Mad World

by Lori Majewski

  * NILE RODGERS: Tom Bailey was right. You could watch history change in front of your face from the post-punk, club-kids, gothy thing to more glam, like Madonna. Everybody talks about the Queen–David Bowie performance in the U.K., but I was at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, and there was nothing more rousing than when Madonna said, “I ain’t taking off shit today.” The set was almost irrelevant. I’m sitting here with the biggest record of my career [Like a Virgin], a 20-million seller, and this woman walks on stage and delivers that line, and you could see that the crowd was loving this new type of vulnerable, highly sexual thing. It was no longer about being dark and mysterious; it was about being upfront and open and “Fuck you!” Madonna was bringing in more of the R&B dance groove that has really never left our spirits, but in America we didn’t want to admit it because of the whole “Disco Sucks” thing. The eighties music is still rooted in groove R&B music, and that stuff had never gone away. When you think about records like “Relax” or ABC’s “The Look of Love,” you can see these guys are heavily influenced by American R&B.

  THAT WAS THEN

  BUT THIS IS NOW

  Following the departure of Joe Leeway in 1986, Tom Bailey and Alannah Currie (who married in 1999) carried on as a duo. In 1993, they changed their name to Babble, releasing two albums. Bailey—now divorced from Currie—continues to arrange and record music under the name International Observer. Currie upholsters furniture using the carcasses of animals who died naturally or were run over by unobservant drivers. Leeway works in hypnotherapy.

  BAILEY: I’ve no particular interest in being the Thompson Twins again. People are calling me all the time and trying to get me to do it and arguing about the benefits—how much I’d enjoy it and what a thrill it would be and how the fans are dying to see me—and I just don’t get it. I have to find some personal trick, some strategy for enjoying it. Otherwise I’d just feel, Why am I here? Why am I doing this? It has the risk of being embarrassing for me.

  Essentially, what it comes down to is money and to see if bands re-form after they’ve split up under acrimonious circumstances, whether there might be a strange, experimental thrill to see whether it can be put back together again. But when someone like, say, Culture Club, re-forms to go on tour, it’s because they actually want to do it. I do quite a lot of work with Indian musicians, and one day I said to an agent, “I’ve got this great idea. I’ll go back and perform Thompson Twins songs but, get this, we’re going to be sitting cross-legged, and I’ll have a sitar and a tabla playing with me, and it’ll be fantastic.” The agent said, “No, you won’t.” He said those things are about people who want to relive the past, not to be challenged with some new creative endeavor.

  I don’t see much of Joe because he’s in California. Alannah, I see from time to time, partly because we have a couple of kids together, so we have an interest in looking after them. But we once said, “Should we do it?” And within 10 minutes we were arguing about which songs we should do and what we should be wearing, and I thought, Oh my God, it’s too much stress. But when Alannah’s out of money, she’ll be on the phone wanting to do it.

  “DON’T YOU (FORGET ABOUT ME)”

  he year 1982 was an amazing one for music. ABC’s The Lexicon of Love came out that year. So did Sulk by the Associates, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse by Siouxsie and the Banshees, Pornography by the Cure, and A Broken Frame by Depeche Mode. And so did New Gold Dream (81, 82, 83, 84), the fifth, and finest, album by Scotland’s consistently evolving Simple Minds. This was epic music. Minds frontman Jim Kerr has no illusions about exactly how epic and influential his album was: “If you read the book about the making of The Unforgettable Fire, when U2 worked with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois for the first time, both of them comment on how the guys played them New Gold Dream and said, ‘We want some of that.’” But despite the hugeness of Simple Minds’ sound, and the vastness of their vision and ambition, the song that actually elevated them to the status they long deserved was written about five snotty American teens stuck in detention on a Saturday morning. Kerr’s themes were enormous—Love! Miracles! Great cities! “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” is small in scope but ultimately proved to be the group’s most universal song.

  JB: You know that Morrissey song, “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful”? And that line, “And if they’re Northern, that makes it even worse”? Multiply that by a million and that’s how natives of Glasgow feel about anyone from their hometown achieving even the slightest degree of success. Anything that makes us think they’re better than us. We’re bloody-minded that way. I certainly was when I first encountered Simple Minds. Didn’t they used to be tragic local punk band Johnny and the Self Abusers who played in the pub down the road from me? And suddenly they were pretending to be this pale, enigmatic, icy synth outfit? Pull the other one! I—and it must be said, most of Glasgow and the other bits of Britain not worth mentioning—afforded Simple Minds zero attention and respect until their second outing. While 1979’s Real to Real Cacophony may have one of the all-time groaners for a title, something had happened to this band between albums. Something that made even the most resentful and pigheaded of Glaswegians—i.e., all of us—grudgingly admiring. Somehow, the group had managed to outgrow the suffocating Bowie-isms that made their first album, Life in a Day, so easy to mock. Somehow, they’d grown muscles of their own. The next album, 1980’s Empires and Dance—the one with “I Travel” and “Celebrate” on it—was even stronger. But Simple Minds were never cool, not like the fey, jangly bands from the West End of Glasgow who recorded for Postcard Records. So I still acted like I found them nonsensical (though, to be honest, Jim Kerr’s drunk-actor-playing-Hamlet frontman persona didn’t make it that difficult). Then they recorded the theme to The Breakfast Club, which was, at the time, my favorite film by my favorite writer-director, and that was all very confusing. But, with hindsight and maturity, I can now say, hand-on-heart, that the incarnation of Simple Minds who were active from 1979 to 1985 were the best band to ever come out of Glasgow. But that doesn’t entitle them to think they’re any better than the rest of us.

  LM: Ally Sheedy was wrong: I grew up but my heart didn’t die. I’m not even that big of a Breakfast Club fan (I’m more of a Pretty in Pink girl), but whenever I hear the first few seconds of “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” I’m back in high school and waiting for my life to start.

  JIM KERR: Being in any working-class city in the U.K. [in the seventies] and being a male in any working-class city, there wasn’t much going on. We were brought up with both the church of football and the church of Top of the Pops. Of course, being in Glasgow, Top of the Pops seemed a universe away, nothing that any of us could touch let alone enter until the punk movement came along. For me, punk’s most potent thing was not the music especially, but the DIY manifesto that you could beg, borrow, or steal a guitar and make a noise. Whether you were any good or not was subjective, but it put an end to the notion that you had to be able to play like Rick Wakeman or Eric Clapton or go to a music conservatory in Vienna.

  Johnny and the Self Abusers were the much-maligned precursors to Simple Minds; on the other hand, some people would say we’ve been downhill ever since. Had that not been the catalyst it was, we’d still be sitting in the pub saying, “One day we’re going to do this,” which was what had been happening until then. Music was very centralized in London, so the Scottish bands would all go there, saving up whatever they could before, staying in a squat, endure a miserable existence for a few months, and then split up. We were the only band that started playing in Glasgow pubs, doing our own material and having queues around the block, albeit it was free to get in. There was such a thirst for the whole punk/new wave thing that led us to think, “You can do that from up here.” You could get a review in the NME or Sounds or Melody Maker, all those bibles. You could get a buzz going from your hometown without having to move to London. In fact, the A&R men, for the first time ever, were starting to get on the plane and come up and see you in y
our natural environment. It laid the ground for scenes to develop where it wouldn’t have been possible before.

  Within the first few minutes of the first-ever Johnny and the Self Abusers gig, both Charlie Burchill, my songwriting partner in Simple Minds, and myself looked at each other and thought, Hang on, wouldn’t it be great if we could really do this? Even though no one could play or hear a note, it was just white noise, people were jumping up and down. We thought, There can’t be anything better than this, so we’d better try to work out how we can make this work in the long term and take it around the world. After six months, we began to be serious about it, which is when we stopped Johnny and the Self Abusers. Two days after that, we were writing songs—some of which were featured in Simple Minds’ debut album—but certainly the seeds had been sown with that first-ever gig.

  “Sonically, the heartbeat behind ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ is total Simple Minds. It will never be ours, but, in a good way, the song belongs to everybody now. It belongs to that generation.”

  The success, especially in Europe, of New Gold Dream had taken us into these much bigger venues. We were playing arenas for the first time. They put us out in front of crowds at festivals of 60,000 to 70,000. It definitely wasn’t overnight but [headlining our own shows] went from playing to 3,000 to playing to 12,000 within a year. At times we were probably trying too hard, but there was the thing of trying to reach the back of the hall, trying to master an audience. For instance, when we played some of these festivals, there would be much bigger acts than us at the time: Elvis Costello, Van Morrison. Very good artists, but they weren’t cutting the mustard. It wasn’t happening. The music was going up in the air—they weren’t involving the audience. I don’t know if it even dawned on them. But we wanted everyone to get involved, and I think that showed. A huge thing happened with the band when we got a drummer like Mel Gaynor, who is as heavy as John Bonham or Keith Moon. The fact that we’d got this guy who could not only groove but rock—we were like kids with a new train set. We wanted to use it every song, so we lost a lot of subtlety, but we were excited with the noise that was coming out.

  New Gold Dream and Sparkle in the Rain had got a lot of college radio action, and that was great, but no money was spent on them, which was frustrating because some of our contemporaries were starting to break through. Money we were making elsewhere we were putting into tours of America, and we were continually losing it. We were starting to feel gypped, to say the least.

  MIXTAPE: 5 More Songs from Scotland 1. “Party Fears Two,” The Associates 2. “Don’t Talk to Me About Love,” Altered Images 3. “Forest Fire,” Lloyd Cole and the Commotions 4. “Candy Skin,” Fire Engines 5. “Oblivious,” Aztec Camera

  The whole thing with “Don’t You” was a bit of a comedy of errors. We had an A&R guy at the time called Jordan Harris, who said, after New Gold Dream and Sparkle, it was good news, bad news. He said, “We should have got behind these records. Too late now. But there’s a buzz growing on a daily basis.” We were about a year away from a new record. He said it would be great to have something meanwhile to feed the machine and keep the momentum going. We didn’t have anything ready, and he said, “Well, actually, there is something happening that would be great for you.” [Simple Minds’ label] A&M were starting to do movies. He introduced The Breakfast Club to us, then he slipped in the notion that there was a song that would be right for us to do. We said, “Wait a minute, we don’t do anyone else’s songs.” He said, “Don’t worry, this’ll work because it really sounds like a Simple Minds song.” Well, that made it worse because we thought, We’re Simple Minds!

  It turns out that we’d played L.A. a few months earlier and [composer-producer] Keith Forsey had come backstage and given Mick MacNeil, our keyboard player, a cassette of the song. Mick had played it, didn’t think much of it, and forgot to tell us. But Keith had been waiting to hear from us. Finally, Jordan, who was a smooth operator and a lovely man, managed to get us to consider the track. As far as the demo went, Keith sang on it, and it sounded like Richard Butler—like a Psychedelic Furs thing. I could see them doing it, but I couldn’t see Simple Minds ever, and it wasn’t the kind of lyric I would write. So we, as it’s well known, knocked it back a number of times. People have said it was offered to Bryan Ferry, but I asked Bryan and he said he never got approached with it, so I don’t know if that’s true.

  What turned it around wasn’t the fact that we woke up and smelled the coffee. The thing that did it was Keith came over to London off his own back. He knew we weren’t doing it, he got in touch and said, “I’m a big fan of the band anyway; maybe we could work together in the future. I hear you’re in London, can I come and hang out for a couple of days?” Lo and behold, we liked Keith more than his song. You know when you like someone, it’s like, “He’s our new pal.” We thought he was great, and at the right moment, he said, “Why don’t we nip in and do this thing and get the record company off your back? If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. If it does work, who knows? “It was literally a few hours in a drafty studio in Wembley, and the rest is history.*

  “It sounded like a Psychedelic Furs thing. I could see them doing it, but I couldn’t see Simple Minds ever, and it wasn’t the kind of lyric I would write.”

  As soon as that song starts, it’s Simple Minds. We put our heart and soul into it. A lot of people could have done that song. Richard Butler could have done it. But he couldn’t have done it like that. It wouldn’t have jumped out the radio at you like that did, and it wouldn’t have had you jumping out of your seat at the end. Sonically, the heartbeat behind it is total Simple Minds. It will never be ours, but, in a good way, the song belongs to everybody now. It belongs to that generation and it’s a pleasure to play it, and every night we play it with full gusto. We never just go through the motions, because it’s a song from a movie that means a lot to a fair amount of people and you want to respect that.

  Sometimes I get in a cab and the driver will say, “Where do I know you from?” I usually say Crimewatch [the U.K.’s version of America’s Most Wanted]. Or they’ll say, “Are you in a band? Is it Simply Red?” And if I say it’s Simple Minds, they’ll say, “I love that song.” And people ask if it gets on my nerves that it’s always that song. If we’d been a one-hit wonder, then maybe it would—and they might say, in the States, that is the case. Well, you know, we’ve sold gazillions of records and we’ve played to gazillions of people. You don’t have to love all the albums. It’s an honor to us if you even like one of them. People fell in love to that song; they got married to it. The song never strangled us. Jimmy Iovine, who produced Once Upon a Time, said, “Look, this thing’s a monster! You’d better have something to follow it up.” Well, “Alive and Kicking” got to number two in the Billboard charts. It was held off by Michael Jackson. We did all right.

  * DEREK FORBES, original Simple Minds bassist: “Don’t You” wasn’t on Once Upon a Time because Jim was reluctant to do it. He felt detached. He treated it more like an advert. But I know that he grew to like it. The start with all the Hey-hey-heys, the bit that people love, and all the la-la-las at the end, were down to Jim, and that was genius. That’s what helped make it as big as it still is today.

  THAT WAS THEN

  BUT THIS IS NOW

  Simple Minds was a fixture on the global stadium circuit well into the nineties. Latter-day albums like 1989’s Street Fighting Years and 1991’s Real Life were as colossal and pompous as the band’s earlier work, but a certain spark was missing. As seriously as Kerr took himself, his romantic life made him a U.K. tabloid fixture—especially after his marriage to Chrissie Hynde ended and he took up with pouty blonde starlet Patsy Kensit. Still, Simple Minds remains an internationally popular live act. The band, which now consists of the original core duo of Kerr and guitarist Charlie Burchill, currently plays shows that give equal weight to the hidden gems from their early days and to the anthems from their heyday.

  KERR: By the early eighties, it was not onl
y cool to be in the NME; you wanted to be in Smash Hits as well, because the Associates were, Echo and the Bunnymen were, and Orange Juice were, and ABC were, and the Human League were. There was just a lot of shiny new pop that had an edge to it but was still very much pop in the melodic sense. For a long period, the eighties were much maligned. Whenever anyone talked about the eighties, it’s usually for a crappy pop show you get at two in the morning, Oh this is the eighties! And it’ll be Bananarama, and it’ll be Doctor and the Medics, and it’ll be A Flock of Seagulls or whoever had the most outrageous hair. I’m not saying that wasn’t a part of it, but it wasn’t the eighties.

  The Associates, ABC—they were actually staying at the same down-market hotel in London we used to stay in. As they were doing their records, we were doing ours, so there was definitely a feeling, a collectiveness. At night you would meet up, “We’re number 30 this week!” “We’re number 15!” Depeche Mode would come in—even though they were from Basildon, they’d hang in the bar because the Bunnymen would be there, Teardrop Explodes, the Human League. There was a whole feeling of new pop, and whenever people ask me about it now, I think all those people were mates and not one of those bands sounded like each other. There wasn’t a collective sound like there was a sound of the sixties, but there was an amazing imagination. That was a very potent collection of kids—and we were kids at the time—and I still listen to a lot of that music to this day.