State Champ Radio Behind the Setlist
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It was 1985 and Simple Minds were in the recording studio with famed producer Jimmy Iovine trying to follow an unexpected hit after finally breaking through in the U.S. “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” was featured in the movie and soundtrack to The Breakfast Club and hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in May of that year.
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Iovine, whose resume at the time already included Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedos and Stevie Nicks’ debut solo album, Bella Donna, was brought aboard for the sessions for the band’s eighth and most successful album, Once Upon a Time. He was pushing the band hard to create something special, singer Jim Kerr tells Billboard’s Behind the Setlist podcast from his home in Sicily while the band was on break from touring following the release of its 21st studio album, Direction of the Heart, on Oct. 21 through BMG.
“We were already feeling the pressure,” remembers Kerr, “but Jimmy was relentless. ‘You’ve got to come up with something special,’” Iovine told the band. “’You have to come up with something. We have to have something special.’
One result from those sessions with Iovine was the song “Alive and Kicking,” which became the group’s second-biggest U.S. hit and peaked at No. 3 on the Hot 100 in Dec. 1985. Like its predecessor, “Alive and Kicking” ends in a sing-along Kerr says was borrowed from The Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” “It’s almost like a hymn at the beginning. And just when you think you’ve heard it all, the ‘la la la’ comes in at the end — which, coincidentally, ‘Don’t You’ had, too.”
In recent concerts, Simple Minds strategically paired “Don’t You” with “Alive and Kicking” in the encore. Not only are the songs the band’s biggest hits and from the same era, “they’re the sing-along moments,” says Kerr, an opportunity for the audience to participate. “That’s when the whole place sings in tune and where we just stand back and the night belongs to them. It’s a wonderful thing to behold.”
In fact, says Kerr, the genius of those songs is their lyrical simplicity. “The great thing about those choruses is anyone in the world can sing ‘la la la.’ You can sing it in Japan, you can sing it in Oslo. That’s the most intelligent lyric we ever wrote,” says Kerr with a chuckle. “Think about it. The whole world can sing that.”
Listen to the entire interview with Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr at Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, iHeart or Audible.
Through three albums of guitar-driven, melodic ear candy, Soccer Mommy has reveled in the sounds of ‘90s indie rock. So it was no surprise the band was chosen to perform at Pavements 1933 to 2022, the indie rock legend Pavement‘s pop-up museum in New York City that ran from Sept. 29 to Oct. 2 and will be displayed permanently in the band’s hometown of Stockton, California.
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“It was really fun,” Sophie Allison, a.k.a. Soccer Mommy, tells Billboard’s Behind the Setlist podcast. “I mean, it was it was something that we were dying to do, honestly, because me and all the people in my live band love Pavement.” Allison and her band covered three songs at the Oct. 1 performance: “Here,” “Gold Soundz” and “Spit on a Stranger.”
Although many Soccer Mommy fans weren’t born when Pavement broke up in 1999, the song “Here,” from Pavement’s 1992 album Slanted and Enchanted, got a good reaction at the Glasgow, Scotland, concert that concluded the European tour in support of Soccer Mommy’s latest album, the critically acclaimed Sometimes, Forever. “I said I was gonna play a Pavement song and everyone was really excited,” says Allison of the audience’s reaction. The band reunited in 2010 and again in 2022 for U.S. and European tours. “I think that people from my audience do really like [Pavement]. I think they’re specifically really a band that has had this huge renaissance like 20 years after [breaking up]. Even when I was in high school, everybody loved Pavement.”
Earlier this year, Allison branched out into podcasts when Soccer Mommy scored the music for We Were Three, a podcast series by the New York Times and Serial Productions. “I’ve always been really interested in in the idea of getting to score something but I’m usually so focused either with touring or, you know, writing new songs for a record and recording,” says Allison. Finding herself with free time this summer, Allison says she enjoyed the process of writing music intended for background accompaniment – featuring guitar, bass, drums and synthesizer – to the spoken word rather than her own lyrics. “It was really fun getting to write music that I didn’t then have to write a chorus for and lyrics and a hook.”
Now home in Nashville after performing more than 50 concerts in 2022, Allison is working on material for the follow-up to Sometimes, Forever. “I don’t have anything done. But I just want to keep keep working on new songs. If anything else comes up that’s exciting, I’ll definitely try to do it. But in the meantime, [I’m focused on] just touring and working on writing new songs.”
You can listen to the entire interview with Soccer Mommy at Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, Amazon Music, Audible or Stitcher.
