Vomit and illusions of grandeur: The story of Simple Minds’ greatest hit
While running the risk of sounding too rudimentary, in the 1980s, Simple Minds just thought they were too cool for school.
Of course, that seems a very blasé way to start the conversation, but there’s no getting around the fact that the Scottish rock band thought they were far above the standards of movies about teenagers when they were approached about singing a song on the soundtrack. You don’t need me to spell out how the rest went.
‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ quickly became the greatest hit ever made for the band when it was released on the soundtrack of The Breakfast Club in 1985, and they could happily sail off into the sunset as champions of the world. But that would be conveniently brushing over the backstory that went into the song and the plain truth: Simple Minds didn’t want to do it.
There are a lot of conflicting accounts of how the whole situation went down, but the first kick in the teeth was that Jim Kerr and Co. were not at the top of the songwriters’ hit list for potential candidates. It passed from Bryan Ferry to Billy Idol to Corey Hart and even Kerr’s then-wife, Chrissie Hynde, taking a level of romantic persuasion to get it over the line.
John Hughes and Keith Forsey, the respective director of the film and writer of the song, had to go to the effort of flying to Scotland to persuade the band, and even though they were charmed, not even a private screening of The Breakfast Club could convince them. In the end, it was purely the fact that they liked the team that got Simple Minds in the recording booth.
“It wasn’t that we didn’t like it,” Kerr tried to protest in a 2023 interview. “It was just that, at the time, we’d just written an album [1985’s Once Upon A Time], we were going to work with Jimmy Iovine and we felt that we had real songs there – you know, we had three top five hits in the States from that album.” Essentially, he was saying he thought their music was better.
But how wrong this assessment was, because ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ went on to top the charts all over the world and won Simple Minds the coveted elixir they had long been chasing – popularity in America. But even despite all that acclaim, and seemingly having been brought down a few pegs in the process, the band were still trying to maintain their suave veneer.
Kerr admitted that it made him want to vomit every time they had to perform the song, which you could imagine was more than a few times. On top of that, it took until 2025 for the track to appear on any kind of Simple Minds album, after they finally recently conceded to including it on a new record reissue.
It’s a lesson to all artists in the harm that can be caused by massaging their own egos too much, because between Idol and everyone else who passed over ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ would have been cursing their short-sightedness forever after that. Simple Minds clearly also thought it was stupid, but in managing to hold back their heaves, they also created a piece of new wave history.
