
“Life is pretty full and let’s be honest, it’s ‘oh look at Mick Jagger, he goes on until he’s 80’ but I think you have to know when to stop because it’s so absorbing that other people in your life get left out.”
For all his wealth and success, it’s time that is the most precious commodity these days.
“Even with good fortune and good health, time is the most valuable thing now. Saying ‘well, we’re away for a year now’ wisnae a big deal before, but it is a now to people you love and those around you.
“So having taken this thing as far as it is, and with vitality still in it, it’s going on into the foreseeable, but we also have to quite soon find a nice way of putting it to bed. For now though, there’s still vitality, a momentum, still a heartbeat going on.”
Still a direction of the heart.
Simple Minds' new album 'Direction Of The Heart' is released on 21st October (via BMG)