OF all the acts you might expect to see at Creamfields, 80s pop duo Hue and Cry are probably not one of them.

But that could soon change as brothers Pat and Greg Kane are set to reinvent themselves next year with their first dip into electronic dance music (EDM).

Hue and Cry are best known for their early singles like Labour of Love and Looking for Linda but it should not come as a complete surprise to their fans as their work has spanned many genres.

Pat said: “Our creativity doesn’t seem to be diminishing in any shape or form.

“In fact we’re about to take a leap into EDM at the end of next year. We’re exploring analogue synths so we’re taking a trip in another direction in 2020.

“The way we’re exploring this EDM record is my brother had a wall of crazy looking boxes with thousands of knobs on them and only he knows what any of them do. It’s creating context but we’re still doing what we usually do which is: ‘Does this work as a melody? Does this work as a lyric? Could we do this on a piano vocal tour?

“So all the traditional Hue and Cry songwriting questions are being asked in the process of doing a full EDM deep house record.

“So that’s either a bad thing as in we’re not really adapting to it or a good and original thing in that we’re going to be inspired by the power and grandeur of EDM but we’re not going to let it overtake the fact that we’re songwriters and always will be.

“Let’s see. We’re going to give it a go. If it doesn’t work, we’ll try something else. We’re a pretty solid operation and that means we can freely experiment.”

Pat and Greg’s open mind to music came from their teenage years.

“Greg was a saxophonist and a keyboard player and a bass player and he was running around with local bands quite a few years before I got involved,” added Pat.

“I was a bedroom crooner. Our father was a great lover of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett and I added to that Sam Cooke and Stevie Wonder so I was basically singing all these songs in my room.

“Then one day Greg begrudgingly said: ‘You can sing a bit. Why don’t you come along?’

“We were in separate bands then we came together in the same band. Later we threw off that band like a husk and decided to be a duo.

“The early years is what you’d call the post punk era. We were interested in soul and funk and jazz but we also wanted to have that punk attitude in those politicised times.

“There was no band that could express that so we had to do it ourselves.”

The music world quickly caught on when their first single, Here Comes Everybody, was spotted by the Virgin Records owned label Circa in 1986 and a record deal shortly followed.

Pat said: “One minute I’m a twiggy student knocking around university campus, the next minute we’re in Los Angeles making videos.

“It was good but it was too much, too young, to quote The Specials. I didn’t appreciate it in any way appropriately at the time.

Northwich Guardian:

“I was a grumpy Marxist who found himself at the heart of the music business so I only enjoyed about 10 per cent as much as I should.

“So when it came back around and we did this show called Hit Me Baby One More Time in 2005 I made sure I really enjoyed it.

“That kicked off the ‘second wind’ of Hue and Cry which has led us up to being here. Greg’s Kurt Cobain, I’m Liza Minnelli – that’s how we describe the differences between the two of us.”

Now Hue and Cry are on a stripped back tour marking 30 years since their first live album, Bitter Suite.

Celebrating the anniversary of a live record may sound unusual but the idea came about after the duo released a special edition of their biggest album, Remote, bundled with Bitter Suite.

Pat added: “Millions of people bought it and they grew to love the acoustic record. Then we released the acoustic record on its own as people liked it so much.

“So originally it was a ‘bonus extra’ to the original big album but there was such an intensity to it.

“It was recorded the day after my first daughter was born so it’s full of highly charged, highly neurotic emotion. I think that’s why it jumps out of the grooves a wee bit. Also, we have a whole set of 30th anniversaries coming up.

“We did a 30th anniversary celebration of Remote in 2018 and we have another coming up in 2020 with our third album, Stars Crash Down. So it’s kind of a legacy of how long we’ve stuck in the music business.”

Do not expect the anniversary nods to go forever though.

Pat said: “I don’t know what sort of state I’d be in for the 40th anniversary of anything. I’ll have to see what I can do in my mid-60s. Maybe I’ll still be making music but who knows?

“Maybe there’s an element of survival about it but we’re in reasonably good nick.

“Greg is a brilliant musician and my voice is in reasonably good nick so we can put on a show that’s a combination of nostalgia and all the songs we’ve written since of which there are many.

“We have about 18 studio albums to go through. Touring is exhausting but energising as well.”

DAVID MORGAN