Band Details

From the Promoter

More landmark announcements today as Simple Minds take their acclaimed Greatest Hits+ show to the USA and Canada!

The band will play 7 dates during October 2013 visiting New Jersey, Boston and New York in the USA and Montreal and Toronto in Canada. This will mark the bands first performances across the Atlantic for quite a number of years and will be something very special indeed!

“One of the things I’m most proud of is that people say to me what Simple Minds are you talking about?

The avant-garde, the art-rock, the pop, the ambient, the instrumental group, the political, the folk, the stadium band? We’ve been on one hell of a journey. To play all those different styles but at the same time be quintessentially Simple Minds is an amazing thing,” says frontman Jim Kerr.

The Greatest Hits + dates will coincide with the release of Celebrate – The Greatest Hits + collection, a comprehensive overview of their 35 years as one of Britain's most successful bands, taking in the innovative sheen of Promised You A Miracle and Glittering Prize, the anthemic sweep of Waterfront andSanctify Yourself, the firebrand strand of Belfast Child and Mandela Day and the singalong wonder of Don't You (Forget About Me) and Alive & Kicking, and bringing things right up to date with the inclusion of two new tracks.

What has remained a constant, from their early days at the Mars Bar in Glasgow to their most recent run of European dates via headline appearances at Wembley Stadium and Milton Keynes Bowl, is their dedication to live performance. It can be traced back to the days when future Simple Minds frontman Jim Kerr and childhood friend and guitarist Charlie Burchill used to sneak into the Glasgow Apollo to catch
Lou Reed or Genesis when they weren't hitch-hiking around the UK to follow cult groups Van Der Graaf Generator and Doctors of Madness in the mid-seventies.

In February 2012, Simple Minds reissued their first 'five' albums as the X5 box and embarked on the 5X5 tour with a repertoire comprising 5 tracks from each of their early albums. Ecstatic reviews followed across the pages of the music monthlies – “everybody loves them” trumpeted Q – and the broadsheets – The Guardian piled on superlatives such as “vital and “dazzling” – and justified the group's decision to go back in order to move forward. The 5X5 Live double set, documenting the dates and the variations on the 5X5 template, enthused a dedicated and wide-ranging fanbase.

Most of all, they have always been a formidable, vibrant, vital concert attraction, able to draw on a catalogue that includes such timeless classics as the widescreen majesty of Speed Your Love To Me and Ghostdancing, the supple avant-funk of Love Song and Sweat In Bullet and the demented electro-disco of I Travel and Celebrate, an apposite title for the forthcoming tour and collection.

“When we started Simple Minds, our objective was to be considered as one of the great live bands. A band that had the desire to go all around the world – playing everywhere and anywhere,” says Kerr. “That challenge is ongoing and we will relish touring all over the UK next spring, getting up close to so many who have supported us over the last three decades and more.”

Time to celebrate the majesty of Simple Minds.

Simple Minds are Jim Kerr, Charlie Burchill, Mel Gaynor, Andy Gillespie and Ged Grimes.

Promoter