“Why not?”: How Chrissie Hynde saved Simple Minds from sabotaging their greatest success
“It was hard getting us to do that one,” Simple Minds singer Jim Kerr declared in 1986, a year after the single ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ became their first number one hit in America.
Arguably on the shortlist of the most memorable pop hits from the 1980s, that anthemic tune from The Breakfast Club soundtrack was also the gift horse that Kerr couldn’t stop looking in the mouth.
Simple Minds had already been around for eight years by the time the single came out, and they had a strong following in the UK, but rather than being asked to write a new song inspired by the teen coming-of-age film, they’d been offered the chance to record one already penned by Keith Forsey, the man behind the hit ‘What a Feeling’ from 1983’s Flashdance.
“We had lots of worries,” Kerr said, “We can be a very precious bunch, though I hate to admit it”.
Preferring to write their own material, the band initially rejected The Breakfast Club offer, and ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ floated around for a while, with Billy Idol and Bryan Ferry passing it on before Forsey circled back around to Kerr again.
“Keith Forsey phoned me,” Kerr recalled to The Guardian in 2016, “and rather cleverly said, ‘I’m a huge fan of the band. How about I just spend a couple of days with you? Maybe we’ll do something in the future’.”
Kerr admitted that he and his bandmates “couldn’t give a toss about teenage American schoolkids,” but after spending some time chatting with Forsey, he started to feel bad for the guy, and reluctantly agreed to go into the studio and “bang out the tune” for the film.
In a 2006 post on Simple Minds’ website, the frontman wrote that the band’s decision to finally record the single was “due to the persistence of our manager Bruce Findlay and of course Forsey himself”, but in The Guardian chat a decade later, he gave some belated kudos to another encouraging voice that had pushed back against his initial prideful rejection of the idea.
“My wife at the time, Chrissie, who was older and wiser, kept badgering me,” he acknowledged, referring, of course, to his ex-wife and Pretenders frontwoman Chrissie Hynde, whose rebuttal was a simple, “Why not?” “I like the song,” Hynde had told him, “What’s the problem?”
Not even Hynde, however, could have guessed how important that “badgering” would prove to be. Once The Breakfast Club became a box office success, its stand-out ‘theme song’ and the accompanying video on MTV dominated pop culture in 1985, propelling Simple Minds to international fame, eventually leading to them playing ‘Don’t You’ in front of 100,000 people in Philadelphia at the Live Aid concert that year.
And yet, when the band released their next studio album later that same year, Once Upon a Time, they refused to include their brand new smash hit on it. “We must be the first band that has a number-one hit around the world and doesn’t include it on the next album,” Kerr said in 1986, trying to make it clear to his new audience that he didn’t need anybody’s help writing radio songs.
“It was nice to have [‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)] open doors for us,” he said, “but it wasn’t the first hit we had; it was the first we had in America… We followed it with a number two, written by ourselves, ‘Alive and Kicking’.”
For good measure, Kerr also made it clear that the catchiest part of ‘Don’t You’, the la-la-la bit at the end, was his own contribution, telling The Guardian, “I said I’d write some lyrics [to replace the la’s] but Keith [Forsey] said: ‘Over my dead body. We’re keeping that!’”
