by Kevin Burton
It’s been 40 years and I haven’t forgotten.
But it would appear that my limited affection for Simple Minds begins and ends with Ally Sheedy and The Breakfast Club.
Both the band and the Brat Pack were white hot in 1985, 40 years ago this week, when “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” hit number one on the hot 100.
“In The Breakfast Club, five high school students with very different personalities spend a Saturday together in detention and find some common ground,” reads a synopsis of the movie on SongFacts. “The question is, will they remember their time together and act any differently around each other when they return to school and face peer pressure to act their roles.”
Acting their roles as rock and rollers, the members of Simple Minds, especially lead singer Jim Kerr, hated Don’t You (Forget About Me), when it waspresented to them by the song’s co-writer Keith Forsey. They hated the lyrics, and besides, were not in the habit of recording other people’s songs.
“According to Forsey, Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music was his first choice to record this song, but Ferry turned it down,” SongFacts wrote. Simple minds, at least at first, weren’t impressed either.
“We were young, we were a bit brattish, we were insecure,” Kerr said on the SongFacts Podcast in 2022. “We were loving what we were doing and thinking, ‘Hang on a minute, you want us in ’cause you love us because we write these songs, but you want us to do your song?’ We weren’t even willing to listen initially. We were like, ‘No, we don’t do other people’s songs. End of story.’”
“At the time, Simple Minds were gaining traction in the UK, with three modest hits from their 1984 album Sparkle in the Rain: “Waterfront,” “Speed Your Love To Me” and “Up The Catwalk,” SongFacts wrote. “In the US, however, they had no luck, in large part because their US record company, A&M, didn’t promote them.”
“An A&R guy at the label named Jordan Harris tried to rectify that by having them record this song (The Breakfast Club soundtrack was on A&M), but the band wanted nothing to with it.
So why did they do it?
“They simply changed their minds,” SongFacts wrote. “They met with The Breakfast Club director John Hughes and got a screening of the film, which put the lyric in better context. Forsey visited them in Scotland, and they got on well. While there, he convinced them to give it a go, and they recorded the track in a few hours at a studio in London.”
“Once we go into the studio, we don’t know how to do things by half measure,” Kerr told Songfacts. “The band was on fire anyway. Anything we jammed on sounded great.”
“The intro was especially inspired, with guitarist Charlie Burchill landing a big riff and Kerr ad-libbing the “hey, hey, hey, hey” part, Songfacts wrote.
“Suddenly it was game-on and we weren’t thinking about ourselves, we were just thinking about what’s coming out of the speaker, and every time someone did something that was cool, that encouraged us more,” Kerr said. “We were kinda looking at each other going, ‘It’s good this? isn’t it?’”
“This is the thing with music: You can analyze it and you can come with an attitude – and bands are notorious for politics – but once you start playing and you like how it makes you feel, everything else goes out the window. That’s all that counts,” Kerr said.
“The ‘la-la-la-la’ coda was inserted as a placeholder because neither Forsey nor Kerr could think of actual words that made sense,” according to SongFacts. “Kerr planned to write a real lyric and record it the next day, but when they played back the song, it was clear the ‘la-la’ section was a winner and had to stay as is.”
“This song broke the band in America and got them on MTV, expanding their fanbase considerably,” SongFacts wrote. “It was very strange for Simple Minds – who had paid their dues writing songs, playing them in clubs, and knocking on doors to solicit a record deal – to find themselves with a huge hit they didn’t write and only worked on for a few hours. They almost felt guilty about it.”
“We thought, We didn’t even work for this, we just jumped down there for a couple of hours and now it’s number 1 on the Billboard charts,” Kerr told Songfacts. “It was a Calvinistic way of looking at it. We don’t deserve this success. But there’s this other thing that says, ‘Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’ You know, take the break. Listen to all those people who worked so hard for it in the record company and people who believed in it, and the people at MTV who gave us a break and all that stuff. We owe them a ton.”
On the strength of Don’t You (Forget About me) Simple Minds took “Alive and Kicking” to number 3 in 1985. They hit the US Hot 100 three more times, my favorite being 1990’s “See The Lights.” They stayed big in the UK through the 90s but Americans, including me, forgot about them.
Despite initial misgivings, Kerr looks back and is thrilled with the impact of Don’t You (Forget About Me) on pop culture.
“The song and the film are almost iconic to certain generations, especially in America,” he told SongFacts. “So it’s great when things come together and work so well. It’s been a pleasure to see how much joy that song gives to a lot of people.”
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