Simple Minds – Don’t You (Forget About Me)

The biggest song of Simple Minds’ career — their only US number one, the one nobody can hear without picturing five teenagers walking out of a Saturday detention — was a song they didn’t write, didn’t want, and recorded in a few hours one day as a favour.

Jim Kerr has a name for Don’t You (Forget About Me). He calls it the black swan. The song that came out of nowhere, took over everything around it, and then refused to leave. The Scottish band he had been fronting since 1977 had eight years of British and European success behind them by the time it landed; in America they were nearly invisible. Within months of the song’s release, the same group that had spent half a decade trying to break the United States had a number one record there, a number one in Canada, top ten singles around the world, and one of the defining moments of an entire decade of cinema attached to their name. And the strangest thing about all of it was that none of them had written a note of it.

The song was written for the film. Producer Keith Forsey and guitarist Steve Schiff put it together specifically for The Breakfast Club, the John Hughes movie that would put Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, and Anthony Michael Hall into a Saturday detention together and turn them into a generation’s reference point. Forsey, an American producer and drummer who had co-written “Flashdance — What a Feeling” and would later co-write “Shakedown” for Beverly Hills Cop II, was running the film’s music. He took the demo to Bryan Ferry. Ferry passed. To Cy Curnin of The Fixx. The Fixx passed. To Billy Idol, who had been working with Forsey for years. Idol passed.

Forsey came back to Simple Minds because he had always wanted Simple Minds. He had turned up at a gig at some point, had a few drinks, and given keyboardist Mick MacNeil a cassette while ranting that he wanted to work with them. MacNeil left the cassette in his bag. Weeks passed; nothing happened. When the formal pitch arrived through A&M, who were also the band’s American label, Simple Minds said no — they did not record other people’s songs, and they did not love some of the lyrics. The label and Forsey kept coming back. Eventually, more out of charity to a songwriter they had grown to like personally than anything else, the band agreed to give it a go. They watched a screening of the movie, sat with the song a little longer, and went into the studio in November 1984. The whole thing was done in a few hours.

A number-one record they never really claimed as theirs

It came out as a single in the United States on February 20, 1985, on A&M, and in Britain on April 9 on Virgin, with “A Brass Band in African Chimes” — a band original — on the B-side. The film opened around the single, and the two became inseparable. By that May the song had reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100, the band’s first and only American chart-topper. It went to number one in Canada, number seven in the UK, number two in Italy, number four in West Germany, number six in Australia, and the top ten in roughly half the markets it was released in. The music video, directed by Daniel Kleinman and filmed inside Knebworth House in Hertfordshire, gave it an MTV life of its own — Kerr singing in a darkened room full of chandeliers and rocking horses while clips from the film played on bank-of-televisions in the background. The hook of the song — the closing run of “la la la la la”s Kerr improvised on the spot — became one of the most recognisable codas in pop music.

What is genuinely odd, given the size of the hit, is that Simple Minds left it off their next studio album. Once Upon a Time came out later in 1985, the band’s biggest record commercially — number one in the UK, multi-platinum in the US — and they deliberately kept Don’t You (Forget About Me) off it. They were uneasy about being known principally for a song they had not written. American audiences, who had only just learned the band’s name, found this baffling. British audiences understood it perfectly. The decision is part of why the song now sits a little to the side of the rest of the Simple Minds catalogue, even as it remains the only one most casual listeners can name.

Forty years on, the song has not stopped working. It is in the new documentary Simple Minds: Everything Is Possible, where Molly Ringwald describes hearing it for the first time as something “gritty… almost like an obscene phone call — in a good way.” Forsey and Schiff own the publishing. The black swan kept paying for itself. And every February, when a generation rewatches The Breakfast Club on the anniversary of its release, the song is right there at the end where it has always been, with Judd Nelson punching the air in a parking lot. Watch the video and an entire decade of teenage cinema reorganises itself around it.

Music video by Simple Minds performing Don’t You (Forget About Me). (P) (C) 2010 Virgin Records America, Inc.. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is a violation of applicable laws. Manufactured by Virgin Records America, Inc., Capitol Records, LLC, 150 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10011.