Featured In: Breakfast ClubComposer/Lyricist: Keith Forsey & Steve Schiff
Performer: Simple Minds
Description:"Don't You (Forget About Me)" is a 1985 song performed by the band Simple Minds known for its being in the soundtrack to the film
The Breakfast Club. The songwriters were producer Keith Forsey (who won an Oscar for "Flashdance... What a Feeling") and Steve Schiff (guitarist and songwriter from the Nina Hagen band). Aside from its initial appearance in The Breakfast Club, the song has been featured in various media throughout the years, and has been covered and sampled by a number of artists.
Forsey asked Cy Curnin from The Fixx, Bryan Ferry and Billy Idol to record the song, but all three declined; Idol would later perform a cover of it on his 2001 greatest hits compilation. Schiff then suggested Forsey ask the Scottish New Wave band Simple Minds, who initially refused as well, but then agreed under the encouragement of their label, A&M. According to one account, the band "rearranged and recorded 'Don’t You (Forget About Me)' in three hours in a north London studio and promptly forgot about it."
Continuing the rock direction recently taken on
Sparkle in the Rain but also glancing back at their melodic synthpop past, it caught the band at their commercial peak and, propelled by the success of
The Breakfast Club, became a number-one hit in the U.S. and around the world. It is the band's only number-one hit on the U.S. Top Rock Tracks chart, staying atop for three weeks. While only reaching number seven in the UK, it stayed on the charts from 1985–1987, one of the longest time spans for any single in the history of the chart.
Despite its success, the band continued to dismiss the song, the most obvious slight being its absence from their subsequent album
Once Upon a Time. It eventually appeared on the 1992 best-of
Glittering Prize 81/92.
The Breakfast Club is a 1985 American coming of age comedy-drama film written and directed by John Hughes. The storyline follows five teenagers (each a member of a different high school clique) as they spend a Saturday in detention together and come to realize that they are all deeper than their respective stereotypes.
Critically, it is considered to be one of the greatest high school films of all time, as well as one of Hughes' most memorable and recognizable works.