Ironing With… The Proclaimers

Much like the people who have joined the Mile High Club, have won a Darwin award, or have killed a Kennedy, I now belong to an exclusive, unspoken group – I am one of a (probably not insubstantial) number of people who have met the Proclaimers. Both of them.

Our introduction to The Proclaimers could have gone either way – we were a little late arriving for our interview slot (complete with scowling tour managers with AAA passes around their necks) and were frogmarched to the lads’ palatial dressing room in order to point a camera at them and ask them questions (the camera later decided to eat – and destroy – the footage, hence why this article lacks a video link). I wasn’t sure quite what to expect – perhaps a watchword on punctuality (delivered by the two of them in unison), a punch in the jaw (delivered by the two of them in unison), or worse.

What I didn’t expect was to walk in and find a Proclaimer – it can be difficult to tell which – doing a bit of ironing.

“You don’t do your own ironing, do you?” I ask.
“Aye,” he said. “Nobody else’s goin’ tae do it.”

You’re never sure quite how you’re going to react when you catch a Proclaimer undertaking basic household chores, but I must say it put me at ease.

I had never been to the Apollo prior to this interview, and was more than a little surprised to see it standing there – in all its pomp and glory – in the middle of what can most charitably be described as the most haggard area of Manchester I’ve ever seen, and I live in Moss Side. I asked what the pair thought of the city, afraid that their only view of the town was this rather unfortunate and totally unrepresentative shithole.

“We’ve played in Manchester many times, first time in ’86 with the Housemartins, and subsequently on almost every tour that we’ve done,” Craig told us, “so I guess maybe ten times over the years. It’s a great city, a great music city. Fantastic.”

At that time, some three hours before the band would take the stage, some fans were queuing outside the venue – having had a career spanning more than twenty years and three decades, the Proclaimers have seen it all. Is there, at this stage in their career, a “typical” Proclaimers fan?

“It’s a really even split – and it has been from the beginning – between men and women, but obviously now, twenty two years later, there’s a much wider age range, y’know?” Said Charlie. “It’s great when you’re playing in theatres, because you get children coming in, so you get anything from six or seven year old children to folk in their forties and fifties, their sixties, whatever. It’s very broad. And in the last year, doing a lot of festivals, has helped broaden it as well. It’s a very wide range.”

Their reach has not only spanned the ages, but the continents – this year, the group went to Texas to perform at South By Southwest (better known as SXSW, a festival during which thousands of acts descend on Texas to find label representation). SXSW is typically considered to be an arena for smaller, unknown acts, which the Proclaimers are anything but. Did they feel out of place at all?

“That said, Metallica played two days after we got there,” Craig informed us, “launching their Guitar Hero thing.” The Proclaimers’ Rock Band franchise is not quite on the shelves yet – so why did they go? Craig spoke very enthusiastically about the event – “we’d wanted to play for years, and we’d had a couple of offers, but we’d always either been in the studio, or we’d been on the road somewhere else and we couldn’t do it, but this year we said we’re definitely going to make the time do it, and we had a great time. We probably did about seven or eight performances in about five days.”

With music being such a pervasive part of their lives – the thing they evidently live for – what do the band do for fun? What, if not music, could possibly fulfil the two? “Well if we do get a night off, usually it’s spent drinking,” said Charlie with a wry grin. “Drinking, going for a run, going to the football, most of the time we’ve been away, we’ve been on tour most of this year, but when you’re home, you mostly spend time with your family.”

Nothing that would surprise the fanbase, then?

“Nothing I’d tell you about.”

Craig chuckles. “Nah, I don’t think so. Really, you’re doing what you want to do day to day, just doing your job. This is a dream for most people, it still feels like a dream for us when we stand on a stage, y’know? This is what we always wanted to do. So most of what you do, going for a drink, going to the football, doesn’t beat being on a stage. No way.”

The Proclaimers are clearly enamoured with their profession, but I was interested to know if it still feels like they’re living the dream after all this time. Is it still a dream job, or is it now just a career?

“No,” Charlie muttered, without a second’s pause.
Craig elaborated. “It shouldn’t feel like hard work – I’m not saying that you never get times towards the end of the tour when you feel a little bit tired, but if it’s like that too much, you’re either not doing it right or you’re in the wrong game, I think. You should always feel like you want to be out there. I never wake up in the morning and not want to go to the next gig, I always want to go. Sometimes the gigs are better than others, sometimes the performances are better than others, but if you don’t want to go – if you’re struggling – you’re probably in the wrong game.”

Like most bands that have reached a level of success, the Proclaimers’ rise to power was helped along with a liberal dose of good luck – namely a support slot for the Housemartins in 1986, which almost singlehandedly launched their career and kept it in orbit for all this time. If that hadn’t happened, what might have become of the Proclaimers?

Craig isn’t sure. “Neither of us are qualified for anything else, not trained for anything else. We were unemployed for a long time before that Housemartins tour, I really hate to think what would have happened to us if we hadn’t got this – because we’d been unemployed for so long, we were so lacking in qualifications for anything, and I think it would have been really difficult.” The Proclaimers were not overnight sensations – there was years of touring and hard work before 500 Miles dropped and the nation’s affections followed. The group cannot have possibly predicted their success when they were living in Scotland, having been unemployed for years – right?

Craig is very direct in his response. “Nope.”

“We didn’t think that far ahead,” Charlie says, shaking his head. “We just wanted to make a living doing it. It wasn’t even about having hits. We thought we’d have a small audience, but we didn’t think it would be anything beyond that. Occasionally it has been, we’ve had the odd hit, the odd bit in films, and that broadens your reach, and that’s what’s kept us going, really.”

The fact that they are still going is a wonder in itself – they probably make enough in royalties from their hits to prevent them ever having to work again, and yet they still record and tour regularly. They have appeared on Family Guy, have provided soundtracks for major films, are scheduled to appear on The Simpsons, and you’d have to travel quite a distance to find somebody who couldn’t name one of their songs (at a later interview, two members ofmidwest-American jazz trio The Bad Plus – upon discovering I’d interviewed the Proclaimers – both knew the band and seemed genuinely impressed that I’d met them, and it’s hard to imagine a greater chasm than the one that exists between the music of The Proclaimers and The Bad Plus). So now that they’re here, is there anything left that they really want to achieve?

“All that stuff doesn’t even feel like an achievement,” said Craig. “You’re compelled to write songs and you’re compelled to perform. If you weren’t doing it full time, you’d be doing it part time. If you weren’t playing theatres, you’d be playing pubs. Eventually it’ll go back to that, inevitably, outside of the likes of Elton John and the Rolling Stones, for most people that’s how it ends up. The only ambitions – if there are ambitions – are to write better songs, and give better performances.”

The performance came later on that evening, once we had vacated the Proclaimers’ dressing room, thanked them earnestly for their time and shaken their hands (or one of their hands twice, it really is extremely hard to tell them apart), leaving them to go back to their business of signing CDs and ironing shirts. I didn’t quite know what to expect from a Proclaimers show. Being very honest, prior to seeing them, I wouldn’t have considered myself a “fan” – I knew and liked the singles that everybody knows, but I wasn’t sure what form a full-blown gig would take.

The audience, however, was almost exactly what I expected – and almost exactly what the brothers had estimated earlier in the day. At the bottom end of the age scale there were children whose parents were clearly fans, then the likes of me (of which there were approximately three), then some people who were a decade or so older than me, and then the kind of people I used to work with when I worked in a village pub – the type that was perhaps a bit of a rocker in the 70s, that now go out in denim jeans with a denim shirt and jacket, go to every stadium and arena gig within a twenty mile radius, and assure you that going to see a good quality cover band is in some cases better than the real thing (“I saw Steely Dan in ’76 at the Palladium, and honest to God, Nearly Dan are just as good”).

What I saw was a very professional, energetic, pitch-perfect rock concert. It was never going to be the Pistols at Free Trade Hall or Die! Die! Die! tearing up Manchester Walkabout last year; The Proclaimers weren’t going to pull the stunts that usually make a gig exceptional for me, because that isn’t The Proclaimers’ trade – what they do, they do exceptionally well. They played a healthy array of songs from their back-catalogue, the crowd seemed happy, and the band were into it. All well and good, I thought.

That said, I have never seen a change in dynamic like the one that occurred during the first five seconds of I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles). The crowd had obviously been waiting to hear it the whole night, and when it got going, the crowd blew the entirety of its collective beans in one fell spurt. After that, The Proclaimers could have spent the rest of the night playing Andy Capp covers or ten-minute ambient dubstep wig-outs, and the crowd would probably have been entirely happy. Amazing what can happen when you casually drop your biggest single on a bloodthirsty audience.

Their modern works are certainly in keeping with their older songs; progress has most certainly been made, but it is impossible not to recognise the pair’s distinctive brogue – a refreshing alternative, when in my own iTunes library (populated by only my favourite artists) it can still be hard to tell singers apart. Now that the likes of Glas Vegas and Biffy Clyro are dropping major hits with Scottish accents, did the Proclaimers have any thoughts on why the Scottish accent has become something of a musical signature for so many of the country’s flagship acts?

“I feel that something culturally has changed in Scotland,” observed Craig. “And something culturally is changing in England too, with the Arctic Monkeys and everything. There was always occasionally people who would do it, like Ian Dury, who sung with a strong East London accent.”
“And Madness,” Charlie added.
“Madness as well. But I think something’s changing in the culture, specifically in Scotland. I don’t think people should or shouldn’t sing with their local accents, but if these guys are happy to do it, as they obviously are, and feel relaxed and natural doing it, I think that’s fantastic. I really like it.”

Scotland is not short on distinctive acts – Biffy Clyro are a major Scottish export these days, and are set to grace the Apollo’s stage mere weeks after the Brothers Reid. Is there a reason why the nation produces such recognisable, varied musicians?

Charlie seemed to think so. “I think there’s something about Scotland that keeps producing people who want to play music. I think it’s amazing. I don’t like that whole ‘we’re a small nation but we’ve produced so much’ thing, but certainly for the last thirty years since punk and post-punk, it’s all started happening. Scotland keeps producing so many acts, bands, individual artists, I think there might be something about Scotland that makes people like to play guitars and pianos, and like singing, y’know? And if you get enough of that, the more you get, the more it comes through. We used to produce fantastic footballers – we don’t produce so many of those now, but we still produce excellent musicians and pop stars.”

An early finish and a brisk walk through a half-deserted Manchester gave me time to process what I had just seen. And I can honestly say I had a great time in the company of the Reid brothers, both as hosts and performers. I cannot fault The Proclaimers. They put on a good, energetic performance and are clearly very happy with – and grateful for – their lot. They were very pleasant, enthusiastic gentlemen who conveyed a tremendous sense of pride in their craft. Would I call myself a Proclaimers fan now? Let’s just say I’m on my way.

And if you thought there wasn’t going to be a Proclaimers pun in this article, go fuck yourself.

John Tucker