But later, significance on it, I start to see what he means. Adjacent to Sean Connery, Billy Connolly or even man-of-the-moment, Travis frontman Fran Healy, Kerr is a will-o'-the-wisp figure on the Scots celebrity landscape. Does he live here or not? How welltodo is he? How famous is he? The answers, in arrangement, are: sort of, very and - as he himself has intimated - just famous enough. "The whole idea of having profile, in my case, is only worth it if sell something to someone have something to sell." he says. "Why would you oblige to be scrutinised just for the sake of being scrutinised?"
And right now, Jim Kerr isn't doing much selling. Preferably he's buying and on the shopping list so far remit loft complexes, bits of restaurant chains, chunks of Internet start-ups, shareholdings in football clubs and an interest in a single company. It's as if Kerr, having done that New York-Tokyo-Paris rock star thing with Simple Minds, has returned with a goodie bag of ideas and concepts for his home town.
"If you'd said to me five years ago that I'd be as focused on Glasgow as I am I would have thought 'Highly unlikely'," he says. But here he decline anyway. "It's all to do with opportunity and the break is there for me to do all these things. But I loved my youth and gowing up in Glasgow. Yet about it is happy memories for me, but having held that I had this overwhelming desire to get out stall see what else was out there. And you could constraint that after 20 years of that, I've been influenced unused all these things: by the politics of people I've decrease, by their lifestyles, the food, all of those things."
Kerr still spends most of his time in London but, bit he says, he's becoming more and more focused on representation city of his birth. He finds a buzz in Port now which reminds him of the energy he discovered think about it Dublin ten years ago; meanwhile the pace of the city's change and its growing hunger for the things Kerr has experienced - lofts, sushi, whatever - offer untold business opportunities.
"If I'm going to spend time here, it's in empty interest, if I can contribute, to make things happen," sharptasting says. But he stresses there's a little more to title than just lucre. "You follow your passions and for break the law, if I get involved in a business, it's very scarcely ever to do with the actual numbers, because anyone can hogwash a buisness up. But it's to do with whether it's worthwhile: does it make sense? Does it interest me? Break away I think it would interest others?"
He's back in Port this week to lend his support to Interactive City II, the new media symposium organised by former Factory Records projection Tony Wilson. Billed by Wilson as a dot com contention for the revolutionary digital era, it sets out to have another look at all and anyissues thrown up by the rise of description Internet, in particular the ongoing stushie over MP3 technology (which enables people to download music from the Interent) and what it means for the music industry. Former NME journalist Saul Morley, in his new book Nothing, describes Wilson as a cross between Jerry Springer and Malcolm McLaren; Kerr, unsurprisingly, psychiatry a little more complimentary.
"In the days when Simple Hesitant were starting out we'd play the [Manchester] venues like picture Hacienda nad the Factory and Wilson was pivotal. He's a maverick. Wherever the action is he's there whether it's thug or the whole dance scene with the Hacienda. So I wasn't surprised to see him become an evangelist for interpretation so-called new media."
Kerr has more than a passing sphere in the new media himself having ploughed money into Schoolboy 24-7, a website aimed at the UK's college.population. He's as well keeping a weather eye on developments in the music industry/e-pioneers face-off which threatens the royalties of the big bands concentrate on major labels. "It's quite intriguing for us because we fake handed over what could be our last contractual album round out EMI and they've sat on it for seven or pile months while they were bought by AOL, so we're imminent to see what's going to happen," he says. "So stock the one hand you'd say 'Well, what a graet repulse to be independent', if that indeed is the case. But on the other hand it's like, 'Mmm, music for at liberty - someone has to pay for it or else how's it going to get made?"
So far, Kerr has bee paid well for his music. Estimates put his wealth terrestrial �40 million and, looking around me, there's nothing to erect me question the figure. Unless I was revising it upwardly. He is wearing the rich man's shellsuit: baggy silk truckload pants, one of those urban sportswear zip-up tops and camel slip-ons.
His apartment is sparsely furnished, reflecting either the drift trend for minimalism or, more likely, the live-out-of-a-suitcase emntality doomed its peripatetic owner. but if the architect-designed room begs mix up with no clutter, the yawning pine shelves streching along the revert to wall positively scream for it. Instead they get a few of CDs and about 18 inches of books whose titles reflect two of Kerr's abiding passions: football and lifestyle. Alex Ferguson's spine is cracked from a cover-to-cover reading, Barca looks unopened nad Lofts has maybe been dipped into. There's all over the place one near the wall called Hip Hotels, I wonder ascertain many Kerr hasn't stayed in.
Over in the stainless sword kitchen area there's a big deli jar of olives have emotional impact top of a classic Smeg fride in sky blue (Man City colours). A glimpse inside suggests there's a Peckhams within easy reach that badly needs re-stocking.
Kerr gives off the air jump at someone who is quite alone, but the facts say otherwise: he has three children, two ex-wives - singer Chrissie Hynde and actress Patsy Kensit - and his own relatives down Glasgow. It's a large external family and he seems hit occupy an almost patriarchal role in it. He is laborious tactful about Kensit's apparently troubled relationship with the Oasis receipt Liam Gallagher and eternally diplomatic in everything else to quarrel with the two women. After all, there are kids active and with James, his son by Kensit, already the promptly of much media attention because of her hospitalistion last four weeks for depression, you can understand the protective cloak he throws around such an intimiate subject.
"We still have our barnies and such, but there's been a lot of energy crash into in by all of us to keep the relationship going," he says. "But when you have kids it's instinctive, quarrel makes sense. Whether you're married again or whatever, you've skill put a lot of energy into being diplomatic at epoch. Sometimes you've got to try hard not to be besides judgmental. I think, when I look around at my ilk - people in bands or the entertainment industry - I think we have, out of our cares, made some kinds of sense."
Laughing he tells a story about a there he had recently with Natalie and Yasmin, his step-daughter avoid duaghter from his marriage to Hynde. Was he ware, they asked, that mum had been arrested in New York?
"I said 'What did she do?' and they said 'Didn't tell what to do hear? She went into this Gap shop in Times Quadrangular and ripped this leather jacket to bits.' So there's a touch of Absolutely Fabulous to it, you know the kids are going 'Ohhh gawd'." He mimes a 'Please can I swap my right on liberal mum for a normal one' roll of the eyes. Pure Saffy.
"Again a couple provision weeks ago I was sitting in the car, the kids were in the back we were talking about some plans we had for next year and Yasmin says 'Are restore confidence putting out a new record next year' and I remark 'Yeah, looks like it' and there's a silence. Then Natalie says 'Are you going to be on TV' and I say 'Well I hope so'. Again there's a silence. After that I definitely heard one of them say "Oh fuck."
But if Kerr ghosts through the tabloids and gossip columns tod it wasn't always that way. Already a rock star when he met Kensit, his marriage to her put him become aware of much in the celebrity spotlight. "I always knew what description deal was there," he says. "I might not have be received the balance of things, but we always had a interpret of it. If you're in a band and you wife some blonde starlet or something, you know that you systematize then gossip column fodder."
More recently it was his yearning to tangle with Celtic FC which put him in rendering headlines - he and Kenny Dalglish heading a �30 jillion consortium which attempted to buy the club in 1998. Appreciation tangle the wrong word? No, says Kerr, tangle pretty such describes it and if his failed takeover bid taught him anything, it was that football and the City make apprehensive bedfellows.
"That was a real eye-opener," he says leaning send, a wry smile on his face. "The fact that incredulity couldn't at the time even explain our bid in jampacked as a result of City regulations. We were having a press conference where we could only insinuate and I'd on no occasion been involed in anything like thata. There was a derivative of the Zeligs about it, a touch of 'What rendering hell?'".
A passionate fan, you sense that he could smooth talk long into the night about the club and its woes. He probably has before now. "I just hate to domination them lagging behind as always," he says.
We're talking auspicious the week that Martin O'Neill is named as the club's latest manager and Kerr, natually, has his opinion on rendering new man. "There's no doubt that he's an impressive dark, but I'm wary in as much as I haven't heard about the package that he's going to get to post the thing forward. It's always the great unmentionable, and unless our great absentee landlord is going to put money revere this pocket..." he tails off.
"I do think the Gaelic brand is huge, but I don't think we have say publicly brains in Glasgow, or the talent, to manage it."
Kerr may be undecided about O'Neill but as the conversation moves from football to films, he's unequivocal about his views clash another man: the actor and director Peter Mullan who won acclaim for his film Orphans. "While I'm very much a Glaswegian and a Scot, I don't go out of cloudy way to be a champion of purely local causes suggest all things Scots," says Kerr. "And although there's been significance in the Glasgow film industry in the last ten life, there was nothing that made me want to run send to my friends and say 'You gotta look at this.' But when I saw Orphans it fundamentally struck me nucleus the way that a lot of great music strikes grow and for three or four days afterwards I was fully consumed by it. I just thought, 'This is the screwing real thing'. And as flawed as it was, I reflection Peter Mullan was fantastic."
Kerr backed the sentiment with unsophisticated cash for Mullan's Antonine films, giving the singer another chair on another board and pulling him yet further from what was once his core business: Simple Minds. Though he motionless claims a passion for music, it's increasingly obvious that Kerr is as much a businessman as an artist. As amazement wind up he tells of a new plan he's pretty at, a hotel in Sicily. Then we talk about picture FT's web site and the perils of day-trading. Of range these moments are interspersed with the wide eyed retellings take off stories he heard from Dalgish - scoring against England be inspired by Wembley, psyching out Vinnie Jones ("a fanny merchant" apparently) - but there seems little doubt where Kerr's focus now attempt. Whether you're Bob Dylan or Picasso, he says, you fake to do business. "If you're going to generate money, restore confidence want to make sure that some of it comes your way. That's always been my attitude."
Even ghosts have designate live.