Top 60 Jim Kerr Quotes

I go to bed at 8 P.M. and get up at 4:30 A.M. Who the hell is gonna live with that?

There is never going to be a band like The Who again.

I want to improve.

Especially in Europe – the States also, where you’ve got that landmass – but in Europe cultures and landscapes change within a hundred kilometers, and there’s worlds within worlds. Within those worlds, there’s good things going on. Within those worlds, there’s tragic things.

At a young age, to think the exciting days are over, it’s not easy.

When you go though the door to the big league, your band is no longer your band. I wouldn’t want anyone to feel sorry for us. We’d worked and we’d gone for it. We were pretty gung-ho. I liked our attitude.

I’m good at getting good stuff out of people.

Glasgow – don’t get me wrong, I love Glasgow, but in the ’60s and ’70s the city was on its knees. It was kind of bankrupt. It was pretty monochrome.

Singing about universal love, peace and freedom is one thing, but it’s important to do something if you can.

Glaswegians have always loved the finer things but with the emergence of good shopping and such like we’re finding it easier to show what were really capable of.

You don’t get to choose when you fall in love.

Being in the studio for the first time was a daunting process. I didn’t know what the engineers did. A mix? What’s a mix? We didn’t know what we were doing, but fortunately, we knew people who did.

I think within our music there is a real strong idea of search, search for identity, search for place, search for time, search for love, search for knowledge.

We’re honored – honored that we’ve been part of something that certainly, in terms of ’80s pop culture in America, people have embraced.

You don’t get many periods in your life when it all goes your way.

For us every gig is a responsibility. We don’t want people seeing us then saying, ‘They’re not as good as The Proclaimers.’

For us, the world makes sense through music, and we escape through it, too.

I’m a kid from housing estate in Glasgow.

When we were starting, the only old guys you’d see on stage were blues guys. They played every night, feast or famine, skint, rich, in fashion and out. You didn’t have to ask them about their lives, their dreams, it was written on their faces: that’s who they were and that’s what they did.

I have the most beautiful memories of ‘New Gold Dream.’ It was made in a time between spring and summer, and everything we tried worked. There were no arguments. We were in love with what we were doing, playing it, listening to it.

Like most classic bands, we only do an album every three or four years but that leaves a lot of down-time. And I don’t like down time.

When we started in the late 70s, I don’t think it’s unfair to say Glasgow was on its knees. It was the end of the industrial age and it really was looking to find itself. It had to reinvent itself. And Simple Minds have had to constantly reinvent themselves. So has Glasgow.

I’d always been interested in the idea of the outsider.

Our big songs were all songs that were never meant to be.

I get wound up by bad manners on public transport.

I’m not a loner, but I spend so much time alone, even on tour.

I sleep five hours, I get up at 4 A.M., I take three or four cold showers a day. I do things differently.

Music is an organic thing. It’s always progressing.

Back in the Seventies, we bucked the trend. Instead of going to London and handing in a demo tape, we insisted the record labels came to Glasgow to hear us.

You don’t plan ‘La la la’s.’ They just pop out. Bowie and Marc Bolan littered many of their songs with ‘La la’s.’

To have a broad range is one thing, but to still have the Simple Minds identity is quite remarkable.

I was happy living in a high-rise council estate in Glasgow up until our sixth album.

I’m not an easy one when it comes to nostalgia – as long as I’ve got a new idea I’ll always think that this is the best song we’ve ever written and all that.

I’m a natural-born enthusiast.

I was into the ‘Dennis The Menace’ comic strip long before I got into music, and it still makes me chuckle.

When I’m touring, everything is so structured and I’m surrounded by people all the time, so I love walking on my own in the open air in the countryside.

I’m not ideal marrying fodder.

The issues are always the same. Racism, war, poverty, the geography changes.

The concert stage is where Simple Minds do their best work, it is where we forged our live reputation.

John Hughes and his movie ‘The Breakfast Club’ gave us above all the thrilling opportunity that everyone who starts a band dreams of. The opportunity that is of aggregating the kind of success that enables an act to go through the door and into what is considered to be ‘The Big League.’

We had this thing that hometown gigs were the best and the worst because there was this unbearable pressure.

The Call should have been bigger than what they were.

I’m enjoying the frenetic pace of this changing world and yet within that hanging on quietly but quite stoically to the same thing I’ve always done.

I love women, I really seriously love them but I need to do my own thing.

It’s a mysterious thing, music. You’re just never sure. You ‘get’ it, but does anyone else even get a chance to know it exists? And if they do, are they gonna feel about it like you feel? When they do, it feels great.

If you speak to Iggy Pop, John Lydon or the Foo Fighters and ask them to name their favourite three gigs I know the Barrowlands will be there.

I love playing shows and travelling – but I’m not about to cart myself around the world with inferior product. I just won’t do it. I don’t need to do it.

In the case of ‘Walk Between Worlds,’ I’m happy to say that it was one of those records that when we were working on it, we would go home at the end of the day with smiles on our faces. We felt it was good work and every song we worked on, they seemed to connect.

It was the mid-80s and we were on the verge of making it big all over the world, having just released Sparkle in the Rain. However, as with many U.K. bands, the U.S. was proving tough to crack.

I’ve always been somebody who lives on the fringe – geographically or whatever.

I think it’s because of dreamers that the world turns.

What it boils down to is that we look for a melody and we look for a lyric, and we look for an atmosphere and an emotion, and we try to concoct a song out of all of those ingredients.

I would never apologise for trying too hard.

When we decided we wanted to do something, we did it 100 percent. When we decided we wanted to make it big in America, we did it.

If you’re in a band, you can dress like a daft teenager for as long as you like. In fact, it’s expected of you!

I really believe that if people put everything they have into something, they can really surprise themselves most of the time.

I am a huge sports fan and could easily reel off a load of sports stars who became idols to me.

We were blessed in many ways.

We have always been a big success as parents and I get on well, always have, with my exes – and had to because there were kids involved. Obviously they’ve had their own lives and their own marriages, as I have, but there’s a knowing closeness. They are still family, really.

In my experience, heroes can come with many different profiles, including some whose stories become known worldwide and, indeed, become part of history.