Thanks Charlie and Craig for proclaiming on women’s rights - Susan Dalgety
Every second Saturday during the football season, Sunshine on Leith would start ringing out from my son’s bedroom from about 10am, as he prepared himself for a match day at Easter Road.
Even today, I can’t hear the chorus without remembering my then gangly son, heading off in his green top, full of optimism, only to return a few hours later, usually downcast. His heart was broken on so many Saturday afternoons, but he always dried his tears in time for the next home game in the hope that the sun would shine on Leith. He still does.
The Proclaimers also wrote another song that features in the soundtrack of my life: the classic I’m Gonna Be (500 miles). I am a trustee of the charity 500 miles, founded by Edinburgh woman Olivia Giles in 2007 to provide artificial limbs for people in Malawi. I can’t hear “I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 more” without seeing in my mind’s eye little boys and girls learning to walk for the first time with protheses provided by the charity. And one of the highlights of my life was watching a Malawi band learn 500 miles, so that they could perform it for our fundraising efforts. The soulful rhythms of Africa added something special to a song that was already almost perfect.
Craig and Charlie Reid have been superstars for nearly four decades, writing songs that capture the hearts and minds of a nation. That said, I disagree strongly with their support for Scottish independence, so I was surprised to read that Craig did not vote SNP in the recent Holyrood elections for the first time since 1983. Not because of the party’s constitutional position, but because of its support for self-ID and the notion that human beings can change their sex.
Indeed, so incensed are the brothers about the nature of the debate on women’s rights in recent years that the title track of their new album You May Offend is about freedom of speech. “Just by giving out thoughts in your head, you may reach the point where some will wish you dead,” they write.
As one of the many women who has endured abuse for her views on women’s rights, it is cheering to be defended so robustly by Edinburgh’s finest songwriters. As Craig explained in a newspaper interview last week, he is not transphobic. “I’m not against a man identifying as a woman, dressing as a woman. I’m not against any of that. All I’m against is saying that he actually is a woman when he’s not a woman… I respect reality and scientific fact, not myth” he said. Which is exactly what women have been saying for years, only to be vilified.
So thank you Craig and Charlie for giving a generation of women an anthem they can call their own, just as you wrote the song that every Hibs fan learns at their mother’s knee. You may be 64, and the world a very different place from when you wrote Sunshine on Leith, but your music is still as powerful as it ever was. Women thank you for your work.