Simple Minds vs Chris Rea
Take 2 of 80’s best and bring ’em together for that special time of the year. Jim Kerr (Simple Minds) teams up with Chris Rea, a duet taking driving home for Christmas to the next level!
Ingredients
This mashup / mix is a blend of these tunes:
Simple Minds
Don’t You (Forget About Me)
Year: 1985
Album: The Breakfast Club
Genre: New wave, pop rock
About Don’t You (Forget About Me)
Simple Minds almost turned this song down. The Glasgow band were offered “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” — written by Keith Forsey and Steve Schiff — for the John Hughes film The Breakfast Club in 1985, and Jim Kerr reportedly wasn’t keen. They recorded it anyway, and it became their biggest hit: #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and one of the defining anthems of the decade. The song doesn’t appear on any of Simple Minds’ regular studio albums, yet it’s the track that introduced them to most of the world. The closing refrain — that sustained “don’t you… forget about me” — is as close to a perfect album closer as an 80s new wave song gets. Which makes it a perfect setup for a Christmas plea.
Chris Rea
Driving Home For Christmas
Year: 1986
Album: New Light Through Old Windows
Genre: Christmas songs
About Driving Home For Christmas
Chris Rea wrote “Driving Home For Christmas” while sitting in traffic on the M25, stuck in the slow crawl toward the holidays. First released in 1986, it barely registered. When it reappeared on his 1988 compilation New Light Through Old Windows it found the audience it deserved, and has never really left. The Middlesbrough singer-songwriter gave British Christmas music something it was missing: not sleigh bells and sentimentality, but the honest feeling of being stuck on a motorway with the radio on, going home. It is now one of the most-played Christmas songs in the UK every December without fail — proof that the best festive songs are about the journey, not the destination.
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