It was pretty exciting to Catch up with one half of The Proclaimers Craig Reid from his home in Edinburgh to talk about their upcoming Australian tour, music, drinking and their upcoming inaugural show in Cairns at The Cairns Performing arts Centre on February 28th
Hi Craig. How are you today?
I'm very well, thank you.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
So where are we talking to you from today?
I'm at home in Edinburgh, it's coming up to 08:15 in the morning.
And what's the weather like in Edinburgh today?
It looks okay. I'm looking out the window, it's clear. It's quite cold last night, but it looks like it's going to be Ok today.
It's a beautiful city that you live in there.
Yeah. Love it very much.
Now, I've been to Scotland quite a few times and I've seen you guys play before. Once in Sydney in 2003 at the Basement, which was a great gig for the World Cup. And then once at the Carling Academy in Glasgow in 2006. And the difference between those two gigs was amazing and that's what I wanted to start to talk about today is one was a sit down kind of dinner restaurant vibe and one was a 2000 thousand seat 100 year old theater in Glasgow that totally went off.
But you brought it to both those shows.
Yeah. I think if you're a performer, it's good to do, different kind of venues, and we've always done that, and we continue to do so. And I think I was actually speaking to someone just before speaking to you, and he asked if I thought it was great when it's the tens of thousands? …And I said it didn't really matter to us the capacity of the place, the number of people. It's just about how you go over, how you're playing, and how the crowd are responding. I think you can get that in a seated venue, in a small venue, you can get it in a big venue. It doesn't really matter to us.
You turned 60 last year and you seemed to celebrate that with a massive tour, how many shows did you play last year?
We did 54 last year, and I think we'll be doing I think it's probably about 52 this year.
And was that like a celebration of that big birthday or did you just think, hey, let's go we've been locked down with COVID ?
It was more the latter. I think we weren't affected by COVID as badly as some because we had completed all the shows for the last record and we had nothing really planned. But all it really did was for us was it put everything back by about a year. But I know for a lot of other people it was worse.
But it was very noticeable when we started doing the shows in the summer, British summer of last year, how enthusiastic the audiences were just to be getting out again and to listen to live music and how much we missed it. I think we realized that when we started doing the gigs. How much we missed actually playing.
I think people don't realize what they miss until they can't do it.
Absolutely.
Both performers and the audience.
Yeah, definitely.
When you formed The Proclaimers in your 20s, did you think 40 years later, you'd still be in a band with your brother, traveling the world, singing songs to people?
I didn't think we thought about it. I think we’d been in three or four different acts before that, different bands, and we started The Proclaimers as an acoustic duo because we wanted to just concentrate on doing the stuff that we wanted to do, and we started that way.
And instantly we were writing better songs, we were getting better responses, but it took about four years before we actually got any kind of breakthrough.
And so, yeah, when we started off, we just wanted to play our music in our own way, and I thought we could maybe get a small audience for playing, like, clubs and things, and I didn't ever think that we would get a mass audience. That was never the ambition I don’t think that we thought about that, it was just really getting off the dole.
We were unemployed for a number of years getting off the dole and being able to make some kind of a living playing our songs.
You are best known for some pop hits, 500 Miles and I'm going to Be. But having seen you live, your music has a much greater depth than that, than just those two songs. You have love songs, you have political songs, and, of course, pop songs. Where does a Proclaimers song come from? When you and your brother sit down, do you sit together to write or where do the songs?
We used to write together when we first started out. We were living in the same flat in Edinburgh, but for the last 30 years or more, we’ve written separately.
And what happens is one of us will get a song, the basics of a song, and we'll start playing it and changing anything that needs to be changed and getting the right key, and just play over and over and over again.
I don't know where the songs come from. I just sit down after we finish an album, finish touring an album, and we've done that for 18 months, whatever it's been, and have a short break and then start writing again.
I don't write when we're on the road and I don't think about it. I just sit down and see what comes in my head. And usually there's nothing. It takes a while for us to actually write enough songs for an album.
It's always at least a year to be able to do that. So you just work out. You get five, six days a week, and you go down and you start sitting at the piano and I start trying to get a tune. And then sometimes I'll get one straight away with most of the time I'll get the tune and then I'll get words later on.
So it's just really work and the occasional bit of inspiration.
Some of the lyrics that you've come up with over time are just so touching and meaningful, you know, the song that starts “there's a touch on my lips, left by memory's fingertips” it's an amazing two lines.
Do you remember who the person was? Where did that come from? that line?
That was just a bunch of different experiences. That wasn't one person. That was a bunch of different experiences. So, yeah, I am glad you like that one because that's one of our favorite ones, because that's from when we came back in 2001, that was the first song we put out as a single and I think it's a very important song to us for bothof us.
We have toured and not played it but most of the time since then, we have done it, and I think it's one of our strongest songs.
I'm glad that you noticed the lyrics in there.
Yes its such a beautiful song.
The next thing I wanted to talk to you about is you're both from Scotland. It's a small country, 5 million people and your songs are set there, They're not set in America. They're set around the stories of Scotland. And your experiences, do you find that amazing, that it resonates with people from all over the world?
I do find it and as I said, we never thought we would get a mass audience, so we certainly didn't think about an international audience, so I'm glad that it does.
I think sometimes if you write specifically about a place and you're right and you're being completely authentic, then that does come over, rather than trying to be universal.
If you write about a specific place and you are authentic doing that, I think that can still resonate with people who are not from that place.
Yeah, you mentioned the word authentic there, and I think that is the word that sums up your musical career and the two of you together. Because I think just from the very beginning, you were just like, this is who we are, like it or don’t.
Yeah. When we started as The Proclaimers that was the thinking behind it.
We thought, we knew, a lot of people wouldn't like it. We were sure of that and we thought, well, that didn't really matter. And if you were trying to be sincere and you try to put over what you actually thought in your own way, then you would have to know that you would be sacrificing a large number of people who wouldn't get it and just hope that you would get a small audience if you could get it.
You've been regular visitors to Australia over the decades. Last time you were here was 2016. Have you been to Cairns before?
We've never no. We're doing both Darwin and Cairns on this tour, and we've never been to those cities, so we're looking forward to very much looking forward to it.
So you can go see the crocodiles in either of those places, Darwin or Cairns
You're playing at Cairns Performing Arts Centre and the tickets are moving pretty fast for that show. It's more than half sold out now.
Well, as you see, it will be a completely new experience for us as well as the audience.
One last question. What's the best pub in Scotland?
The best pub in Scotland? I would have thought…..There's so many I don't know, so many have closed since the smoking ban came in. Obviously covid with that, did it as well.
There was a place we used to go in a village we used to live in before we left at 18. There was a place called the Boarshead in Auchtermuchty in Fife, I think it's gone now. It's something became something else.
But that was the place we did most of our formative drinking, like 16 or17, so that was probably that was probably my favorite, but it's it's gone now, so.
Time moves on.
I actually do just have one last question. When you look back over your life as a musician, what was the one moment when you thought, this is just magic? Like, this is just a magic moment.
Most of them have been gigs, most of them have been playing live, sometimes doing TV shows, sometimes when you're recording, sometimes just when you're writing. I think when you're writing a song, sometimes we've had it when Charlie and I have started playing a new song, and the first time you play it, you go, yeah, that's it. If that has got you there something often it's actually been there's not been any audience there, it's just been getting a guitar, getting the two voices going, and getting that kind of magic there.
Cairns get a little bit of that magic with the brothers coming to play at Cairns Performing Arts Centre on Tuesday the 28th of February.
