Post by stranger on May 10, 2011 7:27:31 GMT
Well I have to say I was surprised at this intelligent discussion on mainly Edward's part on so many serious topics, including school bullying, his willing to punch anyone who hurt John, alcohol, having a relationship, the future, the death of thier grandfather , the way they keep each other strong etc. I applaud him for his honesty! And people say the twins are mad! They clearly know exactly what is going on: I would really recommend everyone reads this:
Jedward: "We always wanted to do more, to get more, to become something"
Jedward are most definitely not ‘empty vessels for Louis Walsh’s pop fantasies’, writes a converted Joe Jackson
Nothing I say fazes John and Edward Grimes, aka, Jedward. Not even when I joke, "Let’s face it, guys with hairstyles like yours must be gay!" and then ask, "So, tell me now which one of you will be ‘coming out’ in a year or three?"
Or ask, more seriously, what they were thinking last September while carrying the coffin of their grandfather who always encouraged them to follow their dream. That’s why, so often during this interview — set up by Jedward’s manager Louis Walsh, who says he hopes it will be “their first really indepth interview!” — I nearly tell them, “Fair play to you guys,” whereas a few weeks ago on my Facebook page, I stupidly dismissed them, as I imagine many still do, as “empty vessels for Louis’s pop fantasies”. Boy, did I get that wrong.
I also seem to have gotten wrong the story that John and Edward, who were born in Dublin in 1991, come from a broken home and that their parents had parted. But Edward, who takes to the relatively serious nature of this interview like a proverbial bat out of hell, soon straightens me out on that one. He also turns out to be the more forthright and forceful of the twins during this exchange, though that may be simply because John sprained his ankle four days earlier, has been confined to performing in a wheelchair and his voice is strained. Highlighting the symbiotic nature of their relationship, it seems that Edward is trying harder to deliver in order to compensate for John’s sense of restraint.
“Mum and Dad have not broken up, that’s on Wikipedia but it’s not true, they are as together now as they ever were,” he insists, as they sit together on a sofa in their dressing room in Dublin’s Olympia Theatre. “The truth is that we come from a happy family that includes our granny and grandad, who are kind of our mum and dad as well. And even though our grandad has passed away, he lived long enough to see we got started in our career and that meant a lot to us because he was always a huge inspiration.” Jedward say they want to win the Eurovision “in memory of” their grandfather, and return to their memories of the man towards the end of this interview. But it is while Edward is telling me what he was thinking as a pallbearer at his grandfather’s funeral, that he reveals his edgier side. “I just felt everyone else was a poseur trying to get in our shot for the paparazzi, whereas me and John were carrying the coffin because we are strong.”
This edgier side of Edward’s nature also seems to have shown itself when the twins were at school, being “bullied mentally” by students, who also would “try to intimidate” them, and he was fast to use his fists if anyone gave John grief. “Like, when everyone else was drinking in the bushes, we’d be thinking, ‘What the hell is going on?’” he says, before John adds, “And they were taking drugs and we’d make sure to stay away from all that.” Weren’t the Grimes brothers ever tempted to try drink and drugs? “No, our mother never allowed us to get into that scene,” Edward claims. “Besides, me and John at school were never let into these groups. We were never invited to parties, never got a chance to do all these things. They were intimidated by us because we were so close and everyone tried to break us down, tried to turn John against me, me against John, but we always knew what they were doing. And I would, like, punch people, to defend John, if I had to.”
Didn’t John and Edward ever drink? “No, never!” they reply. But is it true, as I heard it is, that they despise alcohol and even frown on members of their crew who have been drinking? If so, why? “I just don’t like the whole vibe of people drinking,” John responds. And I point out that Ronan Keating, whom I first interviewed when he was roughly John’s age, didn’t drink at the start of his career but later turned to alcohol to deal with his mother’s death. Hearing this, Edward continues. “The thing is, with boy bands that are put together, they think they have each other but they don’t because there’s a limit to what they can tell each other. Whereas with me and John, there’s no limit at all to what I can tell him, or we can talk about. So, John is my alcohol! I don’t need alcohol because I’ve got John! But if I was doing this on my own, I’d probably be one of those rehab people. The fact that I’ve got John keeps me going and keeps me strong.”
Edward now is on a roll and it feels like he’s been aching to get stuff like this off his chest and maybe even to break out of the playpen into which Jedward are so often relegated by the media and by their own public image. So, I let him roll. “The point is that all that stuff we’re talking about, back at school, happened when we were 17 and we haven’t really had a chance to grow up from then to now. Because, basically, we’ve been living the fame life, not a normal life and we haven’t had a chance, overall, to have the kind of experiences that people our age obviously need in order to grow up.” I tell John and Edward about another Boyzone interview I did, with Keith Duffy, after the group broke up, and how he admitted that “living in a bubble” from the age of 17 to 23 or so had left him “illequipped to deal with life”.
Even when it came to something as simple as booking his own aeroplane flight, which he’d never had to do. So, do the twins fear they may be left similarly ill-equipped, if not emotionally retarded, frozen at the age of 17, in ways? “No,” John responds categorically, as if the question has snapped him into focus. “Because we are always totally aware of what we are doing, totally focused, book our own flights, pick songs, run our show, as much as we can, and stay as independent as we can be, and always have been. We always did everything ourselves. We always wanted to do more, to get more, to become something. We weren’t like some teenagers these days, wasters, always going out drinking and smoking. That was never part of our plan. From a young age, we set our sights on becoming pop stars and went for it. Even after people in the music business here in Ireland said we didn’t have what it takes, and wouldn’t back us we went for The X Factor and got our break that way. I know people see us on TV and think we act and talk silly all the time, but we don’t and we’re not.”
But let’s get back to the potential dangers in living “the fame life, not a normal life”, as Edwards says. One life experience many guys of 19 have already gone through is becoming sexually active, finding a girlfriend, falling in love. John and Edward, however, say they are still virgins and tell me they “never had a proper, mature relationship with any girl”. Edward has even declared that he will never forsake his fans — mostly females, needless to say — for a girl! Hardly a recipe for growing up, is it? “But if me and John had girlfriends it would put us in a totally different light with fans and they’d find out because they find out everything!” says Edward.
Might this not also be Jedward playing “the fame game”, claiming they are available to female fans when they are not? “No! Because we are available!” Edward insists. Maybe, but here I remind Edward that last year he sent clearly smitten online messages to country singer Taylor Swift — one read ‘Take me somewhere we can be alone — It’s a love story, baby, just say yes’ — and this led to Jedward fans rather illogically bombarding Swift’s site, telling her to leave him alone! So, when Edward then went on to say that like one of the Jonas Brothers, he might date a fan, was that really true or just him trying to keep his female fans on side? “It’s true,” he responds. “And I like Taylor Swift because she’s not like loads of girls walking around, going, ‘Look at me, I’m sexy,’ and with macho men. She’s just a real, sweet girl and if were together we’d be all, like, you know, oooooh!”
Roughly translated, this means Edward is swooning and clearly still smitten by Swift. Sorry, girls! But here, rather healthily, John and ‘John is my alcohol. I don’t need alcohol because I’ve got John!’ Edward seem to take divergent paths on this subject, with John stating “No” when asked if he would date a fan, then adding, “You could do that but it would be unprofessional. We know so many bands who sleep with their fans but that’s not what we’re about.” Edward, however, does not reverse his stated opinion. He merely elaborates. “But what it all really comes down to is that we are so used to talking to fans that when you actually meet a girl you like, you don’t know how to talk to her.
Not only that. If I went on a date with a girl, she’d know everything about me, wouldn’t she? So, you’d probably skip all that stuff and just say, ‘OK, let’s get married!’ Yet, seriously, I don’t want me and John to be like those awkward twin couples that end up living with each other! But it’ll take time for us to get a relationship. Maybe it will take 10 years before we can even think about that.” At this point I joke, “But let’s face it, guys, with hairstyles like yours must be gay,” and ask which one, like Stephen in Boyzone and Mark in Westlife, will be “coming out” in a year or three. “Neither of us!” Edward responds. “But to anyone who is gay, out there, reading this article, I don’t want them to think that when I say, ‘We’re not gay,’ we’re putting you down. We’re really proud of you, we want you to realise that being gay is not a bad thing, and that everything we’re saying in this interview, and everything we say overall, is in the hope of inspiring people.”
This brings us back to the subject of John and Edward’s grandfather, who always was, as Edward said at the start of this interview, a huge inspiration to them both. He obviously still is. “Yeah, absolutely,” Edwards muses. “And I miss him because he really was such an innocent person. Yet the thing is we never even got time to mourn for him because we were away when he died, came home for the funeral and have been on the go ever since.” “I feel he still lives on,” says John. “And I can’t accept he’s dead,” adds Edward. “I just think he is hiding and going to come back, at any minute, out of nowhere! But our granny is still alive and now I spend loads of time with her because, when she dies, I don’t want to be left thinking that I didn’t, when I could have.” As you can tell, these guys are not empty vessels, or anybody’s fools. But even though Jedward say they want to win the Eurovision Song Contest for their grandfather, don’t they also want to win it for Eurovision-loving Louis Walsh?
“We want to win it for everybody and we’ve got a savage song and can win!” says John, referring to Lipstick, and leaving a cue for Edward to come in with the final quote, which highlights how aspirational these guys are and the fact that they clearly have a long career before them. “But while we’re doing press all over, for the Eurovision, I want people to get to know us and to like us. I know we haven’t had loads of hits, but we want to take it to the next level. We’ve already got to this stage but sometimes, during a show, say, I think, ‘Why do you guys like this?’ because I just feel we’ve got to get better and better as singers and dancers, or whatever. We’re still learning, I know. We’re not amazing yet but imagine when we will be!”
Jedward: "We always wanted to do more, to get more, to become something"
Jedward are most definitely not ‘empty vessels for Louis Walsh’s pop fantasies’, writes a converted Joe Jackson
Nothing I say fazes John and Edward Grimes, aka, Jedward. Not even when I joke, "Let’s face it, guys with hairstyles like yours must be gay!" and then ask, "So, tell me now which one of you will be ‘coming out’ in a year or three?"
Or ask, more seriously, what they were thinking last September while carrying the coffin of their grandfather who always encouraged them to follow their dream. That’s why, so often during this interview — set up by Jedward’s manager Louis Walsh, who says he hopes it will be “their first really indepth interview!” — I nearly tell them, “Fair play to you guys,” whereas a few weeks ago on my Facebook page, I stupidly dismissed them, as I imagine many still do, as “empty vessels for Louis’s pop fantasies”. Boy, did I get that wrong.
I also seem to have gotten wrong the story that John and Edward, who were born in Dublin in 1991, come from a broken home and that their parents had parted. But Edward, who takes to the relatively serious nature of this interview like a proverbial bat out of hell, soon straightens me out on that one. He also turns out to be the more forthright and forceful of the twins during this exchange, though that may be simply because John sprained his ankle four days earlier, has been confined to performing in a wheelchair and his voice is strained. Highlighting the symbiotic nature of their relationship, it seems that Edward is trying harder to deliver in order to compensate for John’s sense of restraint.
“Mum and Dad have not broken up, that’s on Wikipedia but it’s not true, they are as together now as they ever were,” he insists, as they sit together on a sofa in their dressing room in Dublin’s Olympia Theatre. “The truth is that we come from a happy family that includes our granny and grandad, who are kind of our mum and dad as well. And even though our grandad has passed away, he lived long enough to see we got started in our career and that meant a lot to us because he was always a huge inspiration.” Jedward say they want to win the Eurovision “in memory of” their grandfather, and return to their memories of the man towards the end of this interview. But it is while Edward is telling me what he was thinking as a pallbearer at his grandfather’s funeral, that he reveals his edgier side. “I just felt everyone else was a poseur trying to get in our shot for the paparazzi, whereas me and John were carrying the coffin because we are strong.”
This edgier side of Edward’s nature also seems to have shown itself when the twins were at school, being “bullied mentally” by students, who also would “try to intimidate” them, and he was fast to use his fists if anyone gave John grief. “Like, when everyone else was drinking in the bushes, we’d be thinking, ‘What the hell is going on?’” he says, before John adds, “And they were taking drugs and we’d make sure to stay away from all that.” Weren’t the Grimes brothers ever tempted to try drink and drugs? “No, our mother never allowed us to get into that scene,” Edward claims. “Besides, me and John at school were never let into these groups. We were never invited to parties, never got a chance to do all these things. They were intimidated by us because we were so close and everyone tried to break us down, tried to turn John against me, me against John, but we always knew what they were doing. And I would, like, punch people, to defend John, if I had to.”
Didn’t John and Edward ever drink? “No, never!” they reply. But is it true, as I heard it is, that they despise alcohol and even frown on members of their crew who have been drinking? If so, why? “I just don’t like the whole vibe of people drinking,” John responds. And I point out that Ronan Keating, whom I first interviewed when he was roughly John’s age, didn’t drink at the start of his career but later turned to alcohol to deal with his mother’s death. Hearing this, Edward continues. “The thing is, with boy bands that are put together, they think they have each other but they don’t because there’s a limit to what they can tell each other. Whereas with me and John, there’s no limit at all to what I can tell him, or we can talk about. So, John is my alcohol! I don’t need alcohol because I’ve got John! But if I was doing this on my own, I’d probably be one of those rehab people. The fact that I’ve got John keeps me going and keeps me strong.”
Edward now is on a roll and it feels like he’s been aching to get stuff like this off his chest and maybe even to break out of the playpen into which Jedward are so often relegated by the media and by their own public image. So, I let him roll. “The point is that all that stuff we’re talking about, back at school, happened when we were 17 and we haven’t really had a chance to grow up from then to now. Because, basically, we’ve been living the fame life, not a normal life and we haven’t had a chance, overall, to have the kind of experiences that people our age obviously need in order to grow up.” I tell John and Edward about another Boyzone interview I did, with Keith Duffy, after the group broke up, and how he admitted that “living in a bubble” from the age of 17 to 23 or so had left him “illequipped to deal with life”.
Even when it came to something as simple as booking his own aeroplane flight, which he’d never had to do. So, do the twins fear they may be left similarly ill-equipped, if not emotionally retarded, frozen at the age of 17, in ways? “No,” John responds categorically, as if the question has snapped him into focus. “Because we are always totally aware of what we are doing, totally focused, book our own flights, pick songs, run our show, as much as we can, and stay as independent as we can be, and always have been. We always did everything ourselves. We always wanted to do more, to get more, to become something. We weren’t like some teenagers these days, wasters, always going out drinking and smoking. That was never part of our plan. From a young age, we set our sights on becoming pop stars and went for it. Even after people in the music business here in Ireland said we didn’t have what it takes, and wouldn’t back us we went for The X Factor and got our break that way. I know people see us on TV and think we act and talk silly all the time, but we don’t and we’re not.”
But let’s get back to the potential dangers in living “the fame life, not a normal life”, as Edwards says. One life experience many guys of 19 have already gone through is becoming sexually active, finding a girlfriend, falling in love. John and Edward, however, say they are still virgins and tell me they “never had a proper, mature relationship with any girl”. Edward has even declared that he will never forsake his fans — mostly females, needless to say — for a girl! Hardly a recipe for growing up, is it? “But if me and John had girlfriends it would put us in a totally different light with fans and they’d find out because they find out everything!” says Edward.
Might this not also be Jedward playing “the fame game”, claiming they are available to female fans when they are not? “No! Because we are available!” Edward insists. Maybe, but here I remind Edward that last year he sent clearly smitten online messages to country singer Taylor Swift — one read ‘Take me somewhere we can be alone — It’s a love story, baby, just say yes’ — and this led to Jedward fans rather illogically bombarding Swift’s site, telling her to leave him alone! So, when Edward then went on to say that like one of the Jonas Brothers, he might date a fan, was that really true or just him trying to keep his female fans on side? “It’s true,” he responds. “And I like Taylor Swift because she’s not like loads of girls walking around, going, ‘Look at me, I’m sexy,’ and with macho men. She’s just a real, sweet girl and if were together we’d be all, like, you know, oooooh!”
Roughly translated, this means Edward is swooning and clearly still smitten by Swift. Sorry, girls! But here, rather healthily, John and ‘John is my alcohol. I don’t need alcohol because I’ve got John!’ Edward seem to take divergent paths on this subject, with John stating “No” when asked if he would date a fan, then adding, “You could do that but it would be unprofessional. We know so many bands who sleep with their fans but that’s not what we’re about.” Edward, however, does not reverse his stated opinion. He merely elaborates. “But what it all really comes down to is that we are so used to talking to fans that when you actually meet a girl you like, you don’t know how to talk to her.
Not only that. If I went on a date with a girl, she’d know everything about me, wouldn’t she? So, you’d probably skip all that stuff and just say, ‘OK, let’s get married!’ Yet, seriously, I don’t want me and John to be like those awkward twin couples that end up living with each other! But it’ll take time for us to get a relationship. Maybe it will take 10 years before we can even think about that.” At this point I joke, “But let’s face it, guys, with hairstyles like yours must be gay,” and ask which one, like Stephen in Boyzone and Mark in Westlife, will be “coming out” in a year or three. “Neither of us!” Edward responds. “But to anyone who is gay, out there, reading this article, I don’t want them to think that when I say, ‘We’re not gay,’ we’re putting you down. We’re really proud of you, we want you to realise that being gay is not a bad thing, and that everything we’re saying in this interview, and everything we say overall, is in the hope of inspiring people.”
This brings us back to the subject of John and Edward’s grandfather, who always was, as Edward said at the start of this interview, a huge inspiration to them both. He obviously still is. “Yeah, absolutely,” Edwards muses. “And I miss him because he really was such an innocent person. Yet the thing is we never even got time to mourn for him because we were away when he died, came home for the funeral and have been on the go ever since.” “I feel he still lives on,” says John. “And I can’t accept he’s dead,” adds Edward. “I just think he is hiding and going to come back, at any minute, out of nowhere! But our granny is still alive and now I spend loads of time with her because, when she dies, I don’t want to be left thinking that I didn’t, when I could have.” As you can tell, these guys are not empty vessels, or anybody’s fools. But even though Jedward say they want to win the Eurovision Song Contest for their grandfather, don’t they also want to win it for Eurovision-loving Louis Walsh?
“We want to win it for everybody and we’ve got a savage song and can win!” says John, referring to Lipstick, and leaving a cue for Edward to come in with the final quote, which highlights how aspirational these guys are and the fact that they clearly have a long career before them. “But while we’re doing press all over, for the Eurovision, I want people to get to know us and to like us. I know we haven’t had loads of hits, but we want to take it to the next level. We’ve already got to this stage but sometimes, during a show, say, I think, ‘Why do you guys like this?’ because I just feel we’ve got to get better and better as singers and dancers, or whatever. We’re still learning, I know. We’re not amazing yet but imagine when we will be!”
) this is so nice. John & Edward always seem to be so childish but I've always known and this interview proves it that they can be serious. It's hard not to like them after reading such interviews. 
