- “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” is the big song from the 1985 movie The Breakfast Club. Directed by John Hughes, it features many members of the “Brat Pack,” including Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald, and Judd Nelson. The song is so associated with The Breakfast Club that it is often used in movies or TV shows any time they reference the film, often with a parody of the iconic ending shot where Judd Nelson throws his fist in the air (perhaps the most famous freeze-frame in movie history, although Rocky III, where Rocky and Apollo are frozen mid-punch, is also up there).Examples include the TV shows Scrubs, Psych, 30 Rock and Family Guy, and the movies American Pie and Easy A. The 2001 film Not Another Teen Movie, with a cameo by Molly Ringwald, has a version performed by Sprung Monkey.
- Keith Forsey and Steve Schiff wrote this song specifically for The Breakfast Club. Forsey, who also co-wrote “Shakedown” for Beverly Hills Cop II and the title song to Flashdance, was in charge of the music for the film. Schiff had been a guitarist in Nina Hagen’s band and co-wrote one of her biggest songs, “New York / N.Y.”Forsey and Schiff wrote a few other songs for the film as well, including “Fire In The Twilight” by Wang Chung and “Didn’t I Tell You” by Joyce Kennedy. “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” was the only hit from the soundtrack, but it was a big one, rising to #1 in the US.
- In The Breakfast Club, five high school students with very different personalities spend a Saturday together in detention and find some common ground. The question is, will they remember their time together and act any differently around each other when they return to school and face peer pressure to act their roles. Some dialog in the film when they bring this up gave Keith Forsey the idea for the song title.
- According to Keith Forsey, Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music was his first choice to record this song, but Ferry turned it down. Forsey was also a big fan of the Scottish band Simple Minds, so he tried to get them to record it by delivering a cassette demo.At the time, Simple Minds were gaining traction in the UK, with three modest hits from their 1984 album Sparkle in the Rain: “Waterfront,” “Speed Your Love To Me” and “Up on the Catwalk.” In the US, however, they had no luck, in large part because their US record company, A&M, didn’t promote them. An A&R guy at the label named Jordan Harris tried to rectify that by having them record this song (The Breakfast Club soundtrack was on A&M), but the band wanted nothing to with it because:1) They didn’t want to record a song they didn’t write.
2) Jim Kerr didn’t like the lyric (especially the “vanity… insecurity” line).So why did they do it? They simply changed their minds. They met with The Breakfast Club director John Hughes and got a screening of the film, which put the lyric in better context. Forsey visited them in Scotland, and they got on well. While there, he convinced them to give it a go, and they recorded the track in a few hours at a studio in London. - Simple Minds wanted to use their song “Alive and Kicking” in the film, but “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” was written to the script and was the only option, which the band didn’t understand at first.”We were young, we were a bit brattish, we were insecure,” Jim Kerr said on the Songfacts Podcast in 2022. “We were loving what we were doing and thinking, ‘Hang on a minute, you want us in ’cause you love us because we write these songs, but you want us to do your song?’ We weren’t even willing to listen initially. We were like, ‘No, we don’t do other people’s songs. End of story.’ And of course, later on it was explained, but the song was written to the script and every time they tried to make it more amenable, it sounded worse, because they would say, ‘It sounds really like Simple Minds,’ and we would be infuriated. ‘How dare you rip us off and then try and sell us on an idea!'”
- The song got an absurd amount of radio play, partly because it was played on both rock and Top 40 stations. It continues to get played on classic rock, modern rock, and even Top 40 radio stations as a solid recurrent with a huge recognition rating – when songs are tested by stations to determine if audiences like them, it consistently does very well, which keeps it on the air.
- Getting Simple Minds into the studio to record this song was the hard part, but when they plugged in, the magic happened.”Once we go into the studio, we don’t know how to do things by half measure,” Kerr told Songfacts. “The band was on fire anyway. Anything we jammed on sounded great.”The intro was especially inspired, with guitarist Charlie Burchill landing a big riff and Kerr ad-libbing the “hey, hey, hey, hey” part.”Suddenly it was game-on and we weren’t thinking about ourselves, we were just thinking about what’s coming out of the speaker, and every time someone did something that was cool, that encouraged us more,” Kerr said. “We were kinda looking at each other going, ‘It’s good this? isn’t it?’This is the thing with music: You can analyze it and you can come with an attitude – and bands are notorious for politics – but once you start playing and you like how it makes you feel, everything else goes out the window. That’s all that counts.”
- The “la-la-la-la” coda was inserted as a placeholder because neither Keith Forsey nor Jim Kerr could think of actual words that made sense. Kerr planned to write a real lyric and record it the next day, but when they played back the song, it was clear the “la-la” section was a winner and had to stay as is.
- This song broke the band in America and got them on MTV, expanding their fanbase considerably. It was very strange for Simple Minds – who had paid their dues writing songs, playing them in clubs, and knocking on doors to solicit a record deal – to find themselves with a huge hit they didn’t write and only worked on for a few hours. They almost felt guilty about it.”We thought, We didn’t even work for this, we just jumped down there for a couple of hours and now it’s #1 on the Billboard charts,” Jim Kerr told Songfacts. “It was a Calvinistic way of looking at it. We don’t deserve this success. But there’s this other thing that says, ‘Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’ You know, take the break. Listen to all those people who worked so hard for it in the record company and people who believed in it, and the people at MTV who gave us a break and all that stuff. We owe them a ton.”
- The prom scene in the 1986 John Hughes movie Pretty in Pink was shot to this song, which might explain why the dancing doesn’t follow the music of the song that was used: “If You Leave” by OMD. Andy McCluskey of OMD told Songfacts: “The song had to be 120 BPM cos that’s the tempo of ‘Don’t You Forget about Me,’ which is the track they actually shot the prom scene to. Unfortunately, the editor obviously had no sense of rhythm because they are all dancing out of time in the final film.”
- The song’s co-writer Keith Forsey took over as drummer for The Psychedelic Furs in 1984 and produced their album Mirror Moves that year. When John Hughes found out that Forsey wrote “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” he delved deeper into The Psychedelic Furs and discovered the group’s 1981 song “Pretty In Pink.” He made that the title song to his next movie, which was released in 1986. That gave The Furs a huge career boost and a surprising hit.
- After gaining a foothold in America with this song, Simple Minds landed another hit there when “Alive And Kicking” went to #3 about six months later. A few minor hits followed in America, but their stronghold remained the UK, where they topped the chart in 1989 with “Belfast Child.” Their hits dried up in the late ’90s, but a decade later they had a resurgence with a younger lineup and more contemporary sound. Their albums started charting again across Europe and they did a number of successful tours. Lead singer Jim Kerr and guitarist Charlie Burchill, both founding members, held up the foundation.
