30 July 2008
    
 
We spent the other weekend up in Scotland with The Proclaimers. On Saturday they played at Edinburgh Castle to an audience of 8,500 and on Sunday in a big top in Inverness containing 6000 people. These were the last two dates after a tour lasting something like a year and a half. I was very pleased to play guitar and sing on their version of Whole Wide World.
We flew to Edinburgh from Norwich on a ridiculously early flight. By nine o’clock on Saturday morning we were ransacking a charity shop near the hotel. We didn’t find much but we had a conversation with the woman behind the counter. It was straight out of Dr Finlays Casebook - I can’t imagine how we got steered round to Scottish Nationalism but we did. Madge, as I think I’ll call her, doesn’t go much on Alex Salmond - she thinks he’s a chancer:
‘ He can be vairy pursuasive, but I am not to be pursuaded…’ She sounded like a character in an afternoon theatre presentation on BBC Radio 4.
I seem to be more of a Scottish Nationalist than half the Scots I met this weekend - well, two of them anyway, Madge in the shop and this gentleman who I met in Inverness.
   
 


 
 

I saw him reading The Proclaimers programme and the tourist in me had to take his photo. We had an inane and non-connective conversation - he asked me who I was with, I told him I was guesting (what a word) with The Proclaimers so I asked who he was with and he told me he was taking photos for a British Army publication. I suggested it must stick in the craw (I was going to say rankle but I hadn’t got the stomach for it so I went for the equally hideous stick in the craw) having to say the British army because, togged up like that, he must surely be a Scottish nationalist. I lost him there. Charlie and Craig were watching from a distance - they told me afterwards that although they couldn’t hear the conversation the body language said it all. He wasn’t a nationalist.
The support band was called The Dykeenies. I quite enjoyed them but they transgressed my Laws Of Live Performance:
  
   

1 Never say ‘cheers’ or ‘yeah,cheers’ at the end of a song.
2 Never, ever address the audience as ‘you guys’.
3 Never tell the audience about the boring stuff you got up to on the tour bus -
      


I don’t want to hear that stuff - a band should always strive to give the impression that they arrived in a space craft. Unless they’re a blues band, and then I want to know that they arrived in a Bedford van having spent the night in a lay-by, sleeping in ex-army sleeping bags on top of the amplifiers. The only band I've ever witnessed transgressing rule number three was a Brighton band called The Electric Soft Parade. Their frontman said yeah cheers so often I lost count. The Electric Soft Parade weren't very good. The Dykeenies were but the singer said cheers after the first three numbers so I gave up. Actually that’s not quite true - I was getting cold and I had to go and get organised for my cameo appearance.

I don't know what to say about The Proclaimers shows without sounding corny, trite or bland. Someone who isn't reading this carefully might leave under the impression that I'm using those adjectives to describe The Proclaimers but I'm not - they could never be any of those. So I have to resort to fabulous, fantastic, they went out with a bang etc...
I've probably said it all already anyway. Erika Nockalls played the violin on Sunshine On Leith wearing a green satin frock. I played my green Microfret guitar on Whole Wide World. So there was a bit of colour co-ordination - a matching his 'n' hers Eric section.
Anyway, they were talking about getting together to record a new album beginning next March. I can hardly wait.

There's loads more to talk about but if I start on that I'll get bogged down in it so I think I'll stop now and put this on the site without finishing it off...