Where did the idea come from to use the songs of The Proclaimers as the backbone for a musical?
Stephen: “When James Brining was running Dundee Rep, he said he really wanted to do a big Scottish musical and asked if I would be interested in trying to make one. We had a few false starts before we settled on the easiest way to do it was to use existing songs. I said to James that I didn’t want to just kind of pick and mix a whole bunch of songs from different artists. I could write a show about 80’s Glasgow and then just pick from those different artists, but my worry then was that you’d lose a sense of the voice in the songwriting because it’s so disparate.
So we decided that what we would look for a single artist or band whose back catalogue we could draw on that was wide enough to give us the dramatic dynamics, the highs and lows that would lend itself to making a stage show around it. So I went off and started listening to loads and loads of Scottish bands and artists, and to be honest, I was struggling to find the set of songs that would allow us the storytelling flexibility I wanted. Then one night I ended up listening to the Proclaimers first album – This is the Story, which is a brilliant album, but it’s also really unusual. About halfway through the album, there’s a bit where Craig and Charlie are singing a song and they stop and start talking, and it made me laugh because I was thinking it sounded just like it was in a musical, and at that point I suddenly thought, “God, this IS as if it’s in a musical!”
When I listened to the rest of the album and was thinking about the other Proclaimers albums I knew, it occurred to me that actually the way Craig and Charlie write draws on all sorts of disparate influences from country and Western to gospel to pop to rock. And because of the country and folk influence, they weren’t limited in what they wrote about – they would write about politics and about social issues, they would write about love but from interesting angles, about disappointment rather than kind of always celebrating stuff.
So before I went to bed, I wrote on the back of a —I think it was a gas bill— ‘Proclaimers musical’ and went to bed. The next morning, I got up with a hangover and I’d forgotten about it until I saw the gas bill. Then immediately, I sat down and listened to all the albums I had, and by the time I’d finished listening to the back catalogue of The Proclaimers, I knew they were the ones that had the songs that we could take and use to tell a story, because they had a range of emotions, a range of points of view, a range of voices in the songs.
I was really excited and quickly drafted an email to James saying ‘listen to these four albums, then phone me.’ And he did.”
Did you collaborate with the Proclaimers while you were writing the script or were you given full creative freedom?
Stephen: “No, we didn’t. Well, we didn’t tell them to start with. What we had to do, was to test it, and then if we think it works, then we need to go and speak to them.
So I sort of assembled —I think it was about a dozen songs— and then sort of sketched out a vague storyline where those 12 songs might fit into the story. At that point, James’s concern was that nobody had ever sung Proclaimers songs except The Proclaimers, so we had no idea what Letter from America might sound like if it was sung not by them. So I fiddled with a few scenes where it was kind of like two or three pages of dialogue establishing characters and then they moved into the songs, and what I was keen to try and do was to kind of pull the songs apart a little bit so that some of the songs would be call and answer songs, a duet between a male voice and a female voice.
So we did this and played with the songs for a morning in Dundee with the ensemble, and by the end of that morning, James and I were convinced that this would work. At that point, James and I had to go and speak to The Proclaimers. We made contact and went to speak to Kenny, The Proclaimers manager, who is a lovely man, but he’s very tall and very daunting. So we met him and we were worried that he was just going to go, ‘No no, not happening.’ But instead, he just went, ‘Right, go for it.’ And that was it. I found out afterwards that Kenny had spoken to Craig and Charlie saying, ‘Dundee Rep are thinking about doing a musical using your songs. Do you have a problem with that?’ and they said, “No problem, but that’s never gonna happen.’ So they were convinced it was just something that was going to be floated and then nothing was ever going to come of it.
By the time it started to come together and actually happened, I think they were a bit taken aback that it had really come to fruition, and then I think we were all a little bit taken aback about just how quickly it sort of exploded with audiences. We shouldn’t have been really, because the songs are just so good, and in any musical, that’s the key thing: if the songs are good, then you’ve got a show.
Did your background and experiences influence the development of characters?
Stephen: “Yeah, I think it had to but also I think that it was my connection to the songs because I was a Proclaimers fan from the moment I first saw them. I think before the first album came out, when they appeared on The Tube out of nowhere and they had two songs and one was Throw The R Away which I thought was just brilliant about Scottish accents, which you’re not really going to understand unless you’ve heard that whole chippiness about whether the Scottish accent is good or bad, and then the other one was Letter from America and I was watching this in Fauldhouse in West Lothian, and when they go through that list of industrial facilities that have been closed down, Bathgate is mentioned in there.
So I’m thinking these are two guys in angry Scottish accents singing an angry song about Scottish accents and this incredible song that ties in Highland clearances with Bathgate and British Leyland closing down. And I just thought that was a brilliant kind of marrying of making a social point about Scotland in general, a political point about the way things are run but yet the songs were so hooky —they were like earworms— you couldn’t get them out your head. And it was that thing about their ear for catchy melodies and pop hooks that means that they can say whatever they want to say and it’s going to stick because they’ve made it tuneful.
So I think that their lyrical concerns really resonated with me, and I think that’s why once I’d arrived at them in terms of a potential source of material, I could look at the range of their songwriting and go, I know what you guys are writing about. You guys are writing about the tension between thinking about leaving and wanting to stay, and the tension between looking at what your parents are doing and wondering whether you can go and do something different, and about how that relationship changes as you get older, and dealing with the feeling of being on the margins of things when you want to be at the centre of things. So all those things were all kind of wrapped up in that songwriting. They all resonated with me.
As The Proclaimers continue to pen brilliant songs, do you think there could be another chapter to the Sunshine on Leith story?
Stephen: “I’ve always said that there’s enough songs out there for somebody to write a completely different show about, you know, to look at another theme and say, actually, I’m going to use these songs to do that.
There has even been some chopping and changing with the songs in the show. It’s a very specific theatre thing but we always struggled about how to open the second act after the interval, because that’s a song that has to perform a certain role and one of those roles is to get people out the bar and back in to tell them that the show is starting again (if they haven’t heard the bells) and to kind of announce the second act, and remind the audience about where they are. I can’t remember what song we had in there originally, but it was a great song for where they were in the story but it didn’t quite announce the second act that way. We went to see The Proclaimers play at the Caird Hall in Dundee because they brought out a new album, and we heard them play Life With You and the song just lifted the whole crowd. I was with James and I turned to him and went ‘that’s what we need to open the second act’ and he was like ‘absolutely’ so we swapped out and put Life With You in and that’s now a kind of set within the show.
In recent times, what we’ve tried to do is to build in little glimpses of other songs to use so they’re not songs that are featured but songs that are used in like scene change moments just so there’s more Proclaimers music in there. So you’re getting a little a glimpse of a song as things are happening that helps set the emotional tone of the scene that’s about to come.
There has been some shuffling about, but the show’s kind of settled a little bit now and I don’t want to go messing about with it too much because I think the other thing is that people come and see the show over and over again, so they’re kind of familiar with it. So if I was deciding to take out something to put something else in, that’s going to be somebody’s favourite bit that I’m taking out and I don’t want to be doing that.
What do you feel from the audiences when you’re up here in Pitlochry?
Stephen: “I love Pitlochry. I love it because a lot of the audience, they don’t walk to Pitlochry Festival Theatre, right? They make a decision to come here. So whatever they’re going to see, they’re there because they want to go and see that. And that means, generally speaking, people have decided that they want to go and have a good night out, so they kind of arrive generous of spirit and ready to be part of the experience.
I think that kind of openness, especially in this production by Elizabeth [Newman], it’s a really, open and embracing show because there’s so many actor-musicians on stage. There’s a lot of stuff that you feel is played directly to the audience, and I feel the sense of collectivity between audience and stage is really profound in Pitlochry —helped by the Auditorium— which is one of my favourites that I’ve ever been to, because it’s just the right size, it’s big but intimate at the same time. So that sense of the connection between an enthusiastic audience and an embracing production is just, I find it really exciting and really quite moving as well, because when the songs are up and people want to clap along, then that happens, but also during the emotional moments, you can feel that hanging in the auditorium. It’s a very nice blend between the audience and the stage.”
Sunshine on Leith is on at Pitlochry Festival Theatre from 25 July – 27 September 2025