From: owner-avalon-digest@smoe.org (avalon-digest) To: avalon-digest@smoe.org Subject: avalon-digest V3 #50 Reply-To: avalon@smoe.org Sender: owner-avalon-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-avalon-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk avalon-digest Thursday, February 26 1998 Volume 03 : Number 050 Today's Subjects: ----------------- [AVALON] Forgettable ... ["Garratt, Chris" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 25 Feb 1998 15:18:40 -0000 From: "Garratt, Chris" Subject: [AVALON] Forgettable ... Perhaps Mr Ferry should be applauded for his perspicacity in turning down '(Don't You) Forget About Me'. This is from an interview with Jim Kerr in The Observer, 22nd Feb.: "... These days Simple Minds sell a mere two million or so of each album ... mostly on the continent where musical fashion is less fast and cruel, and where their biggest hit, '(DY)FAM', is still a daytime radio staple. This is Jim Kerr's afterlife, and - for all his money and surface serenity - it has a slightly toxic and, regretful taste: two famous broken marriages, two estranged kids, and a body of work whose early brilliance has long since been overshadowed by pompous vacuity, turning the band's ironic monicker into an accurate description of their audience. And that hit still haunts him. '(DY)FAM' was the bland, booming love song that played in the background as Molly Ringwald snogged a delinquent fellow teenager on the faded-pastel set of 1985's sentimental brat-pack movie 'The Breakfast Club"; one of the archetypal low points of an artistically thin decade. The song went to no.1 in America and made Simple Minds a household name all over the globe. It also stripped them of all credibility. The irony is that, not only did the band not write it, but they hated it from the moment they first heard it. "We were really offended," says Kerr. "It sounded like someone had done us by numbers. It was trite." But they were desperate to conquer America, and the record company had promised to give them a big push if only they would record this little song. " So we thought, well, it's a duff movie; no one's gonna hear the song anyway, so who cares?" They then watched with a mixture of elation and horror as it zoomed to the top of the charts. Kerr grimaces. "It was very awkward and we've never felt great about it, but it was just a ... mechanism" You didn't feel like you'd sold your soul then? "Yeah," he drawls, "we did."" ------------------------------ End of avalon-digest V3 #50 *************************** ======================================================================== Please send any questions or comments about the list to avalon-digest-owner@smoe.org