After focusing much of this year on performing cuts from the band’s first five albums, Simple Minds next March will release a new best-of collection — featuring two new songs —and then embark on a huge, 28-date greatest-hits tour of the U.K. featuring a career-spanning, two-set show with no opening acts.

Simple Minds are putting the finishing touches on a live album culled from this year’s “5×5 Live” tour of Europe, which found the band each night performing five songs off of each of its first five albums — ‘Life In A Day,’ ‘Real To Real Cacophony,’ ‘Empires and Dance,’ ‘Sons and Fascination/Sister Feelings Calling’ and ‘New Gold Dream.’

Thirty years ago today, Simple Minds released their fifth studio album, ‘New Gold Dream (81–82–83–84),’ considered by many to be the band’s commercial turning point after it hit No. 3 on the U.K. charts on the back of singles such as “Promised You a Miracle,” “Glittering Prize” and “Someone, Somewhere in Summertime.”

Simple Minds today unveiled plans for a nine-date summer tour of Australia and New Zealand at the end of this year that also will feature ’80s-era contemporaries Devo and The Church sharing the bill and will hit a mixture of indoor venues and wineries taking part in the popular A Day on the Green concert series.

‘We’re the Kids in America,’ the third chapter of BBC Four’s ‘How the Brits Rocked America: Go West,’ features interviews with John Lydon, Robert Smith, Elvis Costello, Jim Kerr, Ian McCulloch, New Order’s Stephen Morris and Peter Hook, Adam Ant, Bob Geldof, Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes and John Taylor, and many more.

Simple Minds today unveiled plans for a 16-date European tour early next year dubbed ‘5X5 Live’ that will see the band each night perform five songs off of each of its first five albums. The group also will release a new box set, ‘Simple Minds X5,’ featuring those five albums and previously unreleased bonus material.

This week’s round-up of click-worthy links includes news about Mick Jones playing Clash songs on a U.K. benefit tour, an interview with Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr via the Stuck in the ’80s podcast, interviews with The Sisters of Mercy and The Jesus and Mary Chain, and news that The Specials’ reunion will continue.

With a new best-of set due sometime early next year, Simple Minds on Monday announced plans for a unique summer trek across Great Britain: the seven-date ‘Greatest Hits U.K. Forest Tour,’ which is exactly what it sounds like — a ‘series of dates in spectacular woodlands locations.’

Jim Kerr reports that Simple Minds recently hit the studio to record tracks — including a ‘New Gold Dream’-era castoff — that are earmarked for both ‘an extensive compilation’ due out in early 2011 and what eventually will become the band’s 16th studio album.

Ex-Bauhaus leader Peter Murphy took to his Facebook page today to update fans on a number of projects, including his Dalis Car reunion with Mick Karn (sessions being ‘next week’) and the pending release of his new solo album Ninth (‘shouldn’t be too long now’).

Given that today is Jim Kerr’s 51st birthday, we dedicate this installment of Vintage Video to the Simple Minds frontman. Here’s a performance of one of the band’s most rousing anthems, ‘Waterfront,’ filmed Sept. 15, 1989, at L’Arena in Verona, Italy, during the band’s ‘Street Fighting Years’ tour.

This week’s new CD releases include the new solo album from Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr, ‘Lostboy! AKA’; an eight-disc box set from The Church’s Steve Kilbey; and reissues from The Charlatans (‘Some Friendly’) and Modern English (‘Stop Start’).

With Simple Minds still active after 30 years, frontman Jim Kerr will release his first-ever solo album this May under the name Lostboy! AKA, and is set to debut his new material — and dig into Simple Minds’ back catalog — with a trio of intimate U.K. club dates this spring before embarking on a full tour.