Our Secrets Are The Same

Some Promised Land is the joint memoir by Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill, telling the inside story of one of Britain’s most innovative, enduring and successful groups since the late 1970s. It is also a memoir of an extraordinary friendship. Jim and Charlie first met at the age of eight, when their families moved to the same housing estate in Toryglen, north Glasgow. More than half a century later, they live on the same street in Taormina, Sicily. In the decades between, their lives have been intimately entwined. It is the story of working class aspiration, social change, chemical awakenings, cultural infiltration and creative fusion.

Using key songs, places, years and events in the Simple Minds story, and told in the distinct voices of both men, Some Promised Land will trace the subtle calibrations of a bond which has experienced stratospheric success and humbling lows with Simple Minds, as well as marriages and divorces, fatherhood (and, latterly, grandfather-hood), loss, inter-band tensions, power dynamics and the occasional explosive bust up.