Simple Minds' Jim Kerr: 'I’d rather see De Niro than Bowie or Byrne'
Jim Kerr and I have just started talking over a cup of tea in London’s Hyde Park, when a girl comes rushing up.
“Excuse me. Me and my friends have had a bet. I reckon you’re from Ultravox and they don’t. Are you?”
“Yeah I am,” Jim replies.
“Can I have your autograph then, please?”
“No, I’m not really.” Jim points at me. “He is, though.”
The girl looks uncertainly between us. “Can I have both your autographs then, please?”
“Actually,” Jim continues, “I’m from Roxy Music.”
Deciding she’s not going to get any sense out of this mystery man, the girl shakes her head and rejoins her friends. She knows she’s seen him somewhere …
“It’s not the first time that’s happened,” Jim chuckles. His parents once saw Ultravox’s Billy Currie on Whistle Test and were convinced it was their son. Now you come to mention it, the resemblance is striking.
Jim’s in quite a good mood this sunny afternoon, despite having spent all morning in the bath doing phone interviews for Australian magazines. Simple Minds are going to tour there shortly. Before that, they’re visiting Finland and afterwards, hopefully, India.
They’ve just finished work on their fifth album, New Gold Dream, from which the single Glittering Prize is taken. Jim’s proud of it. “I wouldn’t knock the last two albums, but they have got one atmosphere all the way through. With this one we’ve nine or ten songs that stand up on their own. I’d also like to think that we’ve got songs that would sound good on the radio or in a disco or on a Walkman. I think it’s important that it works on different levels.”
Jim likes the term “ambient dance music” that I come up with to describe their recent material, and he’s pleased that I spot certain rhythmic similarities with American avant-garde composer Philip Glass. Simple Minds listen to him a lot, apparently, and both John Leckie – one of their earlier producers – and the current man at the controls, Pete Walsh, are “Philip Glass freaks”.
“But we’re nowhere near as technical as we often get credited for. All the rhythm patterns come from playing about. When something happens we just tape it and it becomes the seeds of a song.”
They’ve also been making a couple of videos to tide British audiences over in their absence. “We’re learning with videos, but there’s still quite a lot of paranoia because of the cost involved and because it’s still a fairly young thing. It’s come so far so soon, and already it’s cliche-ridden.”
Jim sighs. He’s been working hard recently. “This year’s gone so fast! Every day has just whizzed past. I can’t believe it’s September already. Is it September? [He glances out over the park.] I have to look at the trees to tell. But I don’t know, for years we seem to have been planting seeds, and now it’s all coming right up – here, in Europe, Canada, Australia – and suddenly there’s a million and one things to do.”
Jim Kerr’s a thoughtful, likable bloke. He’s a bit of a dreamer, as he’d be the first to admit, and sees nothing wrong with that. He’s also a realist who finds the world endlessly fascinating and is happy to talk about any and every subject.
Our conversation in the sun goes on for about two hours, taking in everything from riots and assassinations to movies and moving about. Here are some excerpts:
Do you think you’ll ever reach a point where you’d feel you could retire?
“I don’t think so. It’s all day-to-day, really. Sometimes I’m like the most selfish man in the world. I want everything … everything material. Other days I might wish I had everything just so I could give it away.”
You seem to enjoy travelling.
“Yeah, I do. I love it. People say you must get tired of touring, but there’s a lot of educational things you can get out of it if you keep your ears and eyes open. I go out on my own when we’re abroad and if anyone asks what I do I never say I’m in a band. Anything but that. You can make things up. People you meet in bars can turn out to be the greatest philosophers in the world.
“Often we’ve been in cities where there’ve been great events. We were in New York when Reagan was shot. We were also in the States when the hostages came back. These are really exciting times we live in. It was the same all through Europe: turmoil everywhere. I’m fascinated by it all.
“I still get this incredible rush when I cross borders. Travelling by car I get into thinking about all kinds of things. If I see a house I think about what the person who built it might have been like, what his life was, or what it might have been like, and how it would have been staying there 20 or 30 years ago. Interesting thoughts and pictures happen, and I write them down.”
Do you go home often?
“If I have the time. I haven’t been there this year since Easter. But we were playing in Germany a few months ago and I took my dad out there for a few days. It was great. He didn’t blink an eyelid at some of the things that were going on.
“I like to keep in touch because this thing could stop next year, you never know, and it’s nice to know I could go back there. I phone them a lot, and they let me know what’s going on. My mother works in a sweet shop and all the school kids come in and tell her what they think of the new record.
“My dad works on building sites. Most of the band did that too at the start, to get money to buy equipment. At that time there was a lot of work in Glasgow.
“We’ve always had an art school tag, which I didn’t mind but I thought was really funny. I don’t even think there’s an art school in Glasgow. If there is they certainly wouldn’t have us.
“It’s funny. In Glasgow there’s a lot of unemployment. Now I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but people are fed up because they haven’t any money, but there aren’t many people saying they wished the factories or shipyards would open up again. Everyone wants to do something with a bit more self-expression. That’s great, but I don’t know if it can work really …”
Hobbies?
“Only movies. I value seeing movies and actors more than I value listening to albums or other bands. I love people like Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro. I’d rather go and see De Niro than I would David Bowie or David Byrne, to be honest. When people ask me about my influences, I can’t talk about musical ones unless I mention films as well.”
What’s Glittering Prize about?
“It’s about getting a glimpse of something and going out on a chase for it against all the odds. If you’re after something, or something’s really beckoning, just go for it. Sometimes I’m not sure what a lot of our songs are about. I’m not sure what I’m searching for. Is it a theory? Is it a person? Is it a god? Is it a new pair of shoes?”
Do you meet many other people in bands?
“I never used to, and I didn’t really like it when people started talking shop. But this year, we’ve met a lot of bands and done a lot of talking. It’s good. There’s been no snobbery or bitching. It’s all people our age, from the Martin Frys to the Julian Copes, and although we’re all doing different things, our backgrounds are almost identical. You talk about favourite albums and favourite films, and it all links up.
“There’s a new realism just now in the pop world. I hope it gets even more realistic as it goes on. I don’t mean everybody wants to be like the man in the street – it’s always good to have oddballs around – but if you sit in our hotel and listen to bands talking, it’s like being in a band is a respectable profession these days. When kids go up to their parents and say ‘I want to be in a band’, their parents should say, ‘Why, son, that’s great!’”
Would you describe yourself as a dreamer?
“Yeah. There’s a line in the film Fitzcarraldo: ‘Only dreamers can move mountains.’ I thought that was great. Dreamers have got a bad reputation, people say, ‘He’s a dreamer, he’ll never do anything.’ You really need courage to dream.”
Where would you like to be by the time you’re 40?
“I really don’t know. It’s taken us quite a time to get where we are now, and in the meantime so many young faces have come, had hits, and gone. We’re really wary of that. On the one hand we do want all that can come, but on the other I’m not sure about the duties of being a so-called public figure. I’d like to be just a bit more private about it. I haven’t got a flat or a girlfriend right now because I keep thinking if I do then I’ll bland out and get really settled and it’ll show in what I do. I’m scared of that.
“I’m really glad we’ve got the nervous energy and urgency we’ve got now. I still feel there’s a lot of confusion inside me – healthy confusion. If I see signs of that burning out, then I’ll start looking at the future and what I’m going to do. You know, in three years we’ve done five albums – six if you count the compilation. In a few years it’ll be ten. It makes us sound like Genesis or someone.”
As Jim chuckles quietly to himself over that comparison, the band of autograph hunters who made our acquaintance earlier get up to go.
“Bye-ee!” they chorus.
“See you,” says Jim, and then calls after them: “Vienna!”
Sooner or later, they’ll realise who they were talking to.
© Dave Rimmer, 1982