CALL AND NO RESPONSE:

Pop idols: Scots love them and even Homer Simpson's a fan. So why can't England learn to love the Proclaimers? (Brian Logan, February 8, 2007, The Guardian)

I would walk 500 miles, and I would walk 500 more, to get to Dundee Rep this spring. And I'm not alone. "It's bizarre, the excitement this show has created," says Scottish playwright Stephen Greenhorn. "With theatre, you're normally begging people to come. But they were trying to buy tickets for this before we'd even sorted dates."

The show is Sunshine on Leith, a musical based on the work of Auchtermuchty's famously bespectacled brothers, the Proclaimers. If proof were required, 300 years after union, that Scotland and England retain their differences, it might be found in contrasting attitudes to the Proclaimers. Most Scots can't get enough of their sweaty, shouty, close-harmony, call-and-response songs. But in England, their brand of militantly Scottish folk-pop is deemed a novelty at best, grievous aural harm at worse.

Witness a recent Observer review of Dundee band the View, whose greatest quality, apparently, is that "they don't sound in any way like the Proclaimers", but the Reid brothers are relaxed about their English reception. "There was always going to be a strong novelty angle to how people perceived us," says Charlie. "But the strangeness lets you get a foot in the door."

It is almost two decades since the release of their Sunshine on Leith LP, which sold 2m worldwide, including 25,000 in the UK just last year. Proclaimers songs have graced films such as Shrek, Dumb and Dumber and Benny & Joon, the last of which propelled I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) to the summit of the US charts in 1993. It has since been covered by Homer Simpson (his is called I Would Drink 500 Beers), while Peter Kay and Matt Lucas's Comic Relief reworking is due this spring.

Soul singers aren't supposed to actually believe in the soul.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 8, 2007 7:43 PM