In Jed we trust

I’m not the first to say this, and, come May 26, I certainly won’t be the last, but those Jedward boys are alright.

Think about it. They’ve given us our best Eurovision result in a decade, they’re among the highest-rated charity ambassadors in the country and they’re the only genuinely entertaining guests The Late Late Show has booked in months. What’s more, I’m not too proud to admit that I found their last album Victory totally charming.
Of course, liking them is one thing, tracking them down is quite another. On the day we’re supposed to speak, their record label has no idea where they are. Twitter soon gives the game away; they’re touring the Burren with Tara Reid, who has inexplicably become their mate after being forced to hang out with them in the Big Brother house.
Well, hey, at least they all had fun.
“We went to Glendalough first,” Edward pants, “and then we went to kiss the Blarney stone and then we went to the Burren, and it’s all like, limestone and stuff. We bought this big massive fossil thing for our garden in the Aillwee caves. It was huge, we had to get like three people to carry it…”
As well as giving Ms. Reid a grand tour of the Irish countryside, the Grimes boys accompanied her to a handful of premieres of her new movie American Pie: Reunion.
“I think when me and John turned up in Los Angeles, everyone was like, ‘Who are these guys?’, the directors, and all the cast. Then we came to Dublin and all the fans were waiting for ages and they had Jedward posters and I think it was like a ‘Wow’ moment, they understood the whole thing. The cast said that every single interviewer asked them about us.”
I’m not surprised. Since last we met, public opinion on the boys from Lucan has flipped dramatically. Far from being a spiky-headed national annoyance and source of countrywide cringing, John and Edward Grimes have assumed the role of unofficial cheerer-uppers of the nation. Only two years ago, the sight of the fresh-faced twins made bloods boil; now the Irish people have so much faith in these two 20-year-olds that they’ve started using them as mascots for all things fun and uncynical about Ireland. Obama’s in town? Send Jedward! The ISPCC needs a charity single? Send Jedward! Our dreams of regaining Eurovision glory are shot to shit? Send Jedward, and then send them some more!
Last year’s placement in the Eurovision top ten was nothing to be sniffed at, but Jed One and Two are even more confident about their chances with this year’s track, ‘Waterline’.
“Some fans think it’s just about water,” Edward pains, “but okay, it has good instruments, it has violin, it has the (singing) ‘Doo doo do doo’, it has a big build-up, it’s a song that’s so much bigger live.
‘We have fans traveling over from the UK and Ireland to go to Azerbaijan, they’ve all saved the money, some of them didn’t get Christmas presents ‘cos they all want to get tickets to Azerbaijan, so they’re all really, really excited. Hopefully when we get to Azerbaijan, there’ll be fans outside our hotel!”
If their video blogs are anything to go by, Jedward are greeted with a crowd of screaming girls in almost every city they land in.
“It’s kind of crazy, because people think we tweet people all the time. If something’s important, we tell people we’re there, but usually they find out on their own.”
Bizarrely, he’s right. For a start, there’s no possible way Jedward could be rallying fans to appear in the ‘Waterline’ flash mobs currently happening in Moscow, Helsinki, Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt and Lahti.
“They’re like a network, they just organise themselves. Other people’s fans are not clued in, but our fans know what’s happening.’”
Speaking of their overactive YouTube channel, the music video for ‘Waterline’ was, for the most part, directed, filmed and edited by the boys themselves.
“For me and John, it’s just about being consistent,” Edward nods. “About putting stuff out there for the fans to latch onto, because if you just stop and let record labels do it, you don’t get it all done.”
It’s remarkable how seriously these two unassuming-looking blondes take their stardom, and how head-spinningly brilliant they are at being Jedward. When I ask about their forthcoming third album, Young Love, I’m shocked by Edward’s attention to detail. Not only can he list off the name of every producer, writer and mixing assistant on the record, most of whom have names I wouldn’t be able to remember if they were tattooed onto my forearm, but he seems to have memorised everyone’s CV, just in case I’m not familiar with the songwriting credits of Andreas Carlsson, Jörgen Elofsson and Jess Cates (Britney Spears’ ‘Born To Make You Happy’, Kelly Clarkson’s ‘What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger’ and Backstreet Boys’ ‘Incomplete’, respectively).
Even better, he’s able to give me a full description of what each track sounds like, advising that one number is a “really big summer anthem with a huge build-up”, another is a “mish mash country song,” and another resembles a mix between Rihanna’s ‘We Found Love’ and David Guetta’s ‘Titanium’.
Well, that’s hardly groundbreaking, some of you are thinking, a pop star who’s capable of using both their eye and ear holes, but you’d be surprised by how many artists, pop or otherwise, trip over their words when asked about the finer details of their record. I’m not saying that Rihanna doesn’t know the name of the guy who played viola on Rated R, but I think it’s worth noting that if there were an exam at the end of every studio session, John and Edward would nail it.
“I think everyone’s gonna be surprised,” Edward says of the album. “Everyone’s gonna be like, ‘Whoah!’, ‘cos we’re properly singing on all the songs. We still have the catchy hooks but we have strong vocals. And usually the tracks on an album have no depth but I think all the tracks together make a really, really strong album.”
Even after all that painstakingly specific information, I’d never have predicted this next bombshell; Jedward’s Young Love is, in essence, a concept album.
“The track-list kind of goes in story,” he begins. “It starts off with ‘Waterline’ when we fall in love, and the second track is ‘Young Love’ ‘cos we’re in love, and then the third track is ‘What’s Your Number?’, where we’re trying to get the girl’s number, and the fourth track is ‘Girl Like You’, ‘cos we’re waiting for the girl, it’s like (breaking into song) ‘Hit me up, whatcha gonna do?…”
And so on and so forth until our plucky heroes get the girl and/or girls (this being the one detail I’m too scared to ask about).
Jedward’s near-businesslike efficiency comes from a lot of places; their hyperactive nature, their encyclopedic knowledge of all things pop, and the fact that, for the first 17 years of their lives, they were the ones turning up at airports with posters in their hands.
“I feel like the good thing about me and John is that we’re on the other side sometimes,” Edward muses, referring to the night last year when their all-time icon Britney Spears invited them up on stage. “That’s when we realise what it’s like for the fans when they see us. Then we know what it feels like to be them, so we give them loads of attention, we take loads of pictures. We do everything possible to make it a Jepic experience and make them go from fans to crazy fans.”
Talk about working overtime.
“I don’t think that people realise that me and John do stuff every single day,” he stresses, “we’re always doing something. I know we do lots of big things, like meeting Obama and Eurovision and going into the Big Brother house, but we do lots of small things, too. You have to do lots of small things to get to the big things.”