The Proclaimers

Leith, Cornwall, Auchtermuchty

Craig and Charlie Reid were born in Leith on 5 March 1962 and spent a childhood divided between Edinburgh, Cornwall and Auchtermuchty in Fife. That upbringing supplied both the accents they declined to sand down for the record industry and a good deal of the geography in the songs. They began working as an acoustic duo in 1983 — two voices and one guitar — and that remains the skeleton of the act, even with a four-piece band around it.

The opening came through support slots with The Housemartins and an appearance on Channel 4's The Tube in January 1987. This Is the Story followed on Chrysalis the same year, carrying "Letter from America", which reached number three on the UK singles chart. The NME named them Best New British Act for 1987, and a Brit Award nomination followed.

The records that did the work

Sunshine on Leith, released in 1988, is the album that fixed them outside Britain. It went multi-platinum and contained "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)", which topped the charts in Australia, Iceland and New Zealand. The United States took five more years: after the song was used in the 1993 film Benny & Joon it climbed to number three on the Billboard Hot 100 in August 1993, and it is still their only American chart single.

Hit the Highway arrived in 1994, after which the brothers withdrew for most of the rest of the decade before returning with Persevere in 2001. From that point the releases came at roughly three-year intervals: Born Innocent (2003), Restless Soul (2005), Life with You (2007), Notes & Rhymes (2009), Like Comedy (2012), Let's Hear It for the Dogs (2015), Angry Cyclist (2018) and Dentures Out (2022). The back catalogue also acquired a second existence in the theatre, as a stage musical assembled from the songs and its 2013 film adaptation, both titled Sunshine on Leith.

Chris Martin, quoted in the material announcing the 2026 tour, put the usual problem plainly: "There is a whole other world of music behind that song that I've just been discovering, and they're a wonderful, wonderful band." The catalogue is deeper than the one number that follows them into every football ground.

You May Offend

The thirteenth studio album was cut at Rockfield Studios in Monmouth over nearly three weeks in April 2026, with Dave Eringa producing for the fourth time, and was released by Cooking Vinyl on 11 September 2026. It runs twelve songs in thirty-three and a half minutes. The touring band plays on it, with James Dean Bradfield of the Manic Street Preachers adding guitar to some tracks.

Two singles went ahead of it. The title track appeared on 26 June 2026 with a video by the Scottish director Douglas Mackinnon dealing with fear, surveillance, free speech and tolerance. "But It Is" followed on 19 August 2026, taking John Lennon's "Imagine" as its starting point and setting that vision against the present. Charlie Reid has described the title as deliberately two-faced — a caution on one reading, a licence on the other.

The songs are pointed rather than nostalgic: "The Grooming", "Knock It Down", "Till The Ink Dries", "There's No Plan". At The Barrier called the album hard hitting and near the knuckle, and noted the band picking at the hypocrisy of Western governments; Louder Than War suggested it may be their defining record; The Scotsman reached for a comparison with Elvis Costello's sober anger.

The chart result describes the audience fairly accurately. You May Offend reached number two on the Scottish albums chart and number seven on the UK independent chart, but only number 85 on the main UK albums chart.

The argument around the record

The politics did not stay inside the songs. In an interview with The Times published on release day, 11 September 2026, Craig Reid described trans-rights activists as "truth-phobic", restated his opposition to Scotland's 2022 Gender Recognition Reform Bill and said that "a woman is an adult human female". Both brothers defended the writer Graham Linehan, with Charlie Reid saying he "lost his career for telling the truth". The remarks were reported onward by NME and LGBTQ Nation, among others.

The tour opened as scheduled five weeks later. For anyone weighing a ticket, the relevant point is that the record and the interviews are of a piece: this is a band in its sixties deliberately picking fights about speech and consequence, not softening into a heritage act.

The 2026 road year

The live calendar was built around the album. Summer brought scattered outdoor shows — Tunes in the Dunes at Perranporth on 9 June, the Royal Hospital Chelsea on 13 June, Bellahouston Park in Glasgow on 1 July, Festival Too at King's Lynn on 12 July. A Swedish run in late September took in Lund, Gothenburg, Örebro, Karlstad and Stockholm, with Lund and Gothenburg sold out, and a short six-song festival set followed at Lindisfarne on 3 October.

The main leg opened at Connexin Live in Hull on 15 October 2026: 32 shows across England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland running to 19 December, with roughly 68,000 tickets across the run. The rooms are mostly halls and theatres rather than arenas — Liverpool Philharmonic on 18 October, Manchester Apollo on 23 October, Newcastle City Hall on 25 October, the London Palladium on 28 October, Birmingham Symphony Hall on 7 November, Swansea Arena on 8 November, a Spiegeltent in Limerick on 20 November — before the Scottish stretch: two nights at the Edinburgh Playhouse on 27 and 28 November, Dunfermline Alhambra on 1 December, two nights at the Glasgow O2 Academy on 3 and 4 December, Perth, Dundee and Dumfries, and a finish at Aberdeen's P&J Live on 19 December.

What happens on stage

The shape established over the summer was a 22-song main set plus a two-song encore. At Chelsea on 13 June the opener was "Knock It Down" from the new album, followed by "Over and Done With", "There's a Touch", "Dentures Out" and "Let's Get Married"; "You May Offend" landed ninth and "But It Is" twelfth. The run home was "Cap in Hand", "Angry Cyclist", "Letter From America", "Life With You", "Misty Blue", "Sunshine on Leith", "Then I Met You", "I'm on My Way" and "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)", with "Make My Heart Fly" and "The Joyful Kilmarnock Blues" as the encore. Eleven of the twenty-four songs came from the first two albums.

Staging is close to nothing: a black backdrop with the band's name in white, and the brothers in jeans and T-shirts. Steven Christie plays keyboards, Garry John Kane bass, Zac Ware electric guitar and Clive Jenner drums; Erica Nockalls guested on violin at Chelsea, where Hamish Hawk opened. Official listings for the autumn leg name no support act.

Reviewers of the summer shows agreed on one thing — the new songs sit in the set without a dip. At Parr Hall in Warrington on 19 June, a 24-song night, heat kept most of the hall seated through the first half before the room came up in the second; the XS Noize review of Chelsea had the crowd singing from the third song onwards and standing by the end.