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Proclaim This: More than a decade after walking 500 miles, the Proclaimers save pop rock with Born Innocent (Buddy Seigal, 4/09/04, OC Weekly)

Mention the Proclaimers to me a few scant months ago, and I would have started giddily intoning, "And ah-HYE would walk 500 miles, and ah-HYE would walk 500 more . . ." while making goofy faces, as if trying to entertain a toddler, in all my ugly American ignorance. I was lost, children, but now I’m found.

Fronted by identical twins Craig and Charlie Reid—wonderfully retarded-looking with their Coke-bottle specs, close-cropped haircuts, pear-shaped bodies and ever-present grins—the Proclaimers’ domestic Q factor has been stymied by many issues: accents thicker than Bill O’Reilly’s fivehead; American radio’s disinterest in thoughtful, intelligent pop music; and the band’s less-than-prolific track record (with a scant half-dozen CDs released since their 1987 debut). Yet self-respecting music fans who don’t sing along and dance dizzily to the Proclaimers’ new album, Born Innocent, best check their hearts for a pulse, their innards for a soul: this is among the most thoroughly enjoyable, sharp and filler-free pop records to surface since the Beatles, Byrds and Beach Boys were omnipresent on the airwaves.

From anthemic rockers like "Born Innocent" and "Blood On Your Hands" to Everly-esque harmony pop such as "Unguarded Moments" and "Redeemed," from the bawdy skiffle of "Role Model" to the gorgeous country/R&B balladry of "No Witness" and the perfectly sublime cover of the Vogue’s "Five O’Clock World," this is a five-star effort from top to bottom, good to the last drop, life-affirming, gorgeous.

The Reids largely came to their artful, idiosyncratic sound like any self-respecting European group: through early exposure to classic American music. "That’s the type of stuff we’ve always liked—rootsy, simple chord progressions, mainly based around American folk and popular music," says Charlie. "Growing up, our early influences were mostly from my dad’s record collection. He liked guys like Ray Charles and Fats Domino. We were born in 1962, so we also came up listening to the Beatles and the Stones on the radio. Then in the late ’70s, we started getting into the punk bands in Britain at the time. But I suppose when you get right down to it, the biggest influences were American—folk music, country music, Appalachian harmony groups. My favorites have always been people like Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard. And I really liked the Motown and Stax stuff, guys like Sam & Dave."

Further comfort comes from "Blood On Your Hands," an oddly upbeat and tuneful diatribe against terrorism, pointedly skewed against Islamo-fascists, rife with allusions to martyrs washing blood from their hands in paradise. For anyone fearful that Europeans don’t take the threats of a post-Sept. 11 world seriously, for those who worry about continental appeasement, the track will come as sweet reassurance.

"I can’t understand anybody who can believe they’re doing God’s will when they go blow up a bus in Jerusalem or walk into a train station in Spain and blow themselves apart," Charlie says. "I cannot . . . nothing in my culture and the history of my people taught me any way I could identify with that. I can identify with people saying, ‘I’ve taken enough; I’m going to fight back,’ but I don’t see how you can fight back by blowing women and children up. It is totally immoral, and the people who fund it, the people who send guys out to do that and say it’s for a moral reason, I . . . I . . . cannot understand that, and I loathe them—I hate them."

They aren't European; they're Christian.

MORE:
-INTERVIEW: The Proclaimers: walking 1,000 miles (An interview by Tom Knapp, November 1994, Rambles)

The band has also stressed religious themes with songs like "The More I Believe," "The Light" and a cover of a 40-year-old gospel tune, "I Want to Be a Christian." It's a marked change from the band's earlier work, which focused more on light-hearted love and politics.

Charlie agreed that religion is more overt in the new album. The Reids have never tried to hide their religious tendencies, he said, even choosing a name that seems more appropriate to a gospel group than a rock band. "It's a strong name, and it has certain gospel overtures to it as well," he said. "Not that we set out to be a gospel band. We certainly didn't."

Charlie describes the Proclaimers' sound as pop music or folk pop. The unusual blend of whimsy and introspection in their lyrics is not an intentional gimmick, he said. "There's no hidden agenda. It's just the way it comes out. The songs are mainly autobiographical, so it's going to reflect the way we are. ... Sometimes it's troublesome. It's hard to say what you want to say simply."

-INTERVIEW: SimplyScottish.com Interviews The Proclaimers (On August 18th, 2001, Andrew McDiarmid Jr. and Sr., producers of Simplyscottish.com and Simply Scottish Radio, sat down with Craig and Charlie Reid)
-They would still walk 500 miles (Jim Sullivan, 3/18/2004, Boston Globe)
-Great Scots still shine on Leith (MIKE BELL, 3/29/04, Calgary Sun)

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 9, 2004 6:33 PM