When Glasgow’s Simple Minds were first approached in 1984 to record “Don’t You (Forget About Me)”, they turned it down flat. The director John Hughes had them in mind for a song for his forthcoming film, The Breakfast Club, about a group of school misfits brought together during a Saturday detention. But the band, who were enjoying a flush of success with their album Sparkle in the Rain, didn’t like the idea of recording a song they hadn’t written themselves. Their manager, Bruce Findlay, nonetheless saw it as their passport to US success, and hoped to change their minds with a private screening of The Breakfast Club in central London. But once the credits had rolled, the answer was still no.
The song had been co-written by Keith Forsey, the British drummer best known for his work on a series of Giorgio Moroder records, and Steve Schiff, guitarist with the Nina Hagen Band. At Moroder’s suggestion, Forsey had begun writing songs in the early 1980s — he co-wrote Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff”, and shared writing credits with Moroder and Irene Cara on “Flashdance… What a Feeling”. After the latter song won an Oscar in 1984, Hughes got in touch with Forsey to say he was scouting for songs for his new movie. Forsey contacted Schiff, gave him Hughes’s script, and they got to work.
Accounts differ as to who was offered the song after Simple Minds. Michelle Manning, who co-produced The Breakfast Club, has said it was sent to Billy Idol, who turned it down, though Forsey, who had worked with Idol on his Rebel Yell album, says it never happened. Both agree, though, that it was offered to Bryan Ferry, who rejected it, and to The Pretenders’ singer (and Simple Minds’ singer Jim Kerr’s then-wife) Chrissie Hynde, who loved the song but passed it up since she was pregnant at the time.
Instead Hynde advised her husband to reconsider. In 2016, Kerr told an interviewer: “[She] kept badgering me. ‘I like the song,’ she said. ‘What’s the problem?’ Finally… Keith Forsey phoned me and rather cleverly said: ‘I’m a huge fan of the band. How about I just spend a couple of days with you? Maybe we’ll do something in the future.’”
The pair hit it off and Kerr yielded. “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” was recorded in a single afternoon — it was the singer’s idea to add the “Hey hey hey” at the start, while guitarist Charlie Burchill ramped up the power chords in the intro, helping to turn Forsey’s sweet paean to teenage longing into a rousing, stadium-sized anthem. It would be the biggest song of Simple Minds’ career and give them their first US number one.
If Billy Idoldid reject the song in 1984, he had a change of heart 17 years later when he recorded a cover that recreated the bombast of Simple Minds’ version almost note for note. Scottish singer KT Tunstall’s folk interpretation in 2011 was more interesting, its sparse instrumentation and quirky percussion rendering it almost unrecognisable from the original. Another version came from an unlikely source: Molly Ringwald, who played prom queen Claire in The Breakfast Club, gave it a gentle jazz overhaul on her one and only album, Except Sometime, from 2013.
The song has continued to be teen TV and cinema catnip: along with popping up on the soundtrack of 2001’s Not Another Teen Movie, it appears in the 2012 film Pitch Perfect as part of a mash-up with Jessie J’s “Price Tag” and Pitbull’s “Give Me Everything”. In 2014, the TV series Glee paid homage to the song and the movie in a predictably sappy cover delivered as singers skate down empty school corridors, and rounded off with a Judd Nelson-style air-punch.
Meanwhile, Simple Minds’ relationship with the song has continued to be fraught. The band hated how it outshone their own songs — Kerr is alleged to have said he “wanted to vomit” whenever they played it. Lately, however, they appear to have made peace with it, with Kerr even singing it during an appearance at an Arcade Fire concert in 2018. As Simple Minds’ guitarist Charlie Burchill said: “It’s obviously a brilliant, well-crafted pop song. I’m embarrassed we dissed it so much.”
What are your memories of ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: UMC (Universal Music Catalogue); Mercury Records; Music Company OMP; Chrysalis Inc; Songs To Save A Life; Universal Music Group International
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