Exclusive | How Simple Minds turned Dont You (Forget About Me) into the Breakfast Club anthem 40 years ago

When Simple Minds first heard “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” — their No.1 single that would serve as the theme song and teenage anthem of the 1985 Brat Pack classic “The Breakfast Club” — it wasn’t exactly memorable to them.“It sounded a little generic to us,” Jim Kerr, lead singer of the band, told The Post.

“I’d be lying if I said we were jumping up and down.”While the Scottish band was playing “hard to get” for the soundtrack to the John Hughes movie — which came out 40 years ago on Feb.15, 1985 — they were even wooed with a private screening of a rough cut of the film in London.

But it was tough for them to even grasp the basic premise of the movie starring Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Emilio Estevez and Anthony Michael Hall.“In the UK, we didn’t have that thing that you have in the States with detention, where you got to go in on a Saturday and all that stuff,” said Kerr, 65.“But we got the gist of the different stereotypes — the jock and the preppy and the goth.”Still, the decision wasn’t so simple in their minds.“We were young, we were precious,” said Kerr.

“We were also scared like, ‘We’ve never done someone else’s song.’ We hadn’t f—king even played it.”Having played “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” hundreds of times over the past four decades, Simple Minds is forever linked with the song — written by Keith Forsey and Steve Schiff — that soundtracked Nelson’s freeze-framed punch in the air at the end of “The Breakfast Club” as well as the iconic film’s opening credits.“It became a kind of zeitgeist movie, and the song itself has got attention from subsequent generations,” said Kerr.“But back then, no one knew.

We were all shocked by the kind of success that the song went on to get.”Simple Minds was first approached with “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” as a way to break the band in America after they had success in Europe and other international mar...