They may be Simple Minds but they haven’t forgotten their roots

It’s just the whole 40-year anniversary kind of thing passed them by. That’s what guitarist Charlie Burchill tells me anyway.

“We knew about it,” Charlie insists. “Jim is pretty meticulous when it comes to big dates. He keeps a diary.”

The problem was they were far too busy to celebrate 40 years since their first gig at Glasgow’s Satellite City on January 17 1978, supporting Steel Pulse and with the Nu Sonics, who late became Orange Juice, also on the bill.

“It was on the calendar,” he continues, “if you know what I mean, but we didn’t contact each other about, we just got on with making music.

“The legacy thing can be a burden if you let it,’ says Charlie. “For us, it has been empowering, giving us the freedom and confidence to make this album.

"Some bands who have been going for 40 years become more narrow in scope. With us, it’s the opposite.

“It’s funny because the one question I always get asked is, how have things changed over the years, and the honest answer is actually, it hasn’t changed much at all.

"We’ve got a band and we write our own songs. It’s just we’ve been doing it for 40 years.”

But since we’re chatting about the old days, I’m wondering whether Charlie will just indulge me on the whole nostalgia thing for a while and being the gentleman that he is...

“Jim and I have known each other since we were eight,” he recalls. “We used to play football together and then when we must have been 13 or 14.

"I used to see him walk past carrying loads of albums and I had my albums and we used to ask each other what we were listening to. Then Jim saw me with a guitar one day and said, ‘Let’s try and write something’.”

At first setting themselves up as punk outfit Johnny and the Self Abusers, a year later they were Simple Minds (taking their name from a line in David Bowie’s The Jean Genie) and playing at Satellite City.

“I had so many fond memories of that place,” Charlie adds. “The first ever gig I saw was there watching Genesis and then Steve Harley and Neil Young. We all felt getting on that stage we had finally made it.”

Except it wasn’t until four albums in that the band could finally say it for sure.

“It was after Branson signed us to his Virgin record label,” Charlie reveals.

“Great people and a great company and it was that support that gave us the confidence to go ahead and make a double album, which at the time was madness really but that got us noticed.

"The album after that something just happened, and we suddenly found ourselves on Top of the Pops. That I think is when we really knew we had made it.”

Hits such as Promised You a Miracle, Waterfront and their smash US hit Don’t You (Forget About Me) helped by appearing in John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club, catapulted them to super stadium rock gods.

Now it looks like they’ve hit the big time again with their latest, and incredibly 19th, album hitting the top five in the album charts and with numerous radio stations making it their Album of the Week.

Walk Between Worlds came out earlier this month and was produced by Simple Minds with Andy Wright and Gavin Goldberg, both of whom worked on the band’s previous album Big Music.

And in keeping with the 40 years, part of it was recorded in Gorbals Sound, a studio a stone’s throw away from the Glasgow estates where they grew up - see, they were thinking about it!

“The whole album probably took us about two years,” Charlie says. “In between tours and most of it was done in a London studio. Then we went on tour again and after that went up to Glasgow.

"In the back of Gorbals Sound is a little hall with a stage where Jim and I first started playing even before we had our punk band.

“Funnily enough in the last five years both Jim and I have bought houses in the city and we’ve loved going back. I think you have to be away from a place for a while before you actually appreciate it and I think that’s been the case for Jim and I.”

There’s also the general excitement of just bringing a new album out.

“A few years ago people were saying that the album format was endangered,” Charlie continues.

“I have to say that we went through that whole conversation about whether we should continue to make albums, but we soon realised that’s what we do, we make records and we won’t change that.

“Whenever we are working on records or writing them, the process is always the same. We always looking for a melody; a context. What is this music? What’s it doing?

“We have got better at identifying that earlier on and sorting out what isn’t necessary to put that particular message across.

“In the past we would elaborate for days and it wouldn’t be necessary.

“I think that’s what changes as you go on. You can still have your identity and all your quirkiness but you get a little bit better at honing the focus of the arrangements.”

As part of the band’s Grandslam 2018 tour, Simple Minds are playing Colchester’s Castle Park with The Pretenders on Sunday, August 26.

It will be the first time the two bands have played on the same stage since Live Aid – a unique opportunity to see both bands in one night. KT Tunstall will also join them as a very special guest.

For more information or to buy tickets, click here.