Music Choice

Twenty-one years after they topped the American charts with Don’t You (Forget About Me), it’s hard to believe that for a time Simple Minds were seen as U2’s only serious competitors as stadium rock kings. It was a brief flirtation with megastardom, however, as the band’s frontman, Jim Kerr (above), increasingly came across as a cut-price Bono. It was an anticlimactic, if lucrative, fate for a group who started out as adventurous art-rockers. Formed by Kerr and the guitarist Charlie Burchill, Simple Minds went on to absorb Krautrock and Eurodisco, producing arresting albums such as 1983’s New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84). Such creative highs were short-lived and, if last year’s comeback album, Black and White 050505, is anything to go by, the band still prefer slickly produced anthems to the imaginative music of their earlier work.