Two years after Covid cancelled his world tour, the singer is back on the road. He talks about his journey from a Glasgow tower block, life with Chrissie Hynde and Patsy Kensit, and the tough times of the early 2000s
Two years ago, Jim Kerr experienced the mother of celebrity comedowns. His band Simple Minds were in Copenhagen, 10 dates into a world tour, when all the remaining shows were cancelled because of Covid. Kerr returned to Glasgow and supermarkets lined with empty shelves. “It was like the first time I’d gone to East Germany in 1978,” he chuckles. “All that was left were cabbages and broccoli. I reached for the last cabbage and a woman burst in front of me and grabbed it. Two nights before, I’d been a rock star. I thought: ‘What happened to my life?’”
In fairness, that’s a question he could have asked many times since 1977, when he began his journey to stardom from a tower block in Glasgow’s Toryglen. Kerr and his old pal Bono virtually wrote the job description for “stadium rock god”, but Kerr was the last person you’d have expected to become one. In his teens, no one knew people in bands and he felt “you had more chance of becoming an astronaut”. He was painfully introverted and spoke with a stammer.
