JIM KERR: SIMPLY SPEAKING
Sting, Simon Le Bon, George Michael, Bono...somehow Jim Kerr doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. For the moment, of course, the name doesn’t have the same clout either—but not, the general feeling is, for long. The word in the music business is that Simple Minds are about to make it huge, and as their singer, lyricist and spokesman Jim Kerr is in for as much of the attention as Le Bon gets with Duran Duran.
JIM KERR SIMPLY SPEAKING
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Tim deLisle
Sting, Simon Le Bon, George Michael, Bono...somehow Jim Kerr doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. For the moment, of course, the name doesn’t have the same clout either—but not, the general feeling is, for long. The word in the music business is that Simple Minds are about to make it huge, and as their singer, lyricist and spokesman Jim Kerr is in for as much of the attention as Le Bon gets with Duran Duran.
Not that Simple Minds are another singing fashion show. They write catchy tunes and they have teenage fans but they’re a rock group, not a pop group, and certainly not a screaming-teen group, though Kerr’s offbeat good looks have occupied the centerfold calendar in Britain’s Just Seventeen. In spite of their name (taken from a line of David Bowie’s and chosen for its “willfull naivety”), Simple Minds music is complex and sophisticated, and more than with most young bands it seems to be the music that has made them, not the clothes or the videos or the tabloids. You won’t see Jim Kerr posing for photographs with Joan Collins.