WE WALK 500 YARDS TO INTERVIEW THE PROCLAIMERS

PA Speaks to Craig and Charlie Reid Craig and Charlie Reid in Seattle Born in Auchtermuchty in Fife, Scotland, the Proclaimers have thrilled audiences for over twenty years with their heavily accented melodies and anthems. Composed of identical twins Charlie and Craig Reid, they are best known for the songs "Letter from America", "Sunshine on Leith", and "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)". "I'm Gonna Be" became the theme song for the film Benny & Joon (1993). They are also known for several charity events, such as the Terry Fox Run and Red Nose Day 2007 where they appeared with comedian Peter Kay and the stars of Little Britain. In North America, they have appeared in Canada in Molson adverts and on the popular cartoon show 'Family Guy'. They have always been politically outspoken and were vocal advocates for Scottish independence long before the current resurgence in nationalist feeling in Scotland. Many of their songs reflect their political views, notably "Letter from America" and "Cap in Hand". In May 2007, the Scottish National Party (SNP) won control of the Scottish Parliament wresting control from a Labour Party who had created it to fend off the SNP's goal of total separation from the United Kingdom. Despite now having the reigns of power, the SNP's desire for Scottish independence continues. On a US tour to launch their new album "Life With You", the brothers visited Ballard in Seattle, location of the Tractor Tavern. PA sat down with them before their show and found that the duo hadn't lost their cutting edge, either musically or politically. In Part 1 of the interview, they discuss their new album, the state of Scottish politics, Sean Connery, Comic Relief and ask how they felt about their song "Sunshine on Leith" becoming an anthem for fans of their beloved Hibernian Football Club. In Part 2 next week, they talk about their view of the Iraq war and tell us who will win the US election and why.

PA: Many critics are saying that the new album is best thing you’ve done since Sunshine on Leith. How do you feel?

Charlie: I think it is. Everybody’s going to say that when they put a new record out. But I actually think it’s a better group of songs than Sunshine on Leith. So yes for me it’s the best thing we’ve ever done. It’s certainly for me it’s the most satisfying.

Craig: It's hard to get a perspective on records. It’s certainly been by far the most successful record in Britain since Sunshine on Leith so we’ll see how it does elsewhere.

PA: Listening to the lyrics, you’re still very political. Is it hard to stay angry as you get older?

Charlie: I don’t think it’s a question of staying angry, it’s a question of if something moves you, then you talk about it. You look at the world situation at the moment, it’s hard not to be at least a little concerned and not a little interested in what’s going on. What is it the Chinese say? "We’re condemned to live in interesting times." And these are very interesting times at the moment. And things move very quickly. Not just in terms of things political but technologically as well, in terms of the whole internet stuff. We live in a change of culture in the last, five, six, ten years. I think it’s phenomenal. I thought it was fast in the twentieth century but now it’s just beyond belief. I inhabit a different world from my kids but I suppose that was the same for my dad but the pace of change now is amazing. Certianly the political situation in the world is pretty volatile.

PA: The political situation in Scotland has changed a great deal since I last saw you perform in 1987.

Craig: A long time ago.

PA: You haven’t aged.

Charlie: (laughs) Thank you. We’ve gained weight but haven’t aged.

PA: You left the SNP in a flurry of publicity.

Charlie: I didn’t leave the SNP. I’ve not been an SNP member for a long, long time. My politics haven’t changed. I’m a socialist who believes in Scottish independence, as simple as that. My concern with the SNP - I have to say I think they've had a pretty good first year - as Scotland’s government, but my concern is that they end up like the Labour Party which is now like packaging Pepsi Cola into an Irn Bru bottle in terms of people telling you it’s still Irn Bru. It isn’t. I saw (Tony Blair Chief Adviser) Peter Mandelson on the BBC International News the other day and it’s like the Borgias or something. I despise him. There’s no end to how much I loathe him. My concern is that the dynamic in the Scottish political scene at the moment that the SNP gets hijacked by business and becomes like Labour a mouthpiece for business which is as far as I am concerned what the Labour Party now represents.

PA: Your concern would be?

Charlie: My concern would be that that could happen.

PA: Do you see any evidence? They’ve had a year of power now.

Charlie: It’s not so much that I think they’ve been taken over by the force of big business, it’s just that when you gain power the people who help you stay in power often require payment for it. In the old days when you had a party of Labour and a party of Capital, it was very clear who you drew your resources from. Nowadays it’s not so clear.

PA: Does it seem that they both contrive to keep the same people in poverty?

Charlie: You could certainly argue that. But the SNP’s strength was that it was a membership party. I hope that continues and its members stay in control of it.

PA: One of the things that happened when just at Govan, two now very prominent activists actually joined at the time of the Govan by-election. How should the SNP handle activists coming from mainly the Labour Party and working with the people they’d come to dislike?

Charlie: You’d never make any progress, if you took that view. You have to win power. The SNP had to win. If Labour had won, it would have been the death knell. If the SNP couldn’t win last year with everything that was going on, it was a case of they’ll never get in. Because they won, the spell was broken. But the SNP , they’ve had almost a very good start, they’ve exposed Labour for what they were, third raters, who could do it when they were in power and

Craig: and had the machinery of state.

Charlie: Labour still seem to resent the Scottish people for not voting for them, they’ve got that attitude. You have to win and bring people from the other side. It’s useless if you keep losing. You do absolutely no good. Eventually you have to win.

Craig: This would be the argument of Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair. If you take it to its logical conclusion you abandon every single principle you ever had.

Charlie: But they abandoned every principle to get power and they got it.

Craig: There are ways it can happen over a short space of time or it can get done through a slow drip-drip.

Charlie: That would be the concern. My feeling is that in Scotland you need an effective opposition and there isn’t one at the moment. The Labour Party’s finished. The Labour Party’s on its way out and I don’t think they’ll recover. They’ll certainly lose the next British General Election. And when they’ve done that they’ll rip themselves apart and they’ll take a long long time to recover.

Craig: I would see Scotland as now having a very good chance of proceeding towards independence. That being the case you need a viable independence parties not just party. By the time it comes two out of three parties will be pro independence anyway, but you need people of the left and the liberal left to organize especially if the SNP becomes, as I fear, the party of business. Then you need something else.

PA: Maybe the Scottish Conservative Party would re-align and become pro-independence?

Charlie: They would maybe be the hard right block but you need a left. And if it disappears in Scotland, then you'll lose a part of Scottish culture. But what will happen is that Labour will keep getting beat and then the penny will drop.

Craig: I would hope so.

Charlie: There’s nothing like a couple of kicks in the face. They’ve been 15 year with increasingly poor representatives. It’s not about at the meoment what happens for Labour in Scotland, it’s about what happens in Britain. They will lose the next British General election and they will be out for at least two terms and they will tear themselves apart. Because they threw away every principle to get power and it worked.

PA: Will it be a Brown versus Blair divide, or an English/Scottish divide?

Craig: No, I don’t think it will be an England/Scotland thing, it will be a left/right divide within the Labour Party, but obviously the Scottish Labour Party is in a very different situation. hat will happen in the British Labour Party will not assist the Scottish party. But obviously they will lose the next British election without a shadow of doubt and they know it.

PA: Craig, you didn’t unlike Charlie leave the SNP.

Craig: No I haven’t been a member for many years but I did think this is the time when you can see that there’s an open goal and when you see an open goal, you have to kick into the opposition goal. They had to win. Despite the fact the SNP won that election by a couple of percentage points and one seat, if they ran that election again today, they’d win by a far wider margin. According to the polls, that doesn’t necessarily correlate with an increasing desire for independence, but they now are seen as the party of government in Scotland. But the Labour leadership are atrocious. I can’t actually believe how bad they are and it’s not all down to (former party leader) Wendy Alexander and it wasn’t all down to Jack McConnell. They were probably the best of a bad bunch.

PA: Is the problem that Scottish Labour doesn’t know if it has an independent voice from what London tells it to say and do?

Craig: It doesn’t have an independent voice.

Charlie: It has an independent voice until it does something that Gordon Brown doesn’t like. Wendy Alexander said last week let’s have a referendum on independence and Gordon Brown says no. How humiliating.

PA: Talking of (British Prime Minister) Brown, what do you think about Gordon Brown changing his accent trying to sound more English?

Charlie: He’s changed everything else. When I was 16 I bought a book called the Red Paper on Scotland. Gordon Brown put it together. He was a hard left Marxist .Gordon Brown’s abandoned every single thing he believed in. Why wouldn’t he abandon his accent? Why wouldn’t he say that Paul Gascoigne’s scoring a goal for England against Scotland was his favourite sporting moment? He’s a fraud. He’s a fraud. They’re all fucking frauds man. The question is ‘will the SNP do the same’?

PA: I don’t think English accents are going to help the Scottish National Party.

Charlie: (laughs) Maybe. But you take the point. Power corrupts. Labour have been there fifty years and they’re entirely corrupt. They’re cancerous. The independent party in Scotland, now it has tasted success. Now it has to shake the hands of those who finance it.

PA: There is song on the new album "In Recognition" about the UK honours system which mentions ‘Every single clown who likes to put the Crown before or after their name’. You’re not having a dig at Sean Connery surely?

Charlie: Sean Connery, he angled for it for years. This is about people who said they would never take it. Sean, he angled for it. He angled for it for many years. Fuck knows why. Fuck knows why. Then Dewar, Saintly Donald Dewar in a despicable act, campaigned for devolution and he shat on Connery, promised him an Honour and then turned his back on Connery. That sums up Donald Dewar. Give Connery credit, he never said he wouldn’t take it. He always gave the impression he would bite your arm off for it. But there’s plenty like Harold Pinter, Helen Mirren and John Mortimer who said the system’s corrupt and it’s a load of rubbish and they end up taking it. Any time there’s a bloody New Years Honours list, you look down it and thing ‘what the fuck, he’s taking it or she’s taking it!’.

Craig: It caresses you and it draws you.

Charlie: But what gets me is that they think that they’re different from the generations before who took it. They think "I’m taking it but I’m not like them." You’re exactly like them. They were seduced in the same way and the end result is the same.

PA: On a related subject, Sean Connery was for many years the only public figure to be in favour of Scottish independence. Sean has said some things that we would regard as politically unfortunate and opponents of independence have used them to try and batter the whole case for independence. When you’re writing you lyrics, are you mindful at any point ….

Craig: No.

Charlie: (laughs) No, oh no. No, no. Course we’re not. We happen to believe in independence, and we’ve said it and we’ll back it and when it comes to a vote, I will back it and I will work for it. But we write songs for completely different reasons. We’d do this anyway; the fact that we believe in independence is a side issue. So you don’t cater your lyrics for what somebody might use against an organization which you support.

PA: On your website, you’ve gone through the songs on the album with an explanation as to what each is about. I have to ask, that song ‘New Religion’. It is about the Old Firm isn’t it?

Charlie: No (all laugh). New Religion's no' about the Old Firm. What ‘New Religion’s about is to do with people who get obsessed with football or sci-fi or whatever it is, and they say is this a new religion. It‘s about people who have a need to almost worship things whether it is divine or not. They elevate something like supporting a football club to a religion. It’s about people like that who should know better and seem to leave their faculties behind sometimes when they get obsessed by things.

Craig: We speak as football supporters who at times have become obsessed with it but you’ve got to step back.

PA: On the album, there’s a song ‘Harness Pain’ which seems to reflect a recurring theme that if you weren’t from Scotland and didn’t know Scotland, you might think it was pretty crap being Scottish?

Craig: I don’t feel that. There are many places you could be born that would be a whole lot worse. If you’re born in Scotland more often than not, you’ve been dealt a fairly good hand in life. But being Scottish is not as unique as we think it is. Being a human being is more important than being Scottish, English, American or whatever it is. There’s a lot more that unites people than divides them.

PA: In 2007, Hibernian Football Club won the CIS Cup, and as they paraded it, 30,000 Hibernian fans were singing 'Sunshine on Leith'. Was it your Corries moment when you saw the crowd singing Sunshine on Leith at the CIS Cup Final?

Charlie: I’ll be honest it passed me by. I was the only one not singing. I was sitting in the back of Celtic end with my family. I thought it was great that Hibs had scored five goals in a final and won it convincingly and was glad that they played good football and that team had got a medal playing for Hibs. I was amazed Hibs had stuck five passed them. I was just relieved. I was the only one there not singing it.

Craig: I was in the Hibs end. It didn’t get to me. It was when they all ran over in the end with the Cup. And you saw how young they all were. And I thought I’ll probably never see this again. I've seen my team win something. They scored five goals in a cup final. No Hibs team has scored five goals in a cup final and probably never will again. I choked a bit on that. And you knew that was the end of it and the team would be broken up. Later on when I watched it on TV. It got me. It really got me. At the time, I was ‘yes we won’.

PA: Are you aware who wrote the Killie song?

Both: (in unison) It was Rolf Harris! (both laugh).

Craig: It’s great to see a team in green and white winning a final singing a song that’s actually theirs and not stolen from someone else.

PA: Or from another country! Talking of achieving greatness, the only other band who’s had a musical made out of their songs is Abba. How do you react to the comparison?

Charlie: It’s not a musical. It’s a play which happens to have 13 or 14 of our songs in it. It’s not like “Proclaimers- The Musical”. I’ve seen it and it’s very good. It’s about two guys coming out the army form Iraq and going back to Edinburgh. It follows them and their family story. So they picked songs which would fit moods in that in a play, and it’s worked. Steven Greenhorn the writer didn’t take anything out of context. There was no point where I thought, he’s got the meaning of that wrong or that doesn’t work. I thought he did a really good job.

Craig: I thought at first he would get 30 or 40 minutes of material up and they’ll think, ‘That’s no working’. But it just kept going and going and they made a full length show out of it. So they did it and it ran for two nights in Dundee and then closed. So they ran it at the end of the year in Scotland and we met a couple of guys in Toronto who spoke of the possibility of taking it to Canada. So we’ll see.

Charlie: We were scared to go at the start and we were proven wrong.

PA: I’m sure you’re sick of being asked about this, the charity record you did for the BBC's Comic Relief. I watched it on You Tube and thought it was hysterical.

Charlie: It was hilarious. It was a 2 day shoot. It was only us the first day. We were laughing the whole time. It’s as well they didn’t include that. We were absolutely doubled up. Peter Kay is absolutely brilliant. He was doing the bit in the wheelchair. And Matt we knew because Matt’s a well known fan and we met David (Walliams) as well. All of them were absolutely fantastic. They were genuinely funny the whole day.

PA: Is the beneficiary of your next charity record perhaps going to be Heart of Midlothian Football Club?

Charlie: There’s no chance.

Craig: You couldn’ae raise that much!

PA: Now that you’re in the United States, you’re going to be asked about the song “Sorry”. It’s explicitly about the Iraq war. Are you performing it here in the USA?

Charlie: Yes we have. Mostly it’s about columnists and journalists who were real cheerleaders for going in. And then you find after the debacle which it became, you did find quite a few of them who said ‘I’ve got it wrong.” A lot of the said ‘I’ve got it wrong but I was lied to’. But so many of them didn’t. They never apologized and just before we went into Iraq , they were calling anybody who opposed the war a friend of Saddam Hussein they were unpatriotic, they were stupid, they’ve got it wrong. But since the Second World War, there has not been a bigger failure of American and British foreign policy.

Craig: Absolutely.

Charlie: It’s the right wing ones who said ‘the left’s got it wrong on everything in the last 50 years and you can’t listen to these people and they went and they cheered men into what was militarily, politically and long term militarily a disaster. They haven’t won, they’ve created a situation which is far worse and who are they going to invade next? And people now know they’ve weakened American and British foreign policy because people now know they haven’t got the resources. They’ve made Iran untouchable.

PA: In Seattle you’re in one of America’s most liberal cities, you may find many in agreement with you.

Charlie: Ah yes, but you don’t assume anything. You never know who’s got a son in Iraq or Afghanistan. I understand why people thought it was a good idea but the truth is when we were asking, in the weeks leading up to it, to produce the evidence it was very clear they weren’t going to produce any. And on that basis, it was an illegal war. De facto it’s an illegal war.

PA: Do you think Tony Blair be remembered for the Iraq War over everything else?

Charlie: Oh absolutely.

Craig: Winston Churchill was remembered for winning a war.

Charlie: He could renounce his wife and become fucking Pope. It disn’ae matter what he does. He’ll be remembered for this. It does not matter what he does.

Craig: If you compare the two careers, Churchill’s outside the Second World War was mostly failure. Blair’s, outside the Iraq War, even though we didn’t like him, was mostly a success. It’s the vanity of a war. The one thing about Churchill was that he wasn’t a warmonger. He’s one who’d actually fought in a war. He knew what war is and understood what war is. Blair came from a generation on the left who had no idea what war is and was pressurized mostly through his own vanity to support it.

PA: He went against his own party and his own people.

Charlie: The instincts of the people are always right.

PA: People here often ask me why did Blair support this war. Now we know, in retrospect, he was much more into Christianity than he told the British people. Is there any other reason you can think of why Blair went along with this?

Craig: He wanted to write himself into the Bible?

Charlie: People say George Bush is a scary character. I think Tony Blair is far more scary and he’s a creep of the first order. I think George Bush is just pretty stupid and that’s it. Overpromoted. Promoted well beyond his capabilities but Tony Blair is a creep among creeps. I think he is truly religiously messianic. He really believes he’s doing god’s will. I don’t think George W Bush does. There’s a few around him who do. But I actually don’t think he does. He has some humility. But Blair – nuts.

Craig: Blair doesn’t have any humility.

PA: What does the future hold for Gordon Brown?

Craig: Gordon Brown will be remembered as the John Major of the Labour Party!

PA: John Major did win an election.

Craig: But he was still considered a failure. Gordon Brown though intellectually far superior to Blair has just come at the wrong time, the wrong point in history. Because he has sold his principles out along with Blair and all the rest of them, he can’t get back.

Charlie: What made me laugh was the story a week ago with Cherie Blair saying Tony would have given Gordon Brown power two years earlier if he’d been more supportive. You lieing cow! They had to pull them out of power by the nails. They would have never given power up unless they had to. They’d still be there.

Craig: Like Thatcher.

PA: I haven’t asked you about (Scottish Prime Minister) Alex Salmond.

Craig: I think he’s alright. He’s by far the best of them. People thought he’s all mouth and when it comes to decision making he won’t be able to do it. Well he’s out maneuvered them all the way. He’s absolutely out maneuvered them. He’s one of the best politicians in the United Kingdom. So far he’s done a pretty good job. But, the raison d’être of the SNP is achieving independence.

Charlie: So how do you do that in the midst of a possible world recession that could potentially turn into something even worse. Good luck to Alex. Good luck. Because he’s going to be hard pushed because what’s coming up economically for Brown and for Salmond and for America, whoever gets in, and I hope it’s Obama. I have an instinct McCain would beat Clinton. I have an instinct Obama is unbeatable because he could get people out to vote who Hillary Clinton could never get out to vote. Hillary gets the white working class where Obama doesn’t . He will beat McCain because people will look around and say it’s not what he looks like now. What’s he going to look like after two years? I saw an interview with Chuck Norris of all people who said he wouldn’t back McCain. He was still backing Huckabee. But he wouldn’t back McCain because it would be too much for him. People look at McCain and that coupled with the economic downturn which the Republicans will be blamed for, will mean that Obama or Clinton will get it.

Craig: It could be the oil price and the exploding economies are going to keep everyone afloat. I don’t think so. I think the oil price is what will do for us. The inflation is in the system now. Cutting the interest rates is a long term disaster. You’ll pay tomorrow folks, and Georgie Boy can go away and get his protection and it’s all dumped on the next one.

Charlie: Reagan did the same thing and George W Bush has done it too. You pay tomorrow. Put everything on tomorrow.

Craig: Whatever the Republicans can say about Democrats, at least Clinton if he did nothing else balanced the books.

PA: That’s confusing when the left wing party balances the books and …

Charlie: (laughing) Yeah, which indicates it wasn’t that left wing.

Craig: He inherited a good economic position. Napoleon when asked what sort of generals he liked said ‘lucky ones’. You’re better being lucky than good. Sometimes you’ve just got fortune. It’s your time and you get away with it. No matter what Alex Salmond does now, he’s tactically the best politician I’ve ever seen, but he’s still going to have to face up to campaigning for independence at a time when the economy is messed up.

PA: The former Soviet Republics left the Soviet Union at a time of uncertainty.

Craig: They saw the opportunity.

Charlie: They saw a failed state round about them they didn’t want to be a part of.

PA: Is the United Kingdom not heading to be a failed state?

Craig: Not in comparison to the Soviet Union.

Charlie: Much as I’ve criticized the UK, I wouldn’t quite compare them.

PA: To another contentious matter, can you bring yourselves to support Rangers in Europe?

Craig: They are there to be backed when the club has changed sufficiently.

Charlie: The club would be backed by most Scots outside the Celtic support in a way that I could never really truly back Hearts if they clean up the act. Get rid of it. Get rid of it because it holds them back. It’s a cultural cancer in Scotland and it holds back the whole nation. They would find there would be more support. It’s not that people dislike them for no reason. That’s the unfortunate thing. They dislike them for good reason.

PA: What’s on the play list for tonight?

Craig: (Rangers anthem) Follow Follow?

Charlie: (laughs) It’s a mix. We’ve taken a few of the hits that we’ve had plus something from every one of the seven albums, and added quite a few of the new songs.

PA: You’re expected to do Letter from America?

Charlie: We’ve never had that many big songs that we need to worry about it. I was speaking to someone today in Gloucestershire for a festival we’re doing and he asked does it bother you doing the same songs again and again. If you’re someone like the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan or the Eagles, your whole gig could be just a ‘best of’. It must be difficult to know what to leave out. We do seven or eight that we pretty much have to do. The rest of the set rotates round that. There are three or four points in the night where we play a different song. So there’s maybe 15 or 20 songs get rotated maybe over four or five nights. That way you don’t fall asleep in the middle of the set. That is a danger. People go into automatic pilot.

PA: You don’t do this ‘Hallo Seattle!’ thing and say the wrong name. Have you ever done that?

Charlie: (emphatically) No, never. I’ve never done it.

Craig: St John, St Johns!

Charlie: St Johns, Newfoundland and St John, New Brunswick. I was on stage in St John, New Brunswick and I said St Johns. That’s the only time. They can’t understand us anyway so we got away with it.

Craig: I spoke to a guy when we were in Belfast years ago and he said he’d gone to see Fleetwood Mac play in Dublin. Stevie Nicks is sitting there in the back. They’re introduced and play a couple of songs and she goes to the mike and she is clearly not really quite sure where she is. She’s sitting in the middle of this park in Dublin and she says “Hallo Iceland”. (laughter)

Craig: I’d have given any money to have seen that. “Hullo Iceland” when she’s in the middle of Dublin!

Charlie: No, I don’t think I’ve ever got the city wrong. I’m very careful to make sure I don’t do that.

Craig: We’re touring all the time. Before we came here it was Scandinavia, before that Germany, France and Spain. You’re on the road all the time so you do have to watch it. The worst thing is you wake up in the hotel room and you’re sober and you don’t know where you are. You wake up and think ’What town am I in?” and it takes you a couple of minutes to work out where you are.

PA: In the film ‘Strange than Fiction, the song the “Whole Wide World”, is done by Will Farell. And we’d have “Life With You” about a month by then and we thought as he sung it, “Isn’t that a Proclaimers song?". So we went back and checked and found its roots with Wreckless Eric, but it could have been one of yours?

Craig: I wish it had been one of ours.

Charlie: We had it when the record came out and it was one of the best records of that year. He’s a nice guy. We did some dates with him. He played Scotland in December, in Glasgow and Edinburgh – a very nice guy. He’s been off the drink about ten years but I think it’s taken its toll.

PA: Well if you have stage name like Wreckless Eric …

Charlie: That’s it. He lives up to his name.

PA: You do a song called ‘Cap in Hand’ about Scotland’s subservient place in the United Kingdom. Ever had any problems doing it in England?

Charlie: Cap in Hand’s fine we do that every night. When we first started we were a support band for the Housemartins but I don’t ever remember any trouble.

PA: When I first heard you I thought they’ll never get on the radio in England, Have you really had no problems?

Charlie: Oh, I wouldn’t say that. But you accept that you are going to have problems when you take the decision to sing in your own accent. There’s no way you’re going got be accessible for many as you would be if you sang in a mid Atlantic accent.

PA: Last question. You have to make a prediction, which will happen first: Scottish Independence or Hibernian winning the Scottish Cup?

Craig: I hate to say it but Hibs winning the Scottish Cup? Craig. I hope it’s Scottish independence but I have to agree with Charlie.

Charlie: Maybe they’ll happen the same year.

PA: Craig Charlie, thanks for giving us your time.

Both: No problem. No problem at all.