There is a sadness befalling many Simple Minds fans right now. Fractions are at an all-time high. There are fans picking sides and there are many caught in the middle. A lot of the fervent set are fans who have been following Simple Minds for more than 40 years. At times I like to think myself lucky that I am not one of them in an exercise of convincing myself that I haven’t been as adversely affected by what is going on compared to many others. But that’s a wrong call on my part. I am deluding myself with that notion.
I envy those in the third camp. The ones who can blot out all the infighting, mudslinging and pettiness and still just enjoy the music. I too wish I could turn that tap off. Because for the past twelve months I haven’t played one single Simple Minds album. Even the ones I did love with all my heart (namely the majority of the first six – or is it seven? – albums). Prior to that I had to listen to tracks when writing my book. I had to for research purposes, and there was already little joy in it. Not through having to ‘listen’ intently for the book but because the joy was already being sucked away for other reasons.
For a time – after the end of 2022 – until this time last year, I could still enjoy those earlier albums to a degree. But once I had finished writing the book, and certainly after attending the gig at Bellahouston Park, all enjoyment was gone. Yet it still tugs at my heartstrings.
Take last night for example. I was listening to a playback of Ronnie McGhie’s Wednesday Night Live show on Irvine Beat FM. The second song played was ‘30 Frames a Second’ and I experienced an inner torture. The very real and potent desire to be absorbed by the song. To sit back, close my eyes and just immerse myself in its glory. But the niggling voice chimes in – Kerr … what an absolute [insert the expletive of your choice here]. And I can’t bat that voice away no matter how much I try. No matter how much another voice comes in saying ‘But those lyrics, eh? And you got to admit, he was fucking HOT at that time…for five minutes.’
And now after the recent opposing documentary, my ability to say to myself ‘Well, he changed and became a ruthless, people-using [insert expletive of choice] later down the line,’ has also been turned on its head. I feel sickened by what has been revealed. The reality was that I wasn’t actually learning anything new, I was just being given another hard pill to swallow that I had been keeping aside in the medicine cabinet because I didn’t want to swallow it! I was employing one last vestige of trying to believe that at some point, Jim Kerr was a good person. Because it matters! And because I was invested in Simple Minds and Jim Kerr in a way I had never been with any other band or artist – even David Bowie.
I appreciate and empathise with all sides of the fan dynamic. The ones that feel a disservice and an injustice has been laid at the feet of former (and current) members of the band – I see it too. The ones that feel the former members are just moaners and the past is the past and they should move on – I have at times felt like that too, particularly when my fandom was at its most fervent. Now I am somewhere in between the first set of fans and the third set who just want to appreciate the music and believe these kinds of grievances should not be played out in public. Yet, I can’t ‘just appreciate the music’ because I cannot make that dissociation between the music and him/them.
I read comments left by the fans on Facebook on Friday evening and through the day on Saturday but have now muted the fan groups (of which there are very few I am currently a member of – I mean, I don’t even follow the official band page any more) because it’s just too much.
When Jim Kerr feels threatened, he hits out and posts on Facebook. Most recently he posted an entry titled ‘On Words and Music’. To me it read like a justification to a career in the music industry. What else would cause someone who had always expressed how much they admired musicians to say such dismissive things like: ‘The world is full of people who can play an instrument […] learnable skills […] most people can reach a competent enough level,’ and twist it to fit a narrative that evokes the notion that lyric writing can’t be learned and that as a consequence, he is special? Only someone with a fragile ego would do that. ‘Where a musician might be able to hide behind the sound of an instrument, great lyricists [like me] bare their thoughts and their souls.’ Except I can clearly recall statements like: my words go with the music and people expect there to be some deep meaning to them but they’re just throwaway. I am paraphrasing here but they are not far from verbatim quotes. With some digging around my blog I could find the exact quotes.
There was a time, yes. Oh, there was a time when I would defend the significance of his input to the hilt. Sychophantically declaring that he is also a musician. His voice is his instrument and that his lyrics made the songs what they were. It was my blinkered hero-worship at play, sprinkled with a huge helping of passion, lust and desire. Also it comes with the fact that I love words. I am a word nerd. I am in the set of people that get hooked on songs by the words and the lyrics. But the music plays just as pivotal a role. If it wasn’t so, I would merely be a lover of poetry. Again, that is another point that Jim Kerr would clearly make in early interviews – I’m not a poet.
Kerr actually states in the recent post I have been referring to: ‘It takes both in equal measure to make a song.’ But then comes a HUGE caveat – one that reinforces his justification of his importance to Simple Minds – ‘It’s the lyrics of a song that turn it into a world people can enter. That’s why at concerts you’ll hear audiences singing along with “the words”.’ Why he needed to put that phrase in scare quotes is anyone’s guess.
Were this true for all people then there would have been a sharp decline in the popularity of classical music over the past century – but this has not been so. One only has to look at the BBC Proms to see that classical music is as popular as it has ever been. In fact, I have been and will be attending several classical concerts over this summer. Not only that, one of my all-time favourite bands over the past 15 years is a predominantly instrumental band – Warm Digits. I would also like to highlight to Mr Kerr the immense popularity of dance music. Again, a lot of it is instrumental with minimal lyrics. Add to that some of the bands that influenced Simple Minds in the early days: Kraftwerk, Neu!, La Dusseldorf, Can – all these bands have a commonality – rhythmic music with minimal or no lyrical content.
One of my closest friends, Birdy – we were always in debate about the catchiness of a song and I am afraid to tell you Mr Kerr that Miss Bird RARELY was hooked by the lyrical content of a Simple Minds song. And whereas I knew the words verbatim (even better than yourself – which given your argument is laughable), Birdy rarely knew them much to my (then) constant consternation. They simply didn’t matter to her.
If, my darling Jim, the words WERE indeed so important, why would you drop whole verses out of a song? Where did the third verse to ‘Celebrate’ go? Likewise, when ‘Sons and Fascination’ was brought back to the setlist in recent tours, why was its third verse cut out? Can you really argue this case when the only lyric universally sung at a Simple Minds concert is ‘la la la la’?
Like I say, yes, for me it was the words that pulled me in – but it was absolutely PART of a whole. Without the incredible music behind Jim Kerr’s lyrics, their impact would falter. I am sorry to rain on your self-congratulatory parade, Mr Kerr. Take a straw poll if you dare and see how many of the Simple Minds fans truly covet the lyrics above all else to the reasons why they love the band and you might be in for a wee shock my dear. I know from my years of being in the fandom and the conversations I have had with many of the fans that I was not in the majority in the way I would covet those lyrics. My own caveat being the EARLY lyrics. Ones that were abstract enough for me to paint my own picture – with your guidance. Jim, you brought the canvas and the paints…perhaps sketched an outline, but it was ME who actually painted the image. But when you then started to do the paintings yourself, as (you would believe that) your songwriting ‘developed’, that’s when I started to tune out. There is nothing as significant for me from Sparkle in the Rain onwards. Certainly not as an entire album. There is the odd gem. A song here and a song there, but nothing like it had been in those early years I’m sorry to say. For me, personally, of course.
I have digressed somewhat, yet I needed to air those things.
Separation of the man/men from the music – I find this hard to do. For in the past if I had taken a dislike to someone in the music industry I wouldn’t listen to their music. Why would I? Our personal biases may have no justifications whatsoever and that’s okay as long as you’re not flagrant or disrespectful in airing the reasoning for the dislike. When I first joined the Simple Minds fandom I would see enough comments referring to Jim Kerr as ‘a knobhead.’ The most used one was ‘Juan’ (i.e.: none too subtly referring to him as a wanker). I used to be bemused as to why people felt that way about him. More than a decade on I now can appreciate why those views existed. Still exist. To be fair, I could appreciate it in the past but it seemed like an irrational thing to me back then. And people are irrational and are well within their right to be. And it is now armed with that knowledge that makes it difficult for me to detach the man from the music.
In the past I kept that separation intact. I never joined fan clubs. I never wrote fan letters. They were up there and I was down here. I made sure I kept that separation in place. Musicians and singers were otherworldly, untouchable, extraordinary. Much like Icarus I sailed way too close to the sun. By becoming entrenched in the Simple Minds fandom and consequently known by and knowing of Jim Kerr to a degree that I had thought utterly implausible when I started ardently following the band toward the end of 2014, my wings melted.
He is the first person to state that there is no turning back. No resetting of the clock, so I have to try and find a way to detach the artists from the art so that at some point in the future I can enjoy the music of Simple Minds again because God knows I’d love to. I really would!