Outstanding Song Collection - Simple Minds

“I’d like to think that we’ve got songs that would sound good on the radio or in a disco or on a Walkman,” Simple Minds’ frontman Jim Kerr once told Smash Hits magazine. “It’s important that it works on different levels.”

Discos and Walkmans and, indeed, even Smash Hits magazine may no longer be part of the modern world, but the fact that Simple Minds are still here shows that their songs are still working on different levels, almost 40 years after the band first formed in Glasgow.

Singer Jim Kerr and guitarist Charlie Burchill first worked together in short-lived punk band Johnny & The Self-Abusers, surely a name never designed to be up in lights. But the band they formed immediately afterwards – joined by the group’s third key songwriter, keyboard player Mick MacNeil – always seemed destined for bigger things.

Their early work had an experimental, alternative edge that was often forgotten when the band hit stadium rock paydirt in the late ‘80s. But albums such as 1979’s Life In A Day and Real To Real Cacophony, 1980’s Empires And Dance and 1981’s Sons And Fascination/ Sister Feelings Call still resonate decades down the line. The Manic Street Preachers hailed that period as a key influence on their Futurology album, with singer James Dean Bradfield declaring: “I’ll never get bored of those records – they had something that will never leave me. Simple Minds were crystalline gods to me.”

Maybe so, but Simple Minds were also always motivated by something very human. Even at their artiest moments, their love of melody shone through, and when the band moved into more commercial territory on 1982’s New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) and 1984’s Sparkle In The Rain – home to huge hits such as Waterfront, Up On The Catwalk and Speed Your Love To Me – their songs retained their ability to connect with audiences both intimate and gigantic. That served them well when 1985’s Once Upon A Time and 1989’s Street Fighting Years made them one of the biggest bands on the planet.

MacNeil left the band after Street Fighting Years, although Kerr and Burchill remain and have successfully kept the band at the top. But it’s the trio’s remarkable catalogue of songs, from Chelsea Girl to Promised You A Miracle to Belfast Child, that provided the foundation stones for all their success. And these days, you don’t even need a Walkman to hear them.