Features
Simple Minds Still Alive And Kicking
The band will make a short trek this spring beginning with a pair of appearances April 18-19 at Spiroudome in Charleroi, Belgium, followed by two stops in Spain: April 25 at Pabellon Fuente de San Luis in Valencia and April 26 at Plaza De Toros in Benidorm.
The next leg of the tour features an eight-night stand at the Antwerps Sportpaleis in Belgium October 24-November 8, a four-night run at Ahoy’ Rotterdam in The Netherlands and six stops in the U.K., including Manchester, Birmingham, London, Sheffield, Cardiff and Glasgow.
Tickets for U.K. shows are available at Ticketmaster.co.uk and TicketLine.co.uk.
During Simple Minds’ U.K. shows, the band will perform the entirety of their 1982 album New Gold Dream for the first time.
The second half of the show will see the band perform other hits, including “Waterfront,” “Up On The Catwalk,” “Alive and Kicking” and, of course, “Don’t You Forget About Me,” which, ironically, was offered to Bryan Ferry and Billy Idol before it was presented to Simple Minds.
Frontman Jim Kerr said the band was initially hesitant to do anything to celebrate their 30th anniversary.
“Oddly, as a band with quite some history we have never been that comfortable dwelling too much on the past, no matter how glorious it may have been,” Kerr said. “The future is what excited us and it still does as we work on another new set of songs.
“However, strangely enough, now that the time has probably come for us to maybe give a not do the past and the journey that has evolved over three decades, I find that I am enthusiastically up for it. Or at least I am now after a period of some doubts.
“And that’s because I realise that it is important to occasionally look around, take stock, and take a pause to consider where we have been in order to grasp where we should be going with our music set.”
In the end, the band decided it would be selfish not to mark the occasion.
“It is only right to consider graciously that there is more involved in the story of Simple Minds than ourselves. By that I refer, of course, to the people who have supported us with great commitment along the way; those for whom Simple Minds are more than merely another record purchase or just another concert among many that occurred in the hazy past.”