One morning last week, an hour or so before I spoke to Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill over video call, a 44-year-old track by their band – 80s phenomenon Simple Minds – played on Nick Grimshaw ’s 6 Music breakfast show. Sandwiched between The Chemical Brothers and Nirvana on one side, Sports Team and The Dare on the other, “Love Song” blasted in from more than four decades ago, sounding entirely at home and entirely now on Grimshaw’s uplifting, seize-the-day “Cloudbusting” playlist. Icy yet red-hot, precision-tooled but raw, powerful and propulsive, this was an electroshock catalysing a brighter day all the way from 1981.

Back then, “Love Song” was the Glasgow band’s biggest “hit” yet, reaching number 47 in the charts. They’d already been going for four years – their Euro-facing art-sy

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