Waiting to chat to Jedward on the phone is quite daunting, aside from the thick Irish accents and their tendency to talk over one another, they’re just a little unpredictable – but that’s what makes these twins so special, you never know what’s around the corner.
Jedward first clocked on to the pop culture zeitgeist back in 2009 when John and Edward Grimes from Dublin auditioned for the British ‘X Factor’. Simon Cowell cut them off halfway through their rendition of a Backstreets Boys’ song to call them two of the most irritating people who’d ever graced the stage. Fellow panelist Cheryl Cole said the spiky haired duo were “intriguing, but maybe not in a good way”, while Danni Minogue said they were “cocky” and fourth judge Louis Walsh labeled them “cheeky”.
Jedward ended up coming sixth overall in the show. The boys have gone on to make their own TV show, appeared on ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ and recorded three albums of pop tunes.
Last month the boys spent a week in Australia promoting their upcoming tour. Many Australians would know them from their two attempts to win Eurovision for Ireland but over seven days they did their best to appear on every TV and radio show in the country, in between squeezing in chats with magazines and filming the occasional YouTube video.
“I want to tell you what we’re wearing,” said Edward, the brother who does the majority of the talking for the pair, “We’re wearing all black and white and some chrome.”
The fashion declaration came without any provocation, but it seemed as good as place as any to start, for a moment I was tempted to ask if they boys had flat hair or spiky hair today, but decided to go a little deeper, so I asked Edward if their dedication to fashion had lead to a lot of luggage.
“We actually brought a lot of clothes, because everything we do we have to have different clothes, because our fans like to see us,” explains Edward, “We style ourselves, it’s not like we have a stylist. We have loads of clothes and trainers and then we also brought a bag of studs and spikes, so if we bought anything over here we’d be able to stud it. We bought some crazy t-shirts in Korea town and we wore them yesterday.”
Indeed shortly afterward the boys posted a YouTube video of themselves wearing matching sheer black and gold shirts adorned with gold tigers. They’d added hundreds of gold studs themselves. “We spent a long time putting in the studs” explains John in the video.
We share with John and Edward some of the questions that OUTinPerth readers sent in for them, first up we asked if there were times they wish they weren’t famous. The boys list off a mountain of times that fame is a disrupter from having your twitter feed inundated with comments, to having to wear caps to go out in public, not wanting to be caught shopping in sales and not being able to enter a marathon. One of the worst Edward says is trying to go to the movies.
“When we go to the movies we have to wear caps, and sometimes at the movies if people are in front of us, they’ll spend the whole movies looking back at us, sometimes we just have to leave.”
Secondly we asked the boys if they were to be a character in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ which one would take their fancy, Edward jumps at the chance to be the Lion, “I’d be the Lion, so then I could appear in Katy Perry’s ‘Roar’ music video!” After some consideration John chooses the Tin Man because he’d get to wear a lot steel and would feel quite safe.
We pass on another reader’s question asking, if you were a Kangaroo what would you keep in your pouch? The boys are unanimous on their answer, they’d have load of cameras and take pictures of everyone who takes pictures of them.
John has however recently become wary of marsupials after a koala grabbed his hair. Edward jokes that it must have been a professional, “We did meet one that wouldn’t let go of Johns’ hair. It was rearranging his hair; it was a hair stylist koala!”
Jedward share that they do have a few pre-performance rituals, before each show they love to tweet people in the audience and are guilty of peeking through the curtains to look at the crowd. Edward admits he’s quite fond of hearing the crowd shout “Jedward, Jedward!” before the show begins.
One of the boys’ new videos shows them visiting MTV Australia and creating a new dance move which they’ve christened ‘the jedshake’. The move is their personal response to twerking, unlike the twerk, which is mainly an up and down motion of the derriere, the jedshake is like a vibration. Edward clarifies that you officially need two people to undertake a jedshake, it can’t be done alone.
Jedward tagged twerk obsessed singer Miley Cyrus in their online post, but they haven’t had a response back from her yet. The boys giggle as they recall the British press declaring that Miley looked like them with her new short hair cut.
“When Miley cut her hair, that was breaking news in the UK. Everyone was like, ‘Oh no, she’s cut her hair like Jedward!’ When she was in the UK everyone kept asking her if she was going to have a ‘flat’ day. When she first cut her hair short though she did look like our record cover for ‘Lipstick’,” said Edward.
Pressed for a description of their upcoming show at The Regal Theatre the boys declare it’s going to be a lot of energy, jumping around, mountains of fun and that there’ll be crowd surfing. Then after a ten minute interval there’ll be more energetic jumping around.
Just before our chat ends Edward asks if we’d seen the Instagram video he posted the night before of him jumping into the hotel pool. I admit that I had seen it and his Speedos had been discussed in the OUTinPerth office. ‘They’re not Speedos”, he declares “I just decided to jump in the pool, that’s my underwear, I figure everyone has seen us before on Big Brother so why not!”
Jedward will be back in Australia soon, performing at the Regal Theatre on Saturday 23rd November.
Graeme Watson
