The Duke On "This Is The Story" By The Proclaimers - Page 3

There's also much debating on the "Social Situation" and what-not.

The Proclaimers are as unique a band as The Pogues, what have been certified as The Duke's Favourite Band Of All Ever, and, indeed, they share several characteristics with that majestic squad of prodigious fiddle-fondlers.

Besides the visually striking nature of the outfits, both groups were also grudgingly British, and spent most of the time talking about the ties between their official nationality and their home. Although Shane MacGowan was born in Kent, his childhood was spent in Ireland, and thus his odes to the country are nostalgic, romantic, possibly factually dubious.

The Proclaimers also romanticise their home-land, in this case Scotland, so much so that it's hard to imagine anywhere else producing them. The backstreets of Edinburgh, the waters of Leith, the remote beauty of the Highlands, these external concerns are as important to their art as anything internal.

Again, though, the contradictions. Nationalism rarely breeds anything worth bothering with, and yet here these motherfuckers go, making records that could bring tears to even a stone-cold son-of-a-bitch like The Duke, even though I couldn't care less for the geography. If it was empty patriotic mouthing then one would tire fairly quickly, but there's a hell of a lot more to it all than that.

Letter From America, for instance, whilst rooted in Scottish experience, manages to coax that whole "universal" thing from its themes. Anyone who has experienced the leaving of a loved one can easily relate to that defiantly elating yet strangely mournful plea about "When you go, will you send back a letter from America?"

You don't need to have been raised in The Grassmarket to identify with a lyric like "Sometimes I feel like my sex life's all history." Maybe it helps, but I'm guessing there are folks in Philadelphia that could probably hear a line like that and sigh and say about shit, man, proclaim to me about it.

A song like Throw The R Away, which is about making your accent more acceptable to the rest of civilisation, also manages to punch a personal fist in the Psyche De Duke. Here in The Duke's Hometown, we yack in a fairly-impenetrable Scots-Ulster manner, something which the rest of the country seems baffled by. How many times has a motherfucker told The Duke about "Your diction is such a disgrace"? About forty six times or so, is what I would estimate.

Article Author: Duke De Mondo

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