BOTH are Scottish and feature brothers with the surname Reid, who each looked to America for inspiration and to religion for their band names. One group is no more, the other out on tour still singing "Bathgate no more", and both are newly treated to a career compendium.

The Jesus and Mary Chain's William and Jim Reid looked as off colour as their Glasgow skies, staying in their East Kilbride bedroom for years dreaming of the Velvet Underground and hooked on a surfeit of Jan & Dean and the Beach Boys.

When they emerged in 1984, their feverish music hungrily fed off a squall of feedback; their incendiary early London gigs were the most riotous since the dawn of the Sex Pistols. As their first single promised, they did turn British rock Upside Down, but only briefly.

Riots over, they still fought like Ray and Dave Davies, or now Liam and Noel Gallagher, who have followed them in applying a punk spirit and glam-rock guitars to a Sixties template. Yet unlike The Kinks or Oasis, they had only two Top Ten hits, the dreamy April Skies in 1987 and their last high-impact blast of controversy, 1992's Reverence, in which they aspired to "die just like JFK".

Death came in 1998, by now playing a pitiful, early evening set to no one in the Temple Newsam mud. "We quit.

We killed the JAMC. Were not sad. Were glad," write the brothers in their gravestone epitaph in the sleeve-notes. The after-life begins with 21 Singles, all 21 singles in chronological order, only Head On and Snakedriver being second rate. The Chain should still cause a reaction.

The Proclaimers, from lovely Leith, had crinkly hair and thick specs: Sunday school looks only their mother could love. Veins bulging as they hollered in their malted Scottish accents, twins Charlie and Craig Reid could have been dismissed as a novelty act, a Caledonian Everly Brothers, on the evidence of Letter To America in 1987.

Except that they wrote witty, wry, passionate, sometimes political lyrics, sang folk in the manner of soul singers, and continue to do so on the evidence of There's A Touch from last year's comeback album, Persevere, and Ghost Of Love, a new ballad as melancholic as latterday Nick Lowe.

Where Jim and William could be too negative, rousing Charlie and Craig are ever positive. Opposites, but each with attractions.

Updated: 09:56 Thursday, June 27, 2002