Simple Minds still sound like the ghosts of Glasgow learned how to time-travel — and Jim Kerr is still figuring out where the hell they’re going. The album Direction of the Heart somehow conjures up club gigs from 1978 and headlines about the collapse of truth in the same breath. “You want to conjure up the ghosts of the past,” Kerr says, “but we don’t want to be wallowing in nostalgia. There’s a sweet spot where it all feels of the moment.”
And what a moment. Act of Love might be the closest you’ll get to hopping a time machine back to that first half-empty discotheque gig. “It was January 17, 1978, freezing cold Glasgow,” Kerr laughs. “Charlie hits these chords and I thought, he’s got a future. The rest of us? I dunno.” Of course they shelved it, as impatient kids do, but decades later someone found an old clip on YouTube. “We thought, ‘We gotta go back to that!’ So we strapped on a better B chorus and gave it a voice of experience.”
That voice hasn’t lost its bite — or its nerves. Who Killed Truth lands like a brick through a cable news feed. “That phrase, ‘Who killed truth,’ it’s timeless, right? Shakespearean even,” Kerr says, suddenly the bard of post-fact paranoia. “But I kept seeing it pop up in America — you know what I’m talking about.”
Even the sweetly titled Solstice Kiss comes with its own Celtic swirl of mythology, winter mornings, and a side gig for a whiskey ad. “They said, ‘We want the Celtic Simple Minds!’ Well, we happened to have one lying around.”
It’s not all misty nostalgia. Sparks’ Russell Mael shows up for Human Traffic, adding a wink to the song’s grin. “I told Charlie, the chorus doesn’t make me laugh. He said, ‘We don’t do laugh.’ But it needed to flip. Russell just popped into my mind — they’re hilarious! And legends.”
Behind it all, there’s Charlie Burchill, still hoarding tapes like a mischievous crow. “I’d have to break into Charlie’s house to see what he’s got hidden,” Kerr jokes. “He drip-feeds me stuff. He’s like, ‘I played you that.’ No, you didn’t, Charlie!”
And then there’s Wondertimes, the “bonus track” that fans instantly demanded be promoted to full-time status. “We made a mistake there,” Kerr admits. “The reaction’s been so good. It’s classic Simple Minds — a piece of teenage naive hope, which we need right now.”
Don’t look now, but Simple Minds might be your favorite legacy band that never learned how to die. “We shouldn’t be having this kind of energy at this stage of the game,” Kerr says, not sounding sorry about it at all. “It’s Defying Gravity, man.”
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
