Credit: Brian Sweeney/Paninaro
Simple Minds singer Jim Kerr has revealed the band named their upcoming album Sacrosanct because making it came close to being a religious experience.
Simple Minds’ latest long player is a tight collection of eight songs that hark back to the band’s post-punk years.
Regarding the choice of album title, Kerr, 67, said: “We called the album Sacrosanct because after a lifetime of doing this, nearly fifty years of writing songs together, it’s stopped feeling like a career and started feeling like something closer to faith. Calling the record Sacrosanct isn’t an exaggeration. It’s just honest.”
The band also revealed they named the newly released second single to be taken from the album Sacrosanct after the paradise of Greek myth.
The rock track Elysium is in part inspired by the band’s love of the band Magazine, particularly their 1978 track, The Light Pours Out of Me.
The Minds supported Magazine on a 1979 UK tour promoting the latter’s Secondhand Daylight album.
Looking ahead to their own music launch, Kerr says he is amazed by the creativity of his band partner for the last 50 years and best friend, Charlie Burchill.
The pair formed their first band, Biba Rock, in 1975, and went on to play in the punk outfit Johnny & The Self Abusers before finding fame as Simple Minds.
The new album’s track Our Secrets Are The Same directly explores the lifelong bond by examining the remarkable friendship that began as two eight-year-olds growing up in Glasgow’s Toryglen scheme in the city’s southside.
Kerr said: “Over decades of writing songs together, there are moments when Charlie Burchill lets me hear a new piece of music he has been working on in solitude.
“Often the first few bars literally stop me in my tracks. Then, as the music unfolds, I’m left wondering how on earth he has conjured something at once so familiar and yet so alluringly strange.
“That was the case with the seeds of what would, over time, become Elysium, the song chosen to open Simple Minds’ forthcoming album, Sacrosanct.
“The otherworldly feeling of what I was hearing instantly gave me the freedom to be suitably outlandish as I set about writing lyrics, building images to match the atmosphere of the music.”
Beginner Boys, another song on the album, was inspired by watching his twin grandsons grow up, thinking about what it means to raise a good man today and how to show up as a good role model.
Last year, the group played in front of over 1.5million people around the world.
Sacrosanct is available from January 29 and comes four years after the Simple Minds album Direction of the Heart.
Kerr said: “Making records and performing live is as much part of our lives now as when we started out.”