Exclusive:Jim Kerr interview on special plans to perform classic Simple Minds album live at Bellahouston Park

Simple Minds will make a special return to their hometown on Friday 27 June 2025 as part of Glasgow’s Summer Sessions at Bellahouston Park for a one-off performance. Jim Kerr and co will be joined by special guests which will include Future Islands, KT Tunstall and Hamish Hawk. It will be Simple Minds’ largest UK headline show for over 30 years.

Today the band have made an announcement about the show which will see them play their biggest album live for the first time. I had previously spoken to Jim Kerr about the Glasgow origins of Simple Minds.

I phoned him yesterday morning at his London hotel room to continue that conversation and to find out more about the band’s plans.

You've got some news for me. What's happening at Bellahouston Park?

Well, first of all, we're really looking forward to it. Simple Minds have played in Glasgow countless times, but rarely have we been outdoors. The last time we were outdoors was not so far from Bellahouston Park, at Ibrox [in 1986]. So coming back to play in Glasgow was a special occasion. Why not try and make it a wee bit more special? By playing, for the first time, as part of the set, our biggest album ever, Once Upon a Time, which we've never played before in it’s entirety. It's quite a short album, eight songs. It will be a genuine premiere.

Deciding that the album will be part of the set, has that given you an opportunity to revisit that record, and listen to it a bit more to think about how you want to play the songs live and how you want to bring it into the live environment now?

Well, that is right. It is a challenge because there's maybe one or two songs that we have never played live. You can’t go back in time - that was then, this is now. But I think if you do a good job, you can really evoke the times, particularly for people who are there.

And we did it quite successfully not so long ago with New Gold Dream, one of Simple Mind’s most prominent records, we did that at Paisley Abbey and recorded it, that went out as a live album and it was its own success.

What do you remember of this particular album in terms of the time that it came out, where you guys were in your life?

I think a lot of people who know Simple Minds would say that it was definitely a peak. If you look at some of the events that went on that year, starting with, Don't You Forget About Me, which came out in April 1985, it went all the way to number one in America. Then a couple of months later there was Live Aid, which to this day, is arguably the most iconic rock gig ever. We did that in America.

There was The Breakfast Club movie as well, of course, which still, to this day, subsequent generations discover Don't You Forget About Me, a huge part of the soundtrack.

We released Alive and Kicking as the follow up to Don't You Forget About Me. It went all the way to the lowly number two in America, just missed it. Our album, Once Upon a Time that we're talking about just now was released towards the end of the year and through it all, we were out on tour. And so it was heady times, that's for sure.

You’d gone from sitting around in cafes in Toryglen, saying “we’re going to be rock stars” to standing in front of 100,000 people in Philadelphia for Live Aid, broadcast to the world. Was that the point you realised you had made it?

It’s funny. We're working on a book just now. We were recently reminiscing about that. I remember our manager, Bruce Findlay at the time, I mean the pressure was already on us, but I remember he gave this little speech before we went on stage, not that we needed geeing up, but he was always good at getting things going. And he used this phrase, he said, “this is your Everest moment”. This is it. If you do well today. I mean, the record was already a big success, but to deliver it live to an audience of that magnitude. If you can do this today, then you're set up. And who would've thought 40 years later, here we are still talking about it and excited about the idea of playing it. And an entire lifetime has passed.

When me and my brother lived in Dublin, if we came home from a nightclub or something like that, we used to have a DVD of Live Aid, we would put on the Simple Minds set and dance about in the living room with folk, and they’d love the way it all looked and the performance.

That's great. What an image that is.

Did it feel like a defining moment at the time?

If there's one thing I think has been a huge factor in how the career of Simple Minds has panned out - we want to give our best every night. Every night was Live Aid to us. Except I think what Bruce was saying was that this was the show that would measure how far we had come. I think I would have preferred if he had waited till after the gig to lay that out.

We were still a bit wet behind in those days, that level of responsibility was still new to us. Of course, through time, that performance becomes even more iconic and referred to again. It did feel big when we were there, you mentioned being in a wee cafe in Toryglen and now we are being announced on stage by Jack Nicholson who was the biggest movie star on the planet at the time.

I’ve got this great image of Madonna and Sean Penn coming into our room. Sean, believe it not, had just done a John Byrne play, Slab Boys. So he had this Glasgow accent down and he wanted to come in and show off. It was rubbish, but just great, great memories [laughs].

I talked to you before about the Mars Bar and how the Glasgow crowd was part of those early days for Simple Minds, but I'm curious about where it was exactly that you and Charlie were scribbling things in notepads and talking to each other and saying “we can take this to the entire world”. Where were your Southside places that were important to you, when plotting your future?

Well, Shawlands was a big place to us, we would be hanging about there before we started going into town. There is a pub there on Kilmarnock Road called The James Tassie, but back then it was called the Doune Castle. That's where we would go and hang out with the rest of the guys and the bands would play and we were horrible to them. We would sit and say, “they're rubbish. We could be much better than this.” And then finally the manager of this place called our bluff and said, “well get up and do better than them”. Yeah, which was a kind of red rag to a bull.

You're just off the back of your biggest tour in 30 years. The energy from the crowd when you do arena shows and these large scale performances, does that give you impetus to keep going?

It certainly does give it a sense of purpose. Somebody fairly recently showed me an interview we did at our first ever gig, January 17th, 1978. And don't ask me where I got the gall, it really wasn't a part of my nature, but I'd said we wanted to not only be in a live band, we wanted to be in a great live band. We wanted to take it around the world, and we wanted to get a life out of it. And here we are. That's still the desire here. The biggest sense of purpose is sending people home at the end of the night feeling great.

I was thinking the other night about when the band started out, where you were growing up, the world was a much bigger place. Young people weren't as saturated with access to musical influences, you had to seek that out. You come from a time when there were folk sitting in Bellshill, in East Kilbride, across Glasgow who wanted to send messages to the world in music. Each of the bands that came along and got beyond the confines of the West of Scotland, they all had a very individual sound. I’m curious about what were the influences that helped form that early Simple Minds sound?

I mean, to this day we still give credit to... it was a hodgepodge of David Bowie and Roxy Music. Peter Gabriel. Lou Reed was a huge thing, I think Velvet Underground was the first ever punk band. For me, the greatest thing about when punk came wasn't so much the sound, although it was exhilarating as well, it was the idea, the ethos, homemade. You could do it yourself because even till a year before punk, the idea that you would have to be musically proficient or talented or study in London or Paris or Vienna, to be an artist.

Then you started to see kids in Glasgow, and in the surrounding areas, for some reason, imbued by dreams, and the power to act on dreams. That's as important. We can all have dreams, but to act on them. The power of imagination as well as the skill to hustle. You have to be able to hustle. We're still hustling, putting it all together. I think that is all part of the Glasgow character as well.

It was 41 years ago this week that you filmed the music video for Waterfront with a free gig for fans at the Barrowland Ballroom, which was closed at the time. That gig is seen as the starting point for creating one of the greatest music venues in the world. What are your memories of how that all came about?

Well, it's amazing because when you think that it was really fragile as Barrowland Ballroom had been shut for a few years and that part of town by then was a bit dark and dodgy. And I'm saying that coming from Toryglen. I remember Peter Irvine the Edinburgh promoter coming through who had quite a lesser view of the idea of a gig there. Voices in the room saying we’d get done in. We wanted to shoot the video there and use that as a bit of a test run, see what it would be like for a concert. It was on a Sunday afternoon when I got to see the crowd and that famous Barrowland bounce with the sprung floor for the first time. It was magic. Now the venue is known the world over.

When we see you at Bellahouston Park at the summer, the album will be part of the set and then you will weave in the songs that people would expect from a Simple Minds tour?

That’s right. People are going to hear the big songs they would expect to hear but this will be a one-off, a different thing. We’ve done outdoor shows across Europe so it’s a chance to bring that to Glasgow. The sun will be shining, I’m going to give a hundred percent. We’ve got a lot to live up to if we want to conjure up the past. We have to be as good as it was back then, and that’s quite a challenge, but I’m looking forward to it.

Okay Jim. Thanks for talking to us, I'm sitting here at my desk with a roll and square sausage from Henry Healy’s, so I'll get back to my breakfast.

And I'll let you, brilliant, that's what I call nostalgia.

Tickets for Simple Minds at Bellahouston Park are on sale here.