Hue and Cry Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

Hue and Cry

The Kanes are Still Able

Interview by Alice Jones-Rodgers.

“Pat and I are not afraid of change, it gives you an opportunity to be inventive.”

It is the 11th June 1987 and Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government have just been elected for a third successive term with a majority of 102 seats. Meanwhile, Hue and Cry, a duo consisting of Pat and Greg Kane, brothers from Coatbridge, 8.5 miles east of Glasgow city centre are gearing up to question the British voting public as to why they would ever want to vote Tory with ‘Labour of Love’, the second single from their upcoming debut album, ‘Seduced and Abandoned’ (1987, UK#22). ‘Labour of Love’ enters the UK top 40 singles chart at number 61 just two days after Thatcher vows to continue her reign of terror for another three miserable years and with the brothers having cleverly disguised their opposition to the Iron Lady as an infectiously Poppy, radio-friendly, uniquely Latin-flavoured, three-and-a-halfminute love song, within a matter of weeks, it will have peaked at number six.

This level of songwriting ingenuity wasn’t just limited to ‘Labour of Love’ and during the remainder of the ‘80s, Hue and Cry returned to the UK top 40 with ‘Looking for Linda’ (1989, UK#15) and ‘Violently’ (1989, UK#21), two singles taken from their hugely successful and still much loved second album, 1988’s ‘Remote’.

As the ‘80s (and, incidentally, Thatcher’s reign) ended, Pat and Greg began to experiment with a variety of new musical styles and the ‘90s saw them take on Folk and Country with their third album, ‘Stars Crash Down’ (1991) and Jazz on ‘Showtime!’ (1994); ‘Piano and Voice’ (1995) and ‘Jazz Not Jazz’ (1996) and even Drum ‘N’ Bass, R&B and Latin Funk on 1999’s ‘Next Move’. A six year break followed before the brothers were invited to take part in ITV’s Pop competition show ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’. After reaching the final, only to be knocked out by Shakin’ Stevens, one might have forgiven Hue and Cry for rebuilding their career simply relying

on their previous successes, but instead, they took off where they left off in 1999 by continuing to broaden their sound across five brand new albums, ‘Open Soul’ (2008); ‘Xmas Day’ (2009); ‘Hot Wire’ (2012); ‘September Songs’ (2015) and ‘Pocketful of Stones’ (2017). And in 2022, Hue and Cry may have signed up for this September / October’s 21-date Essential 80’s Tour alongside T’Pau and Paul Young, but they are also set to cause a sensation very firmly rooted in the 21st Century with a brand new, long awaited and as yet untitled album, which for the first time finds them entering the realms of Electronic Dance Music.

To find out more about this curious balancing act between being one of the most sought after commodities on the 80’s nostalgia scene and still having the drive and ambition to push the musical envelope with new releases, we recently caught up with Greg at Hue and Cry’s studio in Scotland, where there was even talk of a slice of cake! Firstly, hello Greg and thank you for agreeing to our interview, it is lovely to speak to you. Let’s start at the here and now, because September and October this year sees you head out on the 21-date Essential 80’s Tour alongside T’Pau and Paul Young. You have been back out on the road since pretty much since COVID-19 restrictions were lifted, so the most obvious question to ask at the moment is how have you found the experience of playing live in this ‘New Normal’ environment?

We did the festivals last year. The early ones didn’t make it, but the later ones did, so we were doing festivals from Henley down to Somerset, back up to Carlisle and in the Northern Kin Festival [Durham, September 2021], which was amazing. So, we got towards the end, it was getting a bit cold though, we were pushing them back until late August and early September, but the audiences were crazy, they were nuts! I mean, you can tell ... oh, you can tell people have been through a bit of an ordeal, so the

audiences were pretty amazing! But the festivals were good and then our manager and our promoters said ‘Do you want to go out towards the end of the year?’ And Pat and I, touch wood, we’ve never got anywhere near this COVID. My partner works for the NHS, so we’ve been quite diligent at home, so we’ve all got our own towels ... we’ve all got monogram towels in our house so nobody uses anybody else’s towels! I go shopping at eight o’clock on a Monday morning in the supermarket when there’s nobody there, just me and a few old ladies! And we’ve got our own studio up here, so I just come to work on my own, so there’s no change. When this all started, there was, in the music business, in the music producing and stuff that I do, people were looking forward to it, they were thinking ‘this is gonna be great, because there’s no change in my life’, because we all work on my own most of the time, but it didn’t really work out that way. There was a lot of de-motivation and a lot of kind of mental health issues with everybody and people trying to deal with it, so I think we were all pretty starved and it’s going to take us a wee while to recover, but the gigs that we did towards the end of the year, which were theatre gigs, four or 500 seater theatres, were even more crazy because people were just dying to get out and to be honest Alice, Pat and I did about two or three of the best gigs we’ve ever done during the last three or four months. I don’t know whether it was the elation of being on stage again or the crowd reaction and we’ve played big, busy kind of bar, club venues on a Friday night and you walk on stage and you think ‘this is not going to work’, it’s just Pat and I on our own with a piano and sometimes it can get a wee bit melancholy, but my God, the tension was incredible and when we let them go nuts, we played ‘Labour of Love’ [1987, UK#6, ‘Seduced and Abandoned’]; ‘[Looking for] Linda’ [1989, UK#15, ‘Remote’] and ‘Ordinary Angel’ [1988, UK#42, ‘Remote’] and they are all going properly nuts! You know, we were on the stage and we were thinking, ‘we’re not really a Punk band, or a Rock band,

Greg (left) and Pat in 1987

this is nuts!’ But I think we were so happy to be out and we take a lateral flow test everyday when we’re out on tour, we don’t go home or anything, so we try to keep it as safe as we possibly can. The only thing I do really miss is Pat and I always went out after the show to say ‘Hi’ to everybody, on the premise of selling merchandise, but most of our fans have bought everything, they’ve got everything, so going out after the gig was more to do with just hanging out and we did it quite faithfully after every gig and the reason being is a band like Hue and Cry that have been on the road for 35 years, nearly forty years, these people have grown up with our music and our songs kind of stamp moments in their lives and they’re just dying to tell you about it! They’re dying to tell you when their children were born, they’re dying to tell you when their mothers and fathers passed away, they’re dying to tell you when they made contact with an old friend or made contact with a brother or sister that they hadn’t seen for a while ... cousins. There were these three guys that we used to meet all the time in London, they used to come to Islington, and one time, they said ‘Do you want to go for a beer?’ And I said, ‘Well, you know what, I’m going to walk back to the hotel, I’ll walk up Islington high street with you and I’ll have a beer’. And the three of them were three cousins and one of the brothers had died and he was a huge Hue and Cry fan and the other three of them didn’t particularly like Hue and Cry, but they came to the gig every time it was close to the anniversary of the death of their cousin and their brother and they stood there and suffered Hue and Cry, because they didn’t really like Hue and Cry [laughs], and honestly, they were the loveliest guys. I couldn’t stop laughing ... I said, ‘You don’t really like it, do you?’ and they said, ‘No, not really! [Laughs]. We’re more kind of Rock guys, but we do it because it really kind of focuses ... We used to do him a favour. We said, ‘Right, we’ll come and see Hue and Cry with you’ when he was alive and we kept the whole thing going’. I’ve had so many urns of ashes brought to me. And that’s the thing I miss the most, because you

you can’t really do it yet, we can’t expose ourselves to, you know, fifty, sixty people crowded round a table at the end of a gig. We’re not there yet and that’s the bit I miss the most. But it will come back.

Yeah, hopefully soon! As we just mentioned, the Essential 80’s Tour also features T’Pau and Paul Young. Are these two acts that you worked alongside much in the early days of Hue and Cry?

Well, this is the thing. We would see them. I met Carol [Decker] many times and met Paul many times, but in the ‘80s, when we were all kind of young and trying to start our careers and trying to build the foundation of our careers, you would see them at TV shows, you would see them at some festivals, but mostly TV shows, but everybody had their own schedules and on these TV shows, you had your slot and you rushed out to do something else, so you very rarely met people. You maybe met them in the corridor or in the canteen to say ‘Hi’, but you would very rarely see spend any time together and then, you know, people think you go back to the hotel and go crazy, but you go back to the hotel and try to get some sleep because you’ve got a five or six o’clock start the next morning and you’ve got to sing live at half past eight somewhere at a radio station! So, even at the hotels, you would maybe meet them at check-in and check-out and say ‘Hi’ and that was it. So, if you wind forward thirtyfive years to now, when we do these Summer festivals, these ‘80s festivals, now we get to hang, now it’s all very relaxed and everybody’s sitting back stage and the kids are running about, or sometimes our kids are playing in the same bands as them. It’s just all kids and it’s all people sitting and you get to hang out when you never got to before and there’s lots of people reflecting on what happened and hearing experiences and it’s amazing experience meeting up with these people again, because you feel as though you’ve known them. You’ve seen them in magazines next to your face your whole life and then when you sit down and just hang out

with them ... I mean, I could tale to you for hours about sitting and talking to Howard Jones and sitting hanging with Nik Kershaw! Nik Kershaw is a lovely guy! He’s great! A lot darker than you think. Musically, I mean, he’s written some of the best Pop songs you’ve ever heard, but if you sit and listen to him and talk to him about music, it can get quite deep somehow and then Howard Jones is a synth genius and then there’s the guys in Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, I was never really the biggest fan and when I sit and talk to them now, it’s really great fun to hang out. And Carol Decker is such a firecracker! She’s so leftfield, I love her to bits! You never know what you’re going to get out of her! [Laughs]. And then Paul [Young] is such a genuine man. He’s another great music lover. My God, I love the thing he does with his Mexican, sort of Mariachi band, absolutely ... I love the thing he does with that! But, I mean, when you see Paul’s show, it’s some of the classic songs of your own childhood and I remember all those records and I remember seeing him doing all the the things that he’s done. So, I’ve had some lovely nights with Paul Young, he’s a really, really fun guy to hang out with and he’s a very elegant man. This tour that we’re doing with Paul Young and Carol [Decker] has been getting a lot of attention, so we did lots of TV about ten days, a week ago and it all went really well and everybody seemed to think we were looking and sounding good, so it’s all been very positive. For men of a certain age, it’s always good to put yourself in front of a TV camera and see how it all goes. We’ve still got it, seemingly!

There has often been a political element to Hue and Cry’s lyrics. Your breakthrough number six hit, 1987’s ‘Labour of Love’, the second single (following ‘I Refuse’, 1986, UK#85) from that year’s debut album, ‘Seduced and Abandoned’, cleverly describes both an unhappy romantic relationship and the unhappy relationship between the electorate and the Conservative government of the time. When you wrote songs like ‘Labour of Love’,

was there a conscious desire to reflect the times we were living through with your music?

Well, the thing is, songwriters comment on what’s happening around them. You know, when I go back to the last two years of isolation, that’s why songwriting has been really difficult, because what have got around you? What are you experiencing? You’re experiencing the four walls and your close family, so you don’t get much inspiration from that. So, we, as songwriters, draw from what’s happening around us. When Pat and I come in to the room to write, we usually come in with nothing and then we’ll just talk about what both of us have experienced recently, with friends, or getting angry at some news report, or getting excited about a film, or getting excited about a design of a building, or getting excited about wildlife, or ... and we just talk about that and the song evolves from that. So, at that time, in 1987, you know, especially in Scotland, Margaret Thatcher was not very popular and Pat and I were trying to be as pragmatic as we possibly could to try and figure out why working class people would vote Tory and the whole song [‘Labour of Love’] is trying to dissect that. It’s like turkeys voting for Christmas, why would you do that?! That’s what was happening all around us in 1986, 1987, especially in Scotland. But funnily enough, ‘Labour of Love’ was written in London. It was written just off Oxford Street, that’s where our publisher’s headquarters were, but Pat has been in London since the mid-’80s and I’ve been up in Glasgow, so I would commute down on the Nightrider. Do you remember the Nightrider train? Yeah! I can’t remember, it used to be £15 to get down to London on the Nightrider and you’d sit in those big, horrible, old orange seats! They were first class carriages though, but just not very comfortable because through the night, the train had to compete with all the cargo and freight that was on the line, so it would take you about eight hours to get to London! So, I used to do that two or three times a month to go down and work with my brother,

but what came out of one of those journeys was ‘Labour of Love’; we wrote that in London in 1986. So, it’s just what is happening all around us, Alice, that’s what we write about.

Do you feel that with the two of you being brothers, there is an element of telepathy when you set about writing?

I wouldn’t ... would I call it telepathy? You might be right. What happens with Pat and I is, you know, I’ll just sit at the piano and he’ll sing, write down some words and he’ll come up with a melody, or we’ll find a melody together, but it’s quite funny ... we don’t leave the room until we can play a verse and a chorus and a verse and a chorus. We don’t leave the room until we can walk down to the nearest open stage and just play the song. So, we have to complete it, it’s just something we’ve always done and sometimes it can take an hour, sometimes it can take a day, it just depends where you’re at. But, as far as telepathy is concerned, we recognise each other’s body language. We don’t have to say anything, but if I come up with a nice melody or harmonic kind of progression and I keep playing it and he [Pat] keeps ignoring it, then I know he doesn’t want to sing it! He won’t say to me, ‘I don’t like that’, he just won’t react! [Laughs]. So, it’s like trying to sort of say to someone, ‘What do you think of this?’ and they just completely ignore you! So, that happens and it’s not so much telepathy, but I understand after I try and play him these chords and I’ve done them four times and he’s completely not reacted to them, I know, ‘oh Greg, that’s the wrong lane to go down, the wrong avenue to go down’ and I’ll go down a different way! So, not so much telepathy, but body language. We don’t say to each other, ‘Don’t like that, don’t want to do that’, we just don’t say anything! [Laughs]. It’s quite funny because we’ve been working on a new album recently and I sent Pat some mixes that I’ve done and if he doesn’t replay within two days, I know he doesn’t like it! It’s as though we’ve taken the negativity out of what

we do and how we react to each other and there’s just NO reaction! If there’s a positive reaction, then I will say ‘That’s a positive reaction!’ But there’s no negative reaction, there’s just NO reaction!

Going right back to those early days of you and Pat coming together as Hue and Cry, how did the two of you first come to start writing songs and making music together and find your sound?

Pat is two years above me, age-wise, so at school, he was more interested in musical theatre, so he was doing ‘Carousel’ and ‘West Side Story’. At that time, it was coming out of the ‘70s and going into the early-’80s, so I was focusing on music. I was a saxophone player from a young age, so I was playing stuff by like UB40 and The Boomtown Rats and that sort of sax-led stuff and the band I was in were playing Punk and Ska and Pat was sort of doing musical theatre and then one band I was in, the singer didn’t want to do it anymore and we were looking for a singer and I said ‘Well, what about my brother?’ And the band said, ‘What, the guy that does all the musical theatre?’ I said, ‘He’s a good singer and he’s a smart guy, he reads more books than anyone I know’ [laughs], so they said ‘Okay, let’s try him’. So, we went into that band and they were called The Winning Losers and we’d recorded some demos, we started getting played on the radio, because Pat’s got quite a distinctive voice, so they started to get interested in his voice and the other guys got a wee bit pissed off because it was kind of their band and Pat was quite dominant as a kind of personality and a musician and I’m quite a dominant musician as well, so I don’t think they liked it. So, after we got a little bit of success with some of the recordings being played on local radio and the gigs getting a little bit busier, they threw Pat and me out of the band! [Laughs]. They didn’t like what was happening. So, it was fine, Pat and I are both dominant people, so you can only be honest and true to yourself, so we went to another band and [laughs] and the same thing happened there and

then I looked at him and I said ‘Do you know what Pat? We should do this on our own’. And we got hold of a drummer that I liked, so we did some recordings with just Pat and I and a drummer and I played bass and piano and saxophone and guitar and Pat sang and I sang and the drummer played the drums and that’s how it happened. Back in those days, they used to give you money to go to university, they used to give you a grant, so we used to use the money we got for our grant ... not all of it, but a little bit of it, to make these demos and they started to get played on the radio. This would be about 1981-’82. I was sixteen, Pat would have been, ooh, nineteen, and then he left university and went down south to do a journalism course and at the time that was all happening, the studio where we were making all these recordings, the guy that owned it, the last time we went in, said ‘Look, you don’t have to pay for this if you let me manage you’ and, as starving students, we said, ‘Can we put that fifty quid back in our pocket?’ and he want ‘Yep!’ So, I remember going home and saying to my father and he said ‘Do you sign anything?’ and I said ‘No, we didn’t sign anything’. And so, that manager, Alan [McNeil], we never signed a contract with Alan and he was our manager for the next ten years. He was our manager throughout all the hits and he was a young guy like us, he was only a few years older than us and he’d never been a manager before, he’d only worked in a recording studio. But he was a smart guy Alan and he led us through all the chaos of, you know becoming famous and a Pop star in the ‘80s. So, that’s how it all sort of happened.

Following 1999’s ‘Next Move’ album, you took a break to work on separate projects. We spoke to Carol Decker of T’Pau recently and she was suggesting that during the ‘90s, there was a fair bit of disdain for bands who had become popular in the ‘80s. How much of the decision to stop producing music together at this point was informed by changes you had seen in the music industry during the ‘90s?

I’d never thought about that, that’s a good question Alice! I’d never thought about that, but what happened was, Pat has got a first class degree in English Literature from Glasgow University, so the music business and writing songs, he loves and he loved, but it wasn’t enough for him to get all his ideas out, so he got the chance to be the editor of a new broadsheet newspaper in Scotland called The Sunday Herald, so he said, ‘Look, I need time to do this’ and I said, ‘That’s fine’. And then, as you said, the last two albums we did were ‘Jazz Not Jazz’ [1996] and ‘Next Move’ [1999] and they were for a Jazz record label [Linn Records] and they were very heavily Jazz-influenced and I’d met a lot of cool Jazz musicians through doing those two projects, so I moved more towards that and I started working with the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra and started working with, you know, famous Jazz musicians like John Schofield, John Patitucci, a lot of kind of famous Jazz musicians who’d come over from America and I would look after them, so the sound, make sure they were all okay and like I said, working with the Jazz on Jazz Orchestra was an incredible experience because, you know, I was in charge of an orchestra the size of 22, 25 people. So, we just did that and we just moved away and then I started getting involved with some younger bands, an all-girl Punk band called The Hedrons and a young kind of Beat band called The Ronelles and both of them did well, went to Texas and Japan. I just started working with Indie bands and started running my own studio, still making music, but not with my brother and I also think ... we did that for about five or six years, maybe ... and I think that’s what saved Pat’s voice, because he took time off from singing at just the right time. Because I know that Carol and Paul and everyone, they kept going and tried to sort of muscle on through the late-’90s and early-noughties, but Pat and I took a rest and I think it stood us in good stead because, you know, we’ve still got the energy and we’ve still got the ability, you know, all this time later and I think it’s because we took those five years off.

It is amazing how many bands say that actually, how much good a rest can do.

We were still playing big venues, the records were still doing really well, we were still signed to BMG, but everybody was fine with it. We had a good run and that was from ‘87 right through to the noughties, end of the ‘90s. So, we had a good ten, eleven, twelve year run at it and took five years off and then we came back with a bang in 2005 with this big TV show. We did the ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’ [ITV] TV show and I wasn’t for doing it, because I hadn’t done Saturday night TV for a long time and I was slightly overweight and I said to Pat, ‘I need to go on a diet then!’ [Laughs]. I said, ‘Oh shit, I’m too old for dieting!’ And the cabbage soup diet was ... oh my God! And we managed to lose as much weight as we could and we did the show, but the people that were making the show were very young, all the production team was young, and that was kind of good too because they were so enthusiastic about all the bands that were doing it and I was thinking ‘Oh, this is quite good!’ And then, when we won our heats and we got to the final, this young production company gave us all the stats and the Saturday night that we won our kind of heat, we said to them, ‘Can you tell us how many people phoned and voted on Saturday night?’ and they said, ‘160,000 people voted’. And when they said that, Pat and I both stopped and looked at each other and went ‘What?!’ And that was when we realised that there was still 160,000 people actually bothered to pick up the phone and say ‘Hue and Cry’. And that gave us quite an impetus to figure out what to do next and we set about trying to find those 160,000! [Laughs]. And it’s been sixteen years since then and in those sixteen years, we’ve managed to find 35,000 of them Not all of them, but enough of them and we’ve used all the different means, from social media to contacting venues where they’ve got databases of all the people who’ve bought Hue and Cry tickets. Pat and I went on a bit of a detective investigation to try and find them!

That’s 35,000 people that we managed to find who want to come and see Hue and Cry, who want to buy our records, who want to get involved in our social media and we managed to restart our career. And, you know, recently, there’s a band called Mogwai, a Scottish band who had a number one [with ‘As the Love Continues’, 2021] and I’m quite friendly with Stuart [Braithwaite] and I said to Stuart, ‘Stuart, if you don’t mind me asking ... congratulations by the way for the getting to number one ... how many records did you sell?’ And he said, ‘We sold 13,000 records to get to number one, Greg’ and I went ‘Oh!’ and he was like, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ And I said, ‘Well, ‘Labour of Love’ got to number six and it sold 350,000 records!’ I’m looking at the platinum disc right now on the wall of my studio! I said, ‘So, the music business has completely changed’. In 1987, you would need 350,000 people to buy your record for it to get to number six and we thought you would need hundreds and thousands of people to restart your career, but you don’t, you just need enough. We’ve got about 35,000 people that come to gigs, buy records, get involved in social media. That’s all you need, which is a tenth of what you needed before! Yeah, the whole thing’s completely changed and Pat and I are not afraid of change, it gives you an opportunity to be inventive and to create things and, you know, we’re in a good place, Alice.

Obviously, as you were saying there, so much has changed in the music industry over the course of Hue and Cry’s career, with social media now being the dominant way of promoting yourselves and downloading and streaming sites now being the main way people listen to music. How easy or difficult have you found it to adapt to such changes over the years?

We’ve found it quite easy to adapt. All the infrastructure around us, the record labels, the publishing companies, they’ve found it difficult. It’s not easy and when you make music ... we used to make music and, as I say, I’m

looking at my studio, at the platinum discs and the gold discs that are hanging around, and that was my prize, to make a record that would be popular and it would sell 300,000 copies, or 100,000 copies. That’s gone now, so when you make music, to record music, it’s really just to promote you as a band for people to go and see live. That’s the change and that’s a difficult thing for a lot of musicians to deal with, because in actual fact, they’re spending a year and a half, writing, recording and producing twelve songs that are basically just for promotion and you don’t really make any money from them. That’s the big change and that was tough for me, I must admit. It was quite hard, because I’ve spent my whole life beavering away in studios trying to make music that is going to connect with people on the radio and that was hard, but it is what it is now and I quite enjoy doing it. It’s more difficult to make music now, because there’s so much music out there, so you have to kind of block everybody off and try not to be influenced too much by what’s going on around you and just make the music that you want to make, because when you get involved in studying everybody else’s music, it just becomes so noisy that you don’t even know where to start. I just cocoon myself in this studio here and don’t listen to anybody else, don’t talk to anybody else and I just make music that Pat and I want to make and that’s what it is.

Well, that’s it, isn’t it? Because you have to stay true to yourself, you can’t just go out and try to copy what the trend is.

No, you can’t. I do that a lot when I’m working with other bands, because when I’m working with younger bands, I like to have a reference of where they’re coming from. I know where Pat and I are coming from, I don’t have to have a reference for where we come from, but with a lot of other bands, I just find it difficult to find out what their references are. I mean, a lot of people are influenced by their parents’ record collection, so, I mean, it’s funny, my nine-year-old daughter plays Justin

Bieber constantly in the car and I keep hearing ‘80s American Pop Rock all over the place when she plays Justin Bieber. I tell her there’s far too much swearing and I’m like ‘Why are bands swearing so much?!’ I don’t understand why they have to swear so much! [Laughs]. There’s a time and a place for swearing! I enjoy swearing, I like making my point and getting energised and enthusiastic, but I don’t understand why they’ve got to swear all the way through the song. But, anyway! It’s all ‘A,B,C,D,E,F you and your mum and your dad and your friends and your job and F your car’. I mean, what?! What?!

Well, yeah, it just becomes swearing for the sake of it, doesn’t it?

I know, because when we swear, it’s kind of a bit of an occasion!

Haha, yes, exactly! Earlier, you were saying about how 2005 saw you make a comeback when you took part in the ITV1 Pop competition show, ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’. You won the fourth week heat by performing ‘Labour of Love’ and a cover of Beyoncé’s ‘Crazy in Love’ (‘Dangerously in Love’, 2003), but were beaten in the final by Shakin’ Stevens. You have always been a band with plenty to say, as demonstrated by the fact that you have released five albums since your reformation (‘Open Soul’, 2008; ‘Xmas Day’, 2009; ‘Hot Wire’, 2012; ‘September Songs’, 2015 and ‘Pocketful of Stones’, 2017) and you continue to experiment with many different musical styles, so how keen were you to embrace the whole ‘80s nostalgia scene when you came back together?

We didn’t know much about it. My brother, as I‘ve said before, when people slag Hue and Cry, they either say ‘Hue and Cry are the Frasier and Niles [‘Fraiser’, NBC, 1993-2004] of the Scottish music industry’, or they say ‘Hue and Cry are Kurt Cobain and Liza Minelli’. My brother’s very Liza Minelli and I’m Kurt Cobain, I’m the miserable guy who just likes to play.

That’s not entirely true, but I’m the more thoughtful one, he’s the flamboyant one and he does call himself Liza Minelli! So, when we got approached to do this, he was chomping at the bit. So, we didn’t have a manager at the time. I was kind of managing stuff to do with Hue and Cry and I’d been working with another manager called Dougie Souness with the younger bands that I’d been working with and he was a very, very good manager. He worked with Marcus [Russell], Oasis’ manager, worked with Alan McGee [Souness also once managed fellow Scottish Pop act Wet Wet Wet], so I said ‘Do you know what Pat? This guy’s been really good to me and I’ve really enjoyed working with him. Can we let him manage this? Because these guys are sending us TV contracts and recording contracts and I don’t really know what these contracts are nowadays, it’s been ten or fifteen years since I’ve looked at one. So, our manager, Dougie, came on board and was such a kind of stabling influence on us, because we didn’t really know ... you saw these other ‘80s bands that didn’t have a powerful manager on these Saturday night TV shows and you felt as though, hhhhmmmm, they might be getting the piss taken out of them a wee bit, we need to be careful here ... not in a band way, just in a kind of business way. But our manager was not like that, they were doing everything through him, so we did really well out of that show because of him, because of his diligence. And after that, we sat down, the three of us and said, you know, ‘Why don’t we create a thing between the three of us and we’ll split it three ways and we’ll just see what happens?’ So, we signed a new management contract in 2008 with him and then him and his people have created the Hue and Cry monster as it is today! So, that TV show was a fantastic experience for us. It taught me how to diet again! I know which one works! The Scarsdale diet, that’s the one that works for me, Doctor Scarsdale! You can lose two pounds a day! But you can’t do it for more than two weeks, or you get rushed to hospital! You can lose nearly two stone in two weeks, it does work! You

need to enjoy cooking though! You have to kind of put a bit of effort in. As long as you enjoy cooking, it’s great! But that’s the one that works for me. Recommended to me by ... I think we were doing a photoshoot and the wardrobe person had said, ‘Have you ever heard of the Scarsdale diet?’ I said, ‘Don’t be so cheeky!’ She said, ‘No, I’m just saying, if you want to try a diet!’ And she was right! You need to give Pat and I three weeks notice before a photo session! [Laughs].

As we mentioned earlier, Hue and Cry have experimented with many different musical styles over the years, including Soul, Pop, Jazz, Drum ‘N’ Bass, R&B, Latin Funk, Folk and Country, but we noticed somewhere that you are currently working on an EDM album. When can we expect to hear the result and what can you tell us about the new album at this point?

Right! Well, we finished writing the new album just before lockdown. The last writing date was in February 2020 and we’d written eighteen songs, but before that, Pat wanted to record an Electronic album and I said ‘Okay then, I’ve never really worked in Electronic music. I bought some synths back in the ‘80s, but you need to give me a bit of time to get up to speed’. So, we invested a chunk of money buying synths. I researched a lot to do with synthesizers and it was the right time to get into Electronic Music because the price of synthesizers had gone really down, because the old synthesizers that were made in the ‘70s, the copyright for the technologies is now out of copyright, so it was the perfect time. So, like Behringer and Roland and Korg were making these synths that would have cost you tens of thousands of pounds, but you can pick them up for several hundred quid now. So, I looked up everything to do with these synths and I started at ‘Synth 101’ page one and I tried to figure out how this works and it’s been such a journey, Alice. It’s been very hard and I don’t know if you know anybody who’s into Electronic Music, but you become even more monastic and even more of a

hermit! Oh my God, so you can lose DAYS in here and my daughter or my partner, she’ll be like ‘Are you coming home?’ And I’m like ‘What day is it?’ Literally! So, it was an amazing experience writing to all these synths. Pat and I had never done anything like this before, so the songs are quite different to what people would expect from Hue and Cry. None of them are below 123bpm. Yes, so we had an amazing experience and then COVID hit and I thought ‘I’ll get this record ready, I’ll work during COVID and get it done’, that never happened because to make a Dance album, an Electronic Dance album for people that are not allowed to dance was really quite a weird experience. So, the songs are all written, they’re all sitting there and Pat came up and sang a bit about six months ago and I just need to try to push them over the line and get them finished. But it’s all there, Alice! It sounds great! I won’t give you any hints and the name of the album has changed a few times. It’s an Electronic Dance album!

That sounds amazing!

It is, it is! God knows how we’re going to play it live though! I need to have a talk with the band, but I’ve got another keyboard player, he’s heard some of it and he loves it, so he can do that, I just need to figure out what everybody else wants to do. We’ve got a horn section, a drummer and bass player, so we need to figure it out, what we’re going to do. But whenever Pat and I write songs, we can play any of these songs just sitting at the piano. There’s a guy called Sam Sparro, who did ‘Black and Gold’ [‘Sam Sparro’, 2008] a few years ago. Sam, I kind of referenced him quite a lot because he’s a big Electronica, not pioneer, but protagonist and he’s always done Electronic Music, that’s the way he makes his music. So, I was referencing him quite a lot and if you watch him, there’s a few videos of him just sitting and playing ‘Black and Gold’ with a piano player, so it works. So, I thought ‘well, if he can do ‘Black and Gold’ just at a piano, then we can do any of these songs that we’ve written with synths on piano’ and lo

and behold, we can. The songs are there, they’re very Electronica, sometimes they go a bit left-field, because I was listening to an awful lot of very dark left-field Electronic podcasts. There’s one called ‘Data Cult Audio’, which was very dark. So, sometimes it can get dark, which is okay, I don’t mind about dark [laughs], but it gets a bit light as well, so Pat and I’s Pop sensibilities are still there, but it’s on a background of very dark Electronica. Yeah, so it’s good!

Wow, that sounds amazing! I love what you were saying there, that even the songs are Electronica, you can still sit down at a piano and play them, because for me, when you can strip a song down to its bare elements, that is the sign of a good song.

Yeah, it is. I mean, there’s an old Jazz adage when they say ‘You can play any song any way if it’s a decent song’. So, it doesn’t really matter what you do and songs, especially in EDM music ... we still like writing verses and choruses, it’s just something we grew up with, but writing to this sort of format, you don’t need as many verses and choruses as Pat and I once thought you needed. You kind of let the sonics engage with your listener for a wee bit longer, because that’s just the style of music. So, we’re very excited about it [the new album], we’re dying to let people hear it, but we just need to get it over the line, Alice. After this interview, I shall turn on my snyths and start work!

You will be lost in your room for another few days!

Well, I’m looking at it now and we bought 27 analog synthesizers and they’re all over the walls and they’re all connected! Well, we turned off the computer. We didn’t use the computer to write the music. The synthesizers all talk to each other and they all talk to each other in a certain way. It was great getting away from the computer! Not easy to do, as I said, it took about eighteen months, two years to get proficient at it and I learned every day. Every day, I came in and turned them

on for an hour and every day, I did that, I learned something new. So, it’s a constant learning process working with them, but it’s been great fun! I do a lot of sound restoration as well, so I’m doing the sound restoration on an old Soul track by a guy called Ronaldo Domino. He’s an old Northern Soul sort of thing. So, what happens is, I learned how to do restoration, so if somebody sends you a crackly old record, I can get rid of all that ... so I did it really well for a couple of clients about three or four years ago and I maybe do about eight or nine of these a month now.

Wow! So, is that through the computer then?

Yes, there’s a company called Isotope who make ... so, if you and I were talking in a room, acting in a scene in a movie and the microphone has picked up the air conditioning, they would send the file to me and I would remove the air conditioning. It’s called forensic audio restoration, that’s what you do. The thing is, you don’t completely remove the air conditioning, because you can see the air conditioning and if you completely take the air conditioning out, it doesn’t look right, so what I do is I separate it up for them and they can decide how much of the air conditioning they want. So, when you bring that to music, I get sent these files or sometimes I get sent cassettes, I get sent old vinyl and I’ve set up an old record deck in here and what I would do, I would transfer that over and what they [the client] wants to do is, they want to re-press these records and they only do short runs of about, I don’t know, 300 to 500 and they sell them all around the world. But these are recordings that would have been lost forever, this is the last surviving 7” of this recording. It’s all that sort of stuff. A lot of people get a bit funny about it because they say, ‘Well, that’s what gives it it’s value’, but what happens then is people don’t DJ with those records because they’re too valuable. They still want to DJ with vinyl, but the actual original vinyl, which is probably worth 500 to 600 thousand pounds, somewhere around about there, is too valuable to DJ with. So, these people send it to me to restore and then they’ll do a run of about 100 or 200 and they’ll charge people like forty quid, like DJs all around the world and then, they’re happy to pay that because they can use that as their gigging vinyl, if you know what I mean? I’ve been doing sound restoration for about ten, fifteen years and at the moment I’m just finishing off this track for them and it’s been an amazing journey, I’ve got to hear some incredible records! I get paid for it, it’s quite a good job for me, but I feel as though I’m kind of doing my wee bit to preserve the kind of archives of old songs. So, I’ve been doing that for about fifteen years, Alice and I love it! It’s good, I’m very lucky!

Wow, how incredible! So, finally, and then I better let you get back to

your room, as you are heading out on the Essential 80’s Tour later this year, if there was one thing that you could bring back from the ‘80s, what would it be and why?

If there was one thing I could bring back from the ‘80s, what would it be and why? Erm, that’s a great question! What was good about the ‘80s? Ooh, you’ve stumped me, Alice! What would I bring back? I’m kind of a futurist, I’m trying to think what I miss from the ‘80s! You have a laugh with your friends and always talk about old TV shows and stuff like that and pre-internet, but I like the internet. Pre-mobile phones ... I like mobile phones. Sat nav ... I like sat navs, so I’m trying to think of all the things that you do now that you didn’t have in the ‘80s. What would I bring back? Erm, Black Forest gateaus! I like a Black Forest gateau! You never see a Black Forest gateau anymore! [Laughs]. For my fiftieth birthday ... I’m 55 now, so my fiftieth birthday, my partner, she’s a good baker, so she said ‘What do you want for your birthday?’ So, I said, ‘Don’t buy me anything, I don’t need anything, but what I would love is a Black Forest gateau! She said, ‘A what?!’ She’d never heard of a Black Forest gateau! She’s about ten years younger than me, but she researched it and it’s obviously a German cake and it’s got a liqueur that’s in it and Alice, she made me the most incredible Black Forest gateau! I posted it up on my Instagram and I got so slagged! I got slagged with ‘You ‘80s throwback, Black Forest gateau?!’ But I brought it on the road for my brother and my tour manager, we got into the tour bus and I opened up the box and said, ‘Look at this’ and they went, ‘A Black Forest gateau?!’ And they took a slice each and you should have heard the silence on the tour bus, it was brilliant, as they munched their way through this! So, bring back Black Forest gateaus!

Absolutely! Thank you so much for such a great interview, it has been so lovely talking to you! We wish you and Pat the best of luck with the Essential 80’s Tour and for the future and we can’t wait to hear the new album!

The Essential 80’s Tour featuring Hue and Cry, T’Pau and Paul Young starts on 23rd September at Stockton Globe. For all dates and other Hue and Cry news, visit the links below:

hueandcry.co.uk

www.facebook.com/hueandcry