SIMPLE MINDS

He is Scottish, met one of his wives while performing at the Narara festival outside Gosford and his greatest fame came when his band Simple Minds soundtracked one of the quintessential American teen movies of the 1980s, The Breakfast Club. However, there is something quite appropriate about Jim Kerr being the co-owner of the Hotel Villa Angela in Taormina, Sicily, where he has lived for more than a decade. In Australia in the late '70s and early '80s, listening to the early Simple Minds albums - whose cool, rhythmic and horizon-gazing sounds had roots in the art and electronic music of German acts in particular - seemed like a fabled place of high intellect and great style; certainly in comparison with the quotidian suburban life in Sydney. As Kerr explains, he had had those same European dreams in his Glasgow home.