One of the neighbours was a piano teacher and she was obviously touting for business and she met my mother at the local store and said, ‘Do any of your boys want to play piano?’ I was first down that morning and my mum asked me and I said yes.

Greg: “We had a piano that was bequeathed to by my grandfather and it sat dormant since it was dumped in the spare room of the house. What was the Kane household like growing up, musically? Greg and Pat have continued to make music independently, and we caught up with them both as they prepared to release Pocketful Of Stones, their first album of original material since 2012… Later that decade they signed to the Scottish jazz and classical record label Linn Records for their 1996 album Jazz Not Jazz and 1999 album Next Move, but these two releases turned out to be the last for Hue And Cry before an amicable split. The duo took an experimental leap forward into the 90s, creating a number of LPs – Truth and Love, Showtime! and Piano & Voice – that infused jazz, drum ‘n’ bass, R&B and Nuyorican Latin-funk. To the delight and surprise of the Kane brothers, the band had been a commercial success, however Hue And Cry were dropped from their label after the release of their third album Stars Crash Down. Two massive hits followed from their second album Remote: Looking For Linda and Violently. Their debut album Seduced And Abandoned spawned their biggest hit Labour Of Love in 1987 ( read Hue And Cry wrote the song in our latest issue) after the first single I Refuse had failed to make the UK Top 75 the year before. North Lanarkshire-born siblings Greg and Pat Kane started making music together in 1983, when Pat was about to graduate from university and his brother was still at school. Hue And Cry’s Pat Kane: “That’s one of the basics of establishing the hook of a song: to have a great opening lyrical metaphor.” We hear both sides of the story behind the emergence of the 80s blue-eyed soul pop brothers from North LanarkshireĪlong with Wet Wet Wet, Simple Minds, Del Amitri and Deacon Blue, blue-eyed soul pop duo Hue And Cry were one of the most successful acts to emerge from the Scottish music scene that stormed the charts in the 80s.

Violently hue and cry