Simple Minds Archives

Rarely Covered: Simple Minds

Posted by Mike Tobyn at 9:00 am No Responses »

Nov 132024

Rarely Covered looks at who’s mining the darkest, dustiest corners of iconic catalogs.

Simple Minds has existed for close to 50 years, featuring schoolboy friends Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill, still the nucleus of the lineup. You have heard their music. At least one of their songs, anyway. In the US they are considered One Hit Wonders (even though “Alive and Kicking” hit #3). Here at Cover Me we have had not one feature on “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” but two, along with the occasional standalone mashup version. Nevertheless, it is atypical of their work. And when I say “work,” I mean that Simple Minds were the most commercially successful Scottish Band of the ’80s, and a version of the band records and continues to fill UK and European arenas each year.

Those decades of effort have had many important stages. It is not worth pretending that punk act Johnny and the Self-Abusers had such a glorious future, but once the band evolved into the electronic, Krautrock-flavored field, their sound began to take its mature form, in the albums Real to Real Cacophony and Empires and Dance, and the song “I Travel.” A switch of record labels led to a stream of single and album successes, hits across the world (but not yet the US). Their classic albums Sparkle in the Rain and Street Fighting Years endure as classics. They developed different, innovative, sounds and hit records with legendary producers like Trevor Horn and Jimmy Iovine. With occasional breaks they have remained active ever since. They have embraced many sounds and line-ups. Fully 23 of their albums have been hits in the UK, 5 reaching number 1. Their live act remains a strength to this day; they toured extensively, pre-COVID, across the world, with big tours in the US, periodically strengthened by refugees from other Scottish rock bands around Kerr and Burchill. The breadth and vigor of their work is remarkable.
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Full Albums: Neil Young’s ‘Harvest’

Posted by Seuras Og at 12:00 pm 3 Responses »

Nov 262021

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

Harvest is the one Neil Young album that everybody knows of. The reason? Almost undoubtedly “Heart of Gold,” that era-defining song of the early ’70s, all acoustic whimsy, swaying on a stool. Of course it is a terrific song, if a little diminished by ubiquity, but not hugely typical of, at least, Young’s latter-day work, especially when he saddles up with Crazy Horse.

But, by golly, that sweet acoustic ditty has done ol’ Shakey well. At last count there were over a hundred “Heart of Gold” covers, some of them good enough to warrant a yearly check of no small size passing through his mail slot. It did pretty well in its author’s iteration too, mind, hitting the coveted number one spot in the US singles chart (Young’s only sojourn there) and top ten in many other territories. Considering Young had only started dabbling with acoustic songs in response to a back injury, necessitating his sitting to play, how serendipitous must that fall have been? Mind you, his own comments as to where it took him were less than generous: “This song put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch.”

On the back of the single, so too did Harvest flourish, likewise becoming a chart topper with Young’s biggest LP sales to date. Characteristically, given the sheer cussedness of the man, it contains a number of styles, some harking back to previous album After the Gold Rush, some more akin to future more country-inflected excursions. This reflected the musicians recruited, largely country session men making their first outing as the Stray Gators. Pedal steel player Ben Keith, bassist Tim Drummond, and drummer Kenny Buttrey helped shape Harvest‘s sound. So did Jack Nitzsche, the producer and pianist who also played a part with Crazy Horse. Nitzsche decided to orchestrate a couple of the songs as well, an odd move at the time for an artist in other than easy-listening territory. And then there was the stark and bleak beauty of “The Needle and the Damage Done,” gaunt in its unadorned voice and guitar, a song as chilling as Bert Jansch’s clearly influential “Needle of Death.”

A year shy of its half century, how, then, has Harvest fared? How well have the songs lasted? How do they fit into the differing tastes of this century? These more recent interpretations help reveal the answer: better than expected. The original Harvest is an album I listen to for a wallow in nostalgia; these ten covers stand on wholly different ground.
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Covering the Hits: “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” (Simple Minds)

Posted by Patrick Robbins at 1:30 pm 4 Responses »

Oct 162020

“Covering the Hits” looks at covers of a randomly-selected #1 hit from the past sixty-odd years.

Keith Forsey and Steve Schiff wrote “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” while scoring The Breakfast Club. They sent it to Simple Minds, a favorite group of theirs. Simple Minds turned it down, preferring to do songs they themselves had written. Bryan Ferry turned it down. Billy Idol turned it down. Eurythmics turned it down. Cy Curnin of the Fixx turned it down. The record company suggested Corey Hart; Forsey turned them down. Chrissie Hynde loved it, but was pregnant and didn’t want to do the accompanying video, so she badgered her husband to try it. Her husband was Jim Kerr, of (wait for it) Simple Minds.

Once the band came around, they followed Forsey & Schiff’s demo pretty closely, with Kerr throwing in the “Hey, hey, hey, hey” and a few “la la la”s toward the end. After its release, while grateful for the doors it opened, the band sometimes sounded like they wished they’d stuck to their guns and kept turning it down. “(The lyrics) sound pretty inane to me,” Kerr later said. “Sometimes I play it and I just puke.”

It seems like the only people who ever loved the song were the target audience. They took the song to number one and permanently lodged it in the collective conscious of the class of ’85. When Simple Minds performed it at Live Aid (at Bob Geldof’s insistence), the Philadelphia crowd went crazy, and the band realized what they had on their hands was more than just another hit. Thirty-five years later, “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” can bring the era back like few other songs.

Such a song becomes an easy target for artists wanting to cover it. In Spin‘s definitive oral history of the song, Forsey says, “For me, the song only goes one way, and what we did when we did it was the way.” That’s as may be, but that didn’t stop many others from taking it their way. As Schiff says in the same article, “The song has really gone off on its own and has become that thing for other people, and that comes across when somebody else does it. You know, walking by bars in New Orleans, at a karaoke bar and it’s there. It’s sort of fun where it can pop up.”

Seven of them pop up below. Enjoy!

In the Spotlight: KT Tunstall

Posted by Sara Stoudt at 12:00 pm 3 Responses »

Jun 212019

In the Spotlight showcases a cross-section of an artist’s cover work. View past installments, then post suggestions for future picks in the comments!

Tunstall’s debut album, Eye to the Telescope, contains crowd favorites such as “Suddenly I See,” which graces the iconic opening scene of the film The Devil Wears Prada. However, Tunstall’s breakout hit came in 2004, with “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree.” (Woo hoo!) This song is emblematic of Tunstall’s overall style of guitar playing and vocal tone and features the popular Bo Diddley beat. Continue reading »

Mr. & Mrs. Fox Mash Up “Midnight City” and “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” Covers

Posted by Maggie Clancy at 10:00 am 3 Responses »

Mar 142012

To cover elitists, there is a clear-cut difference between a cover of something and simply mashing up a song with one of the artist’s own (see: every other Top 40 song that features the chorus of an ’80s song.) It’s a seemingly impossible line to straddle. Mr. & Mrs. Fox manage to achieve the impossible with their brilliant cover mash-up of M83’s “Midnight City” and Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget About Me).” Continue reading »

Five Good Covers: Don’t You (Forget About Me) (Simple Minds)

Posted by Courteney Palis at 5:00 pm 3 Responses »

Dec 062011

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

It’s hard to think about The Breakfast Club – perhaps the best thing to come out of the ’80s after parachute pants – without recalling one of Simple Minds’ biggest hits: “Don’t You (Forget About Me).” Who can forget the cult classic’s memorable closing scene, Judd Nelson’s triumphant fist-pump into the air? Although Simple Minds had already released a few popular tracks overseas, it wasn’t until 1985, when “Don’t You” appeared in The Breakfast Club, that the Scottish New Wave pop rock band finally entered America’s consciousness. Continue reading »