Simple Minds interview: Giant strides

Shows what I know. The man behind the grand plan would quickly propel Simple Minds to world fame, so maybe I could have ended up part of their road crew, in charge of plectrums. This is what I'm telling Jim Kerr, in an effort to endear myself to him, but it's obvious he's unimpressed.

"So instead you became a journalist and now you work for a respectable Scottish newspaper – bully for you," he says. "If you're so interested in culture and stuff, how come this is the first time in 12 years your newspaper has wanted to interview my band?" It's a fair point. Despite Kerr once singing "Don't you forget about me", some of us did, and he knows how long the rejection lasted.

Simple Minds are arguably Scotland's biggest rock act: 35 million records sold; No 1s here and in America and just about everywhere else. The early to mid-1980s were their pomp; then, like U2's Bono, Kerr found his political voice. The pair became international statesmen in leather trousers and, however well-intentioned, exposed their bands to ridicule. U2 eventually got their mojo back; the Minds didn't.

But perhaps they have now. Their 15th studio album, Graffiti Soul, has been earning them their best reviews in a long while – maybe 12 years, in fact. When I meet Kerr in a London hotel, in the company of his schoolboy friend and guitarist sidekick Charlie Burchill, he gets the perceived snub off his chest and quickly moves on. Recently he's had far more important things to worry about.

"I thought I was going to have to can this album when my mum got cancer," he says. "But when I moved back in with her and my dad – me, almost 50, after everywhere I've been, living with the folks again – she was amazing and just wanted me to get the job done.

"I'd be downstairs in the kitchen at 3am because I've always slept funny hours and she'd be there because of the cancer. Then I noticed we were sitting at the same table where the Sons And Fascination album was written. I'd play her some of the new songs and she'd go: 'I like the beat on that one.' She was an inspiration."

The enforced stopover in Glasgow required Burchill (usual address: Rome) and Kerr (homes in Sicily, Nice) to book into a local rehearsal studio. "The guy at the front door didn't look up as he pointed down the corridor to room 12," adds Kerr. "Not that we were expecting special treatment. We were like every spotty punk band in that grimy little building and I just thought: 'Our lives from here on in depend on what we do this day.'"

Kerr, it's obvious, hasn't lost his flair for the grand statement, or the odd grandiloquent one, as he seeks to solidify the band's heritage. Simple Minds "broke the mould" in demanding that London came to them. They turned down 1980s roadshows because these were beneath a group with a "rock'n'roll heart".

Today, a Wednesday, they could announce a Saturday gig in Buenos Aires or Tokyo and sell all 6,000 tickets by showtime. And he seems to be comparing their reinvigorating return to Glasgow with "Dylan going to the Joshua Tree and Springsteen to Nebraska".

But he's also brutally honest and self-critical and painfully aware, at crucial junctures, of his own ludicrousness. "There have been times this past decade or so that I've thought it was all over," he says. "It wasn't just that nobody was interested in us, it was worse: I wasn't interested in myself. I was a shadow of who I was before and I was like: 'How is this going to get any better?'"

His mood lightens. "We've got loads of regrets and many of them concern troosers." Worst breeks? "That would be Live Aid." I'm not laughing as loudly as I should. "If I said the word 'yachting' would you remember them? Big billowing f***ers. Two things threw me that day in Philadelphia. One, Jack Nicholson introduced us on to the stage. Jack bloody Nicholson! Two, I started to feel them flapping…"

Burchill, although he hardly gets a word in today, is clearly an important figure in the Minds story. Says Kerr: "Charlie keeps me right, or almost right. I can get carried away with the new idea, thinking it's the best ever. He'll go: 'Nah, don't think so.'" When the band got stadium-huge, the "Jim Kerr thing" took over. "I'd swan off round the world, waxing lyrical about the music's deeper meaning and the kind of skylines it invoked, and Charlie would be sat at home going: 'It's just a G and then a B, you know.'"

The pair like to tell stories about how their boyhood friendship was cemented on a building site. Kerr: "Both our families moved to Toryglen in Glasgow while the estate was still under construction. We'd raid the workies' huts and diggers for nudie books and read them on our sand mountains."

Burchill: "And every Saturday we'd catch the No 2 bus to Knightswood to play football and try to make Jimmy Scotland, who was prone to fits, bang his head off the goalposts."

Kerr's parents, Jimmy and Irene, scraped together 150 for Simple Minds' first demo tape. Irene worked at the baker's next door to the bookie's where Burchill's mother Ellen collected the betting slips. When the band flew to the States for the first time, Ellen said to Irene: "Charlie's gone to America and he's not got his keys so I'll have to wait in. He's not got a jacket either…"

When was rock fame at its maddest and Toryglen furthest from their lives? "The Patsy Kensit thing," says Kerr without hesitation. He means marriage No 2 (Chrissie Hynde was No 1) and specifically "the marriage of rock'n'roll and showbiz where she'd be adamant we had to go to dinner with Michael Winner for the sake of her job and I'd be like: 'Well, it's my job no' to.'" He had a daughter with Hynde and a son with Kensit and remains good friends with both his exes.

Would he marry again? "George Galloway asked me recently what kind of women I liked and I said: 'The kind with jobs!' I'm quite set in my odd little ways so anyone who took me on would have to be pretty understanding. Hopefully there are one or two like them around."

The marriage of rock and politics was similarly problematic for Kerr, although as the son of a Communist-supporting brickie's labourer who learned about the injustices of apartheid from his grandfather, he makes no apologies for having worn his conscience on his sleeve. Bono's name comes up again, with Kerr joking that the Irishman would "turn up for the opening of a can of tuna – as long as it was the right kind", although Kerr stresses he remains a big admirer.

There's enough time left for a funny story about the Wembley concert celebrating Nelson Mandela's 70th birthday which would seem to absolve Kerr of any charges of opportunism: "A big dinner with Clinton and the rest was organised for the night before but we didn't go – I'm always turning them down, me. At Wembley there was a mad, unseemly rush to sit next to Mandela for a photograph; Annie Lennox was right in there but we hung behind and stood in the back row. Then Jerry Dammers said: 'Everyone who's written a song about Mr Mandela take a step forward!'

There are no numbers like Mandela Day or Belfast Child on Graffiti Soul. "I don't think I could better these ones; in any event I think I've said all I want to say politically," adds Kerr. Instead the band have tried to rediscover their pop spirit from before they got all serious. I tell Kerr that I Travel remains my favourite Simple Minds track; it was the thunderous floor-filler at student union discos when I was at journalism college. "Ah yes," he says, "that was the career you gave us up for – your loss." He might be right. It could have been great fun travelling with this band, from Toryglen right round the world and back again – and demanding big enough trouser-presses for my boss's Live Aid breeks would have made me feel tremendously important.

• Graffiti Soul (Universal Music) is released on 25 May. Simple Minds play Edinburgh Castle 18 July and Glasgow SECC, 11 December, www.downloadhome.co.uk/simpleminds

Simply the best

1 I Travel (1980)

Opening track on the album Empires And Dance, this blast of electronica is a favourite with fans, yet despite being released three times, it failed to make the charts.

2 Promise You A Miracle (1982)

From New Gold Dream, this is the track that catapulted The Minds into the mainstream, and saw them clinging on to the New Romantic scene while trying to bridge their way into 80s pop

3 Don't You Forget About Me (1985)

Bryan Ferry and Billy Idol's loss was Jim Kerr's gain, as the ready-written track found its place on the soundtrack to John

Hughes' Brat Pack classic, The Breakfast Club, and pushed the band into America, giving them a taste for stadium rock.

4 Alive & Kicking (1985)

And so came Once Upon A Time, their most unapologetically commercial album to date, and this, a masterclass in how to write the perfect and most bombastic of 80s rock anthems.

5 Belfast Child (1989)

A decade on and the band retain their political edge with The Street Fighting Years album and this track, written in support of Beirut hostage Brian Keenan, which made it to No 1.