Hurts

Adam Anderson, the calculating visionary and Theo Hutchcraft the born pop-star signed to an imprint of Sony, a decision they made in Berlin, having escaped there to get some perspective on their situation. It was a chaotic period. Even in Berlin, they say, they were tracked down by the MD of a German record label.
Silence surrounded Hurts at the start. There was no screaming house-party shows, no twittering, no posturing or hyperbole. They spent 2009 moving regularly from suburb to suburb, spending time in Broughton, Rusholme and Bellevue, as well as Berlin. A mystery surrounds them both.
During the first Hurts sessions Hutchcraft was touring with British Super-bikes, working backstage. Anderson filmed the greyhound races at Bellevue dog track. He was still filming dogs when Hurts began to gather momentum.
Anderson and Hutchcraft met outside a Mancunian nightclub just before Christmas 2005. The two of them got talking about music. Over the subsequent year they communicated only via the internet from their homes in Salford and Longsight. Anderson sent backing tracks. Hutchcraft sent back vocals.
Their musical backgrounds were different. "I learnt to sing by singing along in clubs," deadpans Hutchcraft. Anderson, meanwhile, had an ambition to write scores for television.
The previous band the two masterminded was ‘Daggers’. With ‘Daggers’, Hutchcraft and Anderson manufactured a party band. A hyperactive pop group that divided audiences.
The ‘Daggers’ experiment reached its peak in September 2008 when Hutchcraft and Anderson took the band to London to play a showcase alongside Beyonce’s sister, Solange Knowles.
In late 2008, Anderson and Hutchcraft returned to Manchester. They began writing differently. "It was pretty effortless," says Hutchcraft. "The songs just started to come. Completely different. We weren’t really worried. We were hopeful, melancholy. We just started writing these songs."
They wrote a song called "Unspoken" late one evening. They recorded it immediately and, having listened to it once, they called up the various members of ‘Daggers’ and told them that it was over.
The music is spacious, confident and connected to joy. There’s a sense that Hurts have an open, intrigued and uncomplicated relationship with contemporary music. They’ve engaged with songwriting in an unbiased and unrestricted way. It’s refreshing, unguarded. It’s not ravaged by cool and there’s no genre-splicing gimmick here. The statement of Hurts is an emotional one.
If their sound recalls the global and their history seems oddly European, there is also a strong Mancunian dimension to Hurts. Anderson is only truly animated when talking about the suburbs he writes in. Hutchcrafts’s Manchester is the warm, mist-strewn world of Vallette, rather than the matchstick men of LS Lowry.
"I love Otis Reading and The Righteous Brothers," says Hutchcraft. "I like soul music. I love great voices. We’re both inspired by film soundtracks, too, and I suppose I’m fascinated by female emotions, I mean, I’m interested in them. They influence me. I listen to Prince."