After a Hiatus, the Proclaimers Declare They’ll ‘Persevere’

The Proclaimers aren’t about to start pacing 500 miles fretting over where they fit in the pop scene after seven years out of the limelight.

“I don’t think we fit in now, but we didn’t fit in 14 years ago,” says Charlie Reid during a joint interview with his twin brother and musical partner, Craig Reid.

The 39-year-old Scottish duo became one of the surprise pop success stories of the early ‘90s when their song “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” turned into an international hit five years after they recorded it, thanks to is prominent use in the movie “Benny & Joon.”

“We’ve had our share of success at home and occasionally had success that’s crossed over [in the U.S.], but even in those cases we didn’t really fit in,” Charlie says in the moss-thick brogue he and Craig share. “Worrying about fitting in is a waste of time. We never did, and we probably never will.”

Some fans may accuse the Proclaimers of wasting time between albums. It was just a year from their 1987 debut, “This Is the Story,” until its follow-up, “Sunshine on Leith,” but it took five more years before a third album, “Hit the Highway.”

Much of that time was spent on an extended tour for the “Sunshine” album, which sold nearly 700,000 copies once “500 Miles” became a hit single.

Now, however, with their new “Persevere” album, the Reids are wasting no time picking up where they left off. A new tour brings them back to the U.S. for a short stint as opening act for Barenaked Ladies, including a date Tuesday at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater. In the fall, they’ll return on a club tour that reaches the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano on Sept. 26 and the House of Blues in West Hollywood on Sept. 28.

True to their word, their new music, combining American folk, R&B; and country influences with British skiffle and rock sung in scintillating two-part harmonies, doesn’t neatly fit in with anything typically played on alternative rock radio stations.

It likewise has little in common with the few other Scottish rock acts that have had any effect in the U.S.--the Proclaimers are rootsier than Travis, more accessible than the Jesus and Mary Chain, and more intrinsically Scottish than the Waterboys.

The Reids also infuse their songs with an emotional intensity that makes them the spiritual, if not musical, brethren of punk rockers.

They attack social and political issues in such songs as “Scotland’s Story” (about the ethnocentric skewing of Scottish history in their homeland), “A Land Fit For Zeroes” (a slap at the British Parliament) and “Everybody’s a Victim” (bemoaning the litigation-happy mind-set taking root in the U.K.).

The rest of the time they sing with passion about matters of the heart: romantic love, the joy of family and the loss of those who are dear.

The death of their father two years ago sparked two of the new songs. In “One Too Many,” Charlie Reid delineates with poetic simplicity the act of getting drunk after his father died. In the poignant album-closing track, “An Act of Remembrance,” he sings:

Doctor’s face said the time had come

I stood up and began to run

My boy’s voice called your name

You roared back and the silence came.

“I could not [consciously] sit down and write about that,” Charlie says. “It was going to come or it was not going to come. About two-thirds of the song appeared in a matter of five minutes. With the other [‘One Too Many’], as is the case with most of my songs, it was a lot more difficult to write. I just tried to keep it simple, very honest and unsentimental.”

There’s scant sentimentality in “Sweet Little Girls,” a darkly humorous song Craig wrote after watching his two daughters interact with his two sons:

Sweet little girls

Might like ribbons and curls

But they most like to torture

Their brothers.

Raising kids--Charlie has three sons--occupied a good chunk of the hiatus since “Hit the Highway,” but Craig says the gap was never intended to be that long.

A Fusing of American and British Sounds

“We were going to take maybe a year or 18 months off, but then other things came up. Our father got very ill in the year before he died and the rest of it was not being able to complete the songs quickly enough,” he says. “Of the 14 songs on the album, the first four or five took us about 41/2 years to get. The rest started falling in very easily.”

They wound up recording the album in Minneapolis with U.S. musicians who bring the Reids’ American influences to the fore with the stride piano-led New Orleans groove of “She Arouses Me So,” the pulsing country-rock of “When You’re in Love” and the sensual Memphis soul of “How Many Times.”

Their parents, like many U.K. natives who were young adults in the 1950s and ‘60s, loved American music, so Craig and Charlie grew up steeped in sounds from across the Atlantic.

“We heard the Everly Brothers,” Charlie says of rock’s most famous harmonizing siblings, “but I think what I remember most is listening to Ray Charles and Fats Domino. Our mom liked Frank Sinatra. I liked New Orleans jazz and opera as well, so we had a broad sense of music as kids.”

Back on the road, the Proclaimers are banking on reawakening fan interest through their renowned live shows, exuberant affairs that seem on the verge of erupting into a parade.

“The big thing with us is doing the live gigs,” Charlie says. “We’re starting to build support, but we haven’t done enough yet. We’ve been away a long time, so it’s going to be a slow process. But piece by piece over the next year, it will happen.”

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The Proclaimers play Tuesday at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater, 8808 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine. With Barenaked Ladies. 7 p.m. $14.25 to $41.75. (949) 855-8096.