CityLife

Interview: Hurts

IN May 2009, Hurts established a MySpace page and posted a self-made video (funded by the paltry sum of £20) for a song called Wonderful Life. Pivoted on an intriguing lyric about a romance emerging out of a thwarted suicide bid, the track luxuriated in an exquisite early-80s sound that was simultaneously joyous and mournful, like ringing in the New Year on your own with a bottle of meths.
 
The clip was equally arresting: shot in sepia, it featured two immaculately-coutured men with cheekbones that could etch glass staring impassively into the distance while an Edie Sedgwick-alike danced in the background.
 
And the rest, as they say, is hysteria. Seven months later and Hurts find themselves topping myriad 2010 tip lists (including fourth place on this year’s influential BBC Sound Of poll), while remaining teasingly enigmatic.
 
Given this clandestine image of European hauteur, it’s perhaps surprising when synth-wizard Adam Anderson announces “We’re in discussions with Spain for the Eurovision Song Contest,” with little trace of irony.
 
“That’s true,” adds singer Theo Hutchcraft, the Neil Tennant to his Chris Lowe. “We’ve got a song and it’s about Spain. We wrote it for us and then thought: well, actually why would we want to talk about Spain on our record? So we thought right, it’s perfect for the next Eurovision. So it all rests on whether Spain will have it and whether they get the right person to sing it because we’ll have to be in charge.
 
“If they don’t have it,” he shrugs with a laugh. “Then I guess somewhere like ... Andorra or Catalonia could?”
 
While this may sound outlandish, it makes perfect sense in the nothing-is-impossible world of Hurts. There’s a laudable ambition to the pair – you can hear it in grandiose songs such as Silver Lining and Blood Tears and Gold.
 
Their forthcoming album contains opera singers and next week, notes Anderson, they’re flying out to Gothenburg to “use the world’s loudest acoustic instrument. It’s called a Tyfon Organ. It’s built out of ship horns and you’ve got to record it in a field because it’s so loud.”
 
It’s little wonder that Sony BMG signed them for more than most would care to lavish on a ransom for their baby. 
 
Riot of colour
 
From their inception, Hutchcraft and Anderson have reached for the stars. They first met outside indie club 42nd Street just before Christmas 2005. While their friends brawled, the rational duo started talking about music.
 
“We’ve always been ultra-professional about what we do,” remembers Anderson. “The first thing I asked Theo was: how serious are you about this? I never wanted to do this as a hobby.”
 
As such, they didn’t socialise for a year, communicating only via the internet from homes in Salford and Longsight. Anderson emailed tracks, Hutchcraft would respond with vocals.
 
“We didn’t want to let getting to know each other get in the way,” admits Hutchcraft. “Eventually when we found a common ground in music, we realised we probably could be friends.”
Eagle-eyed readers may remember Hutchcraft and Anderson gracing CityLife’s pages in 2006 as part of Bureau, who subsequently rebranded as Daggers.
 
A riot of colour and eyeliner, Daggers spent two years engaged in a lightning-bottling attempt to create the perfect three minute pop single. Ruthlessly wheedling out anything that didn’t sound like a number one, they collaborated with Richard X and Biff Stannard (producers whose job it is to have the number one pop song in the country).
 
In 2008, they represented the sole unsigned band in the annual Popjustice £20 Music Prize shortlist – for their arms-aloft single, Money, which contained a nuclear-blast chorus akin to Stock, Aitken and Waterman producing Nine Inch Nails.
 
However, behind the bombast, the pressure they were putting on themselves saw the pair buckle. “We just burnt out,” notes Hutchcraft. “We got to Christmas 2008 and we were depressed.”
 
Having already lost everything to the bailiffs of despair, Hutchcraft and Anderson started writing differently; rekindling their love affair with music. “The first song we wrote for Hurts was seven minutes with no chorus,” smiles Anderson. “And it was the best thing we’d ever done.”
 
The next day, they disbanded Daggers and bunkered underground in their Northern Quarter rehearsal space underneath a dance studio, hearing dulled R&B and hip hop wafting through the floorboards.“It gets pretty bleak in here at times,” dead-pans Anderson.
 
'Pushing things forward'
 
The room is decorated with pages from I Venti D’Azzurro, an 80s Italo-disco fanzine. Originally, Hurts had fled to Verona to write material. “On an ill-fated journey that lasted a week,” bristles Hutchcraft. “But it was here we discovered Disco-Lento. A DJ asked us, ‘What does your music sound like?’, so I said it sounds like Alphaville. And then he explained how in the wake of Italo-disco, all those artists started to make ballads and I was like, ‘that’s what we’ve just done’.”
 
Having already had their fingers singed by the industry, Hurts took no prisoners when A&Rs came circling. “We were clear that we wanted to sell millions of records, but we weren’t going to compromise our vision,” elaborates Hutchcraft. During negotiations with labels, Anderson in particular took a zero tolerance attitude: “One of the publishers pronounced the name of the band wrong so I refused to speak to him for the rest of the meeting. Another got the name of a song wrong so I walked out.”
 
Such was their confidence in their artistic vision that when Simon Cowell attempted to buy the song Illuminated off them for Leona Lewis, Hutchcraft and Anderson declined the offer.
 
“You can kind of see how it would work with Leona signing, but it was more a case of thanks but no thanks,” laughs Hutchcraft. “That was song was too important to us. If we’d given it up, we’d have lost a big hole in what we’d started to achieve. And let’s be honest, if she wants to cover it, she can cover it, can’t she?”
 
“And,” adds Anderson with a shrug, “she probably will.”
 
Although their press shots (including one photographed by Dior alumni Hedi Slimane) hint at a Berlin aesthetic, there’s an inexorable Manchester dimension to Hurts. “Old buildings don’t really get restored in Manchester, it’s always about redevelopment: it’s new, new new, always pushing things forward around you,” says Hutchcraft. “And that’s had a subconscious effect on us and our music.”
 
A more deliberate factor, adds Anderson, is growing up in a musical climate where ‘You don’t have to be Madchester to work here but it helps,’ seemed to be adopted as a mantra.
“Heritage promotes laziness. There’s a mafia here,” he says. “Once you get rid of Peter Hook opening Tesco, you’ll be fine. But it’s forced us to make innovative music that will stop people harping on about 20 years ago.”
 
Yet civic pride means they play their first ever live gig in Salford next month. For now, there’s an album – scheduled for May – to finish. Not to mention a future Eurovision-hit for Spain.
 
“We got two front row tickets to Eurovision on our record deal,” says Hutchcraft. “That’s what we asked for. We can’t wait. It’s pride, it’s hope, it’s naïvety. It’s everything in one.” 
 
Wonderful Life (Arthur Baker remix) is released on Monday, January 18, 2010. Hurts play St Phillips Church, Salford, on February 22, 2010.