Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill of Simple Minds have just released their autobiography and collaborated with music writer Graeme Thomson to put their story together. BooksfromScotland got in touch with Graeme Thomson to talk about the project.

Our Secrets are the Same: Friendship & Fame at the Heart of Simple Minds
By Jim Kerr & Charlie Burchill with Graeme Thomson
Published by Constable

What can you tell us about your latest book, and collaboration, Our Secrets Are the Same? How did this opportunity come to you? 

 The book is the joint memoir of Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill, the founding members of Simple Minds and for the longest time now the sole original members still in the band. In it, of course, they reflect on the highs and lows of their near-50 year career in perhaps Scotland’s most successful ever group, but it is also a book about their even longer friendship, which began in 1967, when they were eight years old and their families moved from the Old World tenements of Southside Glasgow to a New World high rise housing estate in Toryglen. It’s a book about music, fame, ambition and creativity, but also about enduring male friendship, family, place and codes of behaviour, spoken and unspoken.  

 In 2020, I wrote a book about the earlier years of Simple Minds called Themes For Great Cities. I interviewed all of the original band, including Jim and Charlie, who I already knew a little. After the book came out and was well received, I was involved in a few more Simple Minds related pieces of work, including being a consultant on Joss Crowley’s documentary, Everything In Possible, and interviewing Jim and Charlie off camera for a Sky Arts show where they performed all of their classic album, New Gold Dream, at Paisley Abbey. It was on that day, in October 2022, in a little room upstairs at the Abbey, that Jim and Simple Minds’ manager Ian Grenfell mentioned the idea of joint memoir with Charlie, and asked whether I would like to collaborate with them on it. I thought it was a really very interesting idea, and a potentially fascinating route into something a little more expansive and relatable than the standard ‘rock memoir’. And so it proved.  

You’ve written about Simple Minds before in Themes for Great Cities, but the approach for this book must’ve been completely different. Can you tell us about how you worked with Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill, and how you agreed on how the book is formatted? Who chose the quotes that open each chapter? 

Themes For Great Cities was very much my personal take on the music of Simple Minds, and a bunch of records that meant a lot to me. I had a lot of things that I had wanted to say about that music for a long time, and also about what you might call the Platonic ideal of a band operating as a collective creative democracy, an approach which I thought was exemplified by Simple Minds in its early years.  

Whereas Our Secrets Are The Same is Jim and Charlie’s personal story. It was absolutely driven by their memories, insights, opinions, input, ideas – and their words. 

It is very much a collaboration. Jim in particular had a lot of his own written material that he shared with me in batches, some of which made it directly into the book, some of which I used as basis for sections, and all of which helped shape the tone and the themes of the book. Over and above that, in the autumn of 2024 I interviewed both Jim and Charlie separately around a dozen times for, I would estimate, around 25 hours each in total. Some of that was done in person, some of it was done via Zoom. We were already quite comfortable with each other, and we had lunch at Jim’s house in Glasgow shortly before we embarked on the interviews just to catch up and settle on how we would proceed.  

After the interviews were done, and using all that material as well as Jim’s writings, I worked on drafts and shared them with Jim and Charlie. They came back with comments, annotations, suggestions, re-wordings and so forth. They were very closely involved and fully ‘in’. The book would never have happened without their commitment to making it as good and as true as it could be. Simple Minds were heading off on a five-month world tour in March 2025, which was a good deadline. By then the text was in pretty good shape, but we kept in contact via email and phone during the early parts of the tour to finalise the manuscript.  

The structure of the book, with each chapter opening with a first person, present tense vignette leading to a more in-depth passage on a particular theme, time or event, was, I think, my idea. I had in my head the idea that the opening salvo of each chapter could be regarded as similar to the ‘intro’ of a song: a hook, a riff, a snatch of the chorus, here and there a longer motif. These were intended to bring the reader into the action very quickly, and then the ‘song’, or the chapter, opens out from there. I also fought hard to have Jim and Charlie’s voice in different fonts! I think it is key to helping the reader slip between the two narratives.  

The idea of having quotes as epigraphs opening each chapter came directly from Jim’s notes, which as well as his own writing included lots of quotes from many sources – classical texts, all kinds of literature, travel writing, pop culture, films and TV shows – which meant something meaningful to him. We ended up using some of these in the book and I sourced more that felt relevant to particular chapters. Frustratingly, there were a couple that had to be changed quite late in the day because we didn’t get the necessary permissions in time. Again, the quotes Jim sent were incredibly helpful for me to get a sense of the things that might be important to write about in the book.  

Did working on this book make you feel differently about your previous book? 

I don’t think so. In some ways I see the two as complementary. I think we were all in agreement that we wanted this book to touch on topics and say things that Jim and Charlie hadn’t necessarily said publicly – or even privately! – before. Obviously, we wanted to shine a light on the music they have made together, but doing so without getting overly bogged down in the detail of making every Simple Minds album. They have been doing interviews for almost half a century, and there is a lot of material already out there where they talk about the minutiae of making Simple Minds records, not least in Themes For Great Cities. So this was about going deeper and wider than Simple Minds in terms of really trying to understand them as two very different and quite complex people; to get a sense of where they came from and what shaped them, and in turn show how that has impacted upon all the wonderful music they have made through the years, and the ways in which they have managed to keep the band going through thick and thin. 

Did it make you feel differently towards the music? 

I have been listening to Simple Minds for more than 40 years and have already written at length about them, so my feelings about their music are fairly well set! However, I may in the past have been slightly dismissive of some later Simple Minds material. Spending quite a lot of time in the book reflecting on the period from the mid-nineties to mid-00s, when things were quite tricky for the band, allowed me an opportunity to go back and reassess the output from that time more objectively. Knowing what I know now about what was happening in their lives and the life of the band, I can appreciate more aspects from all eras of Simple Minds, I think, and the sheer variety of music they have made.  

This book focuses just as much on relationships as the work they’ve produced together. What have you discovered about friendship and family in this collaboration? 

Jim and Charlie’s enduring friendship is so much about being on the same page in terms of the fundamentals, the kind of basics that don’t need to be articulated. Shared values, shared experiences, shared codes. I think they would both say having that kind of shorthand has made both their friendship and creative partnership so much easier, and incredibly solid, even though they are very different personalities. And that really comes from the fact that they grew up in the same area, with supportive parents who instilled the same values in them. It has allowed them to act almost as one throughout Simple Minds, which at times has been incredibly helpful and at other times has meant they have lacked objectivity and have suffered from the absence of a more detached voice to offer different perspectives.  

There is also the fact that Jim is the oldest sibling in his family, and Charlie is the youngest in his. They both make the point that this has impacted the dynamic in their relationship: Jim tends to lead, Charlie is happy to follow… up to a point! It’s clear from writing the book that both Jim and Charlie have been very single-minded – they would even say ‘selfish’ – in prioritising Simple Minds throughout their lives. But Charlie in particular is incredibly tenacious. His refusal to deviate from the course of keeping Simple Minds going, or to even contemplate its failure, has proved crucial to the band’s survival.  

What do you think is their abiding feelings for Scotland now, for Glasgow? 

They are very proud Scots and even prouder Glaswegians, without being sentimental about it. Jim still has a home in Glasgow and a place in Perthshire, not too far from where Simple Minds built their own studio in the late 1980s and 1990s. He enjoys spending time here. I recently did an event with them in the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh, a relatively intimate gig for them! They were really delighted to feel the warmth of the Scottish audience so close at hand. There is, I suppose, a similar form of shorthand between Simple Minds and its Scottish fanbase as there is between Jim and Charlie: so much shared history, cultural touchstones, humour, and love.  

They had appeared at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow the night before the event in Edinburgh. That was a real buzz for them as the Citz was a very important cultural hub for Jim and Charlie growing up as teenagers on the southside. So, these connections remain real and significant. They have retained many friendships from their schooldays and younger years. There is a great deal of affection and history stored up, but their lives nowadays are lived mostly far away from here. Charlie hasn’t lived in Scotland since the late eighties, and has subsequently lived in Italy, Ireland and Holland. Jim no longer has any close family in Glasgow, and his primary base for the past 25 years has been Sicily. Charlie has joined him there in recent years. They are both now Italian domiciled and speak the language very well.  

Perhaps this passage of the book, written by Jim, sums it up best: 

Charlie and I are formed completely from Glasgow granite. That will never change. But the granite has been shaped by so many other experiences and influences, going right back to the time of our first ever hitchhiking trip. The idea of being first Europeans, then internationalists, always held huge appeal to both of us. 

Outside of playing shows with Simple Minds, I return to Scotland regularly. I love to be in Scotland in August and September. It’s the perfect antidote to being on the road. I love the peace, the poetry, the nature and the history we have. But Sicily is home. We have it so good: the landscape, the culture, the weather, the food. Who wouldn’t want to eke out more summer months each year if they can? 

I realise now that my choices have been about more than simply chasing the sun. My nephew here in Taormina is Sicilian. My other nephew is a Frenchman. There is a strong Japanese influence in my life. I married an American and an Englishwoman. Mine has been an international existence; Charlie’s has been the same. That hunger we had as kids, that curiosity, never died – and it has shaped us. Yet some core part of us will always be quintessentially Glaswegian. I love the Glasgow spirit, that condensed mix of Irish and Scottish, and everything that comes out of it: the wit and grit and humour. The street-level surrealism. I love the ability to laugh through the tears – and, crucially, at yourself. 

Do you know what your next writing project will be? 

I am just finishing a book about Talk Talk which will be published next year. The start of that project actually predates the entire span of doing Our Secrets Are The Same, and I’m really delighted that it will soon see the light of day.  

Our Secrets are the Same: Friendship & Fame at the Heart of Simple Minds by Jim Kerr & Charlie Burchill with Graeme Thomson is published by Constable, priced £25.00.