The Minds in the Shed

In late 2023, my old bandmates, Brian McGee and Derek Forbes, along with John Leckie, our first producer with Simple Minds, made the pilgrimage to my home on Vatersay, Barra in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. It wasn't so much Desert Island Discs as Dessert Island and slipped discs! With the help of a Vatersay Boys drums, (he is now known as Donnie Spielberg) we hobbled our zimmer frames and instruments on a trip down memory lane. It wasn't long before we were flying! We resuscitated old tunes like, In Trance as Mission, 30 Frames a Second and Celebrate got the old juices flowing and the memories fired up. The good, the bad, and the ugly! We toasted friends we'd lost along the way and healed old wounds, or at least soothed them. In that shed on Vatersay, the years rolled away, as did a few tears.

Added 31 May 2026