JOE ventures into the world of John and Edward Grimes to chat about being evil, escaping the madness and sexually transmitted diseases
You may not have come across Lucan twins John and Edward Grimes. They left our shores last year to enter a talent competition that was televised on British TV for the latter part of 2010 and which goes by the name of the X Factor.
They caught the eye of everyone’s favourite Irishman, Louis Walsh (OK, Louis Walsh’s favourite Irishman, Louis Walsh), who was a judge on the competition.
They crashed out of the televised talent fest, but Louis stuck with them. It didn’t matter to him that their singing and dancing wasn’t up to the same standard as other acts from his stable such as, say, Six or The Carter Twins. He saw something special…
Something that could make Louis a lot of money.
Well the lads have come home to launch their first album, Planet Jedward, and blow me, it turns out that they’ve managed to get onto the radar of some of the most astute, opinion formers out there – seven to ten-year-old girls.
Not wanting to miss out on what may turn out to be “The Next Big Thing”and wanting to get in on the act before they become known in the mainstream media simply by a moniker that fuses them as one single unit, such as Jedward (a combination of the lads’ first names, John and Edward… clever, eh?) and end up doing naff Abrakebabra ads, we thought we’d better muscle in and check the “singing” twins out.
It turns out that neither John nor Edward drink alcohol and are not a frequenter of pubs, so we abandoned the idea of having a pint with them (we’d have made them share it, and they’d have probably spilt it everywhere anyway) and arranged to meet them in their office.
It turns out they haven’t got an office (a playpen somewhere, maybe, but not an office) so we arranged to meet them in the office of someone at their record company. We’re guessing from the worried looks of their handlers, after they noticed Edward using the computer and orange segments trodden into the carpet, nobody had told the person whose office they were at risk of wrecking that they’d be playing host to our little chat.
Best we get on with things before someone comes in and kicks us out…
JOE: Hello John. Hello Edward.
Edward (to himself, but loudly, while tapping away on the computer on the other side of the room): OMG! Jonathan Ross has, like, put up something about us on Twitter saying “I’d send my Jedward army into space and then there’d be an actual Planet Jedward, not just an album with the name Planet…â€
John: JOE’s waiting, Edward!
Edward: Sorry JOE… and then Jonathan Ross says “I am splicing your DNA with some grass seeds so that there’ll an army of Jedwards.”
John: Come and sit here and talk to JOE! JOE’s waiting.
(Edward, who has an injured leg after falling on stage, limps over and joins us.)
JOE: Right lads, what‘s it like to be back on home turf?
John (Ignoring question): I think I’ve seen your website. It’s really cool.
JOE: Thank you
Edward: It’s going to be really big.
JOE: Thank you. Back to my first question, you‘re home – what‘s that like?
Edward: Do you Twitter? What’s your Twitter?
JOE: We do and our name on there is ManStuffJOE.
Edward: How many followers?
JOE: Not as many as you.
Edward: We’re Planet Jedward. I like checking out what’s being written about us on the internet. I’ll be checking out what you wrote about us on JOE.ie.
John: Let JOE ask his questions, Edward!
JOE: Thank you John. So what‘s it like to be back home?
Edward: It’s actually crazy being back home. You think it’s crazy in the UK but EVERYONE here knows us – little kids, grannies, …
John: We’ve had, like, hundreds of girls following us around Dundrum Town Centre and around Dublin Zoo. But we haven’t actually managed to get back to our actual home this time.
Edward: It’s cool being back here because we know the place, we know how to escape everything without getting lost. If we needed to escape a situation we’d be able to run away.
JOE: So do you get more freedom when you‘re here, more time on your own?
John: No, not really. There’s too much for us to do. We had to get these new blinds on our house, because people are always outside our house going crazy. We can’t really hide anywhere. It’s strange going home because everything’s changed for us over this last year, but being home is always the same. But that’s good.
Edward: We’re twins, so wherever we go we’ve always got each other. We’re never lonely. We’ve always got each other. If we didn’t have each other it’d be kinda, like, weird.
JOE: You‘re twins?
(John and Edward nod)
JOE: If I can direct a question just to you, John… Does what happened recently on stage when you shoved Edward after he fell, hurt himself and got up, clearly in pain, prove that you are, in fact, the evil twin?
Edward: I’m glad you noticed John tried to kill me on stage…
John: Basically this is what happened…
Edward: I’ll explain. He started to speed up the dance routine and he started running down the stage, so I tried to catch up, and then I fell and hurt myself. And I got up and he, like pushed me.
John: I didn’t know what had happened. I thought he’d tripped on a banana skin or something.
Edward: They’re the exact same steps that Peter Andre fell down.
JOE: Really? Wow.
Edward: Yes, really. They should be, like, crossed off.
JOE: They really should. So it wasn‘t something you planned, John. You‘re saying you didn‘t try to permanently maim your twin so people would be able to tell the difference? That‘s what it looked like. Especially when you gave that shove after the fall, just to make sure Edward was damaged.
John: OK, yeah it was. I was using my psychic powers to do my brother harm. Not really, I just pushed him to check he was OK.
JOE: So you shoved your injured brother hard to check he was OK?
John: Yes. I pushed him like this…
(John shoves Edward hard again)
Edward: Stop pushing me!
(John pushes Edward once more)
JOE: So you‘ve got a new album out. What involvement have you had?
John: We sing on the album. And we’ve written a lot of our own songs.
JOE: And they‘re on the album?
John: No, they’re all cover versions.
Edward: Basically me and John always know we can do better, so we wrote a lot of our own songs.
JOE: So have you ended up releasing an album of songs not as good as your own songs? Is that Louis Walsh’s fault?
John: Er, no. The songs on the album are really good and really varied. Maybe we’ll just release our own stuff on the next album… Planet Jedward Revisited…
JOE: Return to Planet Jedward?
Edward: Return to Planet Jedward? Yeah, I like that.
John: In our new video we do a kind of ‘Beyonce, Single Ladies’ thing. Itâ’s a girlie video, but we’re still guys in it. We’re still cool.
JOE: Talking of ladies, we love ladies on JOE.ie. I‘m sure you both love lovely ladies too…
John and Edward: Yeah.
JOE: … but who‘s the best with the ladies?
John: I think we both love ladies the same.
Edward: We magnitude to our fans. We get them really excited.
JOE: You “magnitude”?
Edward: Yes we do. We make our fans all feel like… I mean, some of them are, like, ready to marry us.
JOE: And are you ready for that commitment?
Edward: No. We’re only 18, ok? Everyone’s always asking us about girls, but we’ve got the attention of so many girls that we don’t need to have just the one girlfriend.
JOE: I see. JOE understands. You want to play the field a bit. Have a different girl every night…
Edward: We don’t do that!
JOE: You want to try all the flavours before you pick one…
Edward: We don’t do…
JOE: You feel there are so many options it would be a shame to limit yourselves…
Edward: We…
John: We get rushed off stage…
JOE: … into the arms of a different girl every night. Understood. You don‘t need to say anymore.
John (mumbling): You could get, like, a disease, or something, if you did that.
JOE: That could happen. We‘ve got a couple of stories about that on JOE.ie.
Edward: The website sounds really cool.
John: It is really cool, Edward. JOE, is your name actually JOE?
JOE: No.
John: Oh… You know what you should do. You should go to festivals with lots of cards with JOE.ie written on them and hand them out so that people go on it. It’ll make it go really big.
Edward: All our fans – they go really crazy promoting us everywhere, getting the word out. It’s full on. They make stickers and put them everywhere.
John: Have you got forums on your website JOE?
JOE: We do.
John: That’s good. People like forums. We’ve got forums on our website… You’re JOE.ie, we’ve got planetjedward.ie, planetjedward.net, planetjedward.co.uk – web addresses ending in .ie are more expensive than a lot of the others, aren’t they?
JOE: Hey lads, have you seen any of your money yet? You must be making loads of the stuff.
John: It’s so weird when we actually see our money. That’s so cool. Like if we have €£20 in our hands we rush out and buy something like sushi with it. It’s kind of crazy because, we still ask our mum for money to go to the shop.
Edward: We might not see all the money in our hands, but it’s weird knowing that we might make a whole year’s salary in one day.
John: Or even in one hour, or by doing a half hour set…
(John and Edward pause, look at each other and break out in huge grins and start sniggering)
John: We’re not driven by money, though. If you’re just driven by money I donâ’t think you get anywhere. You just need to be successful at what you’re trying to do. That’s what we’re trying to do. We do the music, the TV stuff, advertising stuff…
Edward: Yeah, we’re even getting to do modelling.
JOE: Has the time you‘ve been spending away from your family doing all this stuff made things weird when you do go home? Has the dynamic between you two and the rest of your family changed?
John: Our family are really, really missing us. It’s been like as if we’ve just disappeared off the face of the earth, even though they can see us on the TV.
Edward: Our granddad and our granny are really old, and we don’t get to see them hardly at all, and that’s sad.
John: We keep forgetting our phones and losing our phone chargers, so we can’t even speak to them that much. It’s like we’ve been taken away from our real family and placed with a family of strangers. We’re surrounded by lots of people we don’t really know. We don’t know any of the people around us today, for instance.
JOE: Somebody else could be using your phones right now to send dodgy texts.
John: Oh my God! That’s actually true!
JOE: One final thing. Simon Cowell – he was a bit of an arsehole to you on the X Factor, wasn‘t he? And the audiences didn‘t always seem that friendly towards you. How did you rise above that and keep on going?
John: There were some people in the audience who didn’t like us but we were always able to focus on the ones who did like us. It’s no good cringing at anything we’ve done, we always have to believe in ourselves. Simon is an absolute legend. He really knows what he’s on about. He knows everything about every detail of the X Factor. We went into his dressing room and in there there were these cool suits and this dog statue, and he had this bottle of Listerine.
JOE: Eh, good to know. Bye John and Edward.
John and Edward: Bye JOE.
Jedward‘s first album Planet Jedward is out now on Universal Records Ireland.
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