Pop duo Hue And Cry are expanding their musical horizons with an electronic album on the way.
The duo – starring brothers Pat and Greg Kane – are this year celebrating their 40th anniversary with a treasure trove of rare and previously-unheard recordings dating back to the early-’80s, which they’re releasing as a series of monthly EPs.
They’ll also be sharing clippings and memorabilia from across the years via their Patreon page, as the pair builds up to the release of a brand new album in 2025.
It’s a project that’s been a long time coming and one that takes the band in a new direction, while also pushing their talents to new limits.
“When we first started making this electronic record, I approached Simple Minds’ keyboard player and had a conversation with him,” Greg shares in RETROPOP’s March edition. “And I realised there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors with electronic music.
“The more I found out, the more I thought, ‘I can do that’. Because when Pat and I play the electronic stuff live, I’ve got three synthesisers set up, nothing’s sequenced, and it can go wrong, which sometimes it does. But a lot of these people are just pressing play on a computer. So I wanted to still retain the liveness of what Pat and I do but in electronica land, and we’ve managed to achieve it.”
Looking ahead, he adds: “So we will celebrate our 40th anniversary in 2024. We’ll reach out to all these millions of people that liked what we do and connect with them again. And in 2025, there’ll be a brand new electronic record for them to enjoy. Because I think they’ll have completely pegged out on archive Hue And Cry at the end of 2024 and it will be a release and a relief for them to get a new record at the end.”
Offering one final teaser, Pat says: “We’re trying to figure out what to call this record. We’re not going to call it this, but it really is a cosmic folk record – and I’ll tell you what I mean by that. When we were recording the last album, we did a lot of research into NASA sound samples, because one of the songs had a space metaphor, and I’m not kidding you that a deep space quasar sounds like Giorgio Moroder. If you actually listen to the sounds, it’s a pulse and a sequence. That’s what the universe sounds like.
“I was immediately inspired by this because I was literally in a cosmic space, so in terms of the future I would love to work more with these machines. There may be combinations of that with real musicians, but we’ve just done the classic thing that you’re supposed to do in rock and roll and, in the words of John Donne, ‘make one room an everywhere’.
“That’s exactly what we’ve done with this record and whether it bears the estimation that we have for it is in the ear of the beholder, but it definitely does not feel as if we’ve gone down a blind alley. It feels like we’ve opened out onto a big vista.”
