“All The Things She Said” by Simple Minds

"All the Things She Said" was the third single Simple Minds pulled from Once Upon a Time, their seventh album, released in 1985, and it's the band at full stadium stretch: Jim Kerr out front and the sound piled high, with Kerr, Charlie Burchill and Mick MacNeil sharing the writing credit. American singer Robin Clark answers Kerr on backing vocals and turns up in the video too, with Sue Hadjopoulos adding percussion and Jimmy Iovine and Bob Clearmountain among the producers.

Under all that gloss sits a serious subject. Kerr built the song from an article about Polish political prisoners held in the Soviet Union, drawing on what their wives said about the men taken from them. It went to number nine in the UK and number 28 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.