Jim Kerr

“You know, one minute you're in fashion and then you're completely out of fashion, but if you hang around long enough and don't get desperate, suddenly you become 'classic.' You see that happening all the time.”

“John Hughes and his movie 'The Breakfast Club' gave us above all the thrilling opportunity that everyone who starts a band dreams of. The opportunity that is of aggregating the kind of success that enables an act to go through the door and into what is considered to be 'The Big League.'”

“You don't get many periods in your life when it all goes your way.”

“I never really left Glasgow. No doubt I've spent most of my grown-up life away from the city but I've always had somewhere to lay my head.”

“When your band is no longer just your band but is an industry within an industry it can be a lot on youngish shoulders.”

“Especially in Europe - the States also, where you've got that landmass - but in Europe cultures and landscapes change within a hundred kilometers, and there's worlds within worlds. Within those worlds, there's good things going on. Within those worlds, there's tragic things.”

“My first-ever game was at the 1966 World Cup. The old man was a bricklayer's labourer, on a job in the north-east of England. One weekend the rest of the family went down to see him and he took me off to Ayresome Park, Middlesbrough for the Soviet Union versus North Korea.”

“When I'm touring, everything is so structured and I'm surrounded by people all the time, so I love walking on my own in the open air in the countryside.”

“I was happy living in a high-rise council estate in Glasgow up until our sixth album.”

“I've always been somebody who lives on the fringe - geographically or whatever.”

“I get wound up by bad manners on public transport.”

“Like most classic bands, we only do an album every three or four years but that leaves a lot of down-time. And I don't like down time.”

“There's nothing that gives more satisfaction than playing live.”

“I really believe that if people put everything they have into something, they can really surprise themselves most of the time.”

“I'm good at getting good stuff out of people.”

“When we decided we wanted to do something, we did it 100 percent. When we decided we wanted to make it big in America, we did it.”

“With hindsight, it is easy to understand why Nelson Mandela became a heroic symbol to an entire generation as he used his newly gained freedom to lead South Africa out of the shackles of apartheid.”

“I'd always been interested in the idea of the outsider.”

“I sleep five hours, I get up at 4 A.M., I take three or four cold showers a day. I do things differently.”

“There is never going to be a band like The Who again.”