Love Hurts, timeoutkl.com

Love Hurts

Having rocked the crowd here last Saturday at Mist Club, we catch up with Theo Hutchcraft and Adam Anderson of the Manchester-based synthpop duo Hurts on music, noodle sandwiches and white shirts.

What made you decide to come to KL?
Theo: We never thought we’d get the chance to come and when we wrote the album we never thought the people in London would hear our music or in anywhere except England. It’s only because of the fans that we got the chance to come here and it’s one of the best feelings in the world – you’ve got fans that give you these experiences like coming here. It makes you very grateful, it’s just incredible.

You met each other at a night club brawl. Did you actually fight each other?
Theo: No, we were too drunk to fight. That’s when we talked, because our friends were fighting each other outside. This was about six years ago when we didn’t know each other. It’s really weird thinking about that now because it was just a random event that we met and we might never have met.

Will Hurts always be a melancholic sounding band or will you sort of lighten up in the next album?
Adam: It might change a little bit, but I think the music we make is reflective of what life’s like really. It’s kind of hopeful with some sad moments and it’s an honest reflection of how we feel about the world – I can’t really see it changing too much. We’ve had great success and amazing things happened but we’ve had years of struggle and I think that’s been built into us. To write happy music, I’m not sure it’d work.
Theo: You get to a weird point in your life when you make music and you realise that you can only make the music you make.

What inspires your songs?
Adam: The situation in our lives really. Like ‘Wonderful Life’ you know the story of the song – we still retained hope despite the fact that our lives were in a bad position, so I think our lives in that particular time inspired songs like ‘Unspoken’ , ‘Evelyn’ and ‘Wonderful Life’.
Theo: Plus, it’s an escape, or us actually wanting to escape or writing music about trying to escape. The reason that some of it is so grand and so epic a lot of the time is because our world was as big as a small room. We couldn’t go to the pub, we couldn’t do anything because we didn’t have any money so in our head we had to write huge music in order to do that.

Adam, you were eating a noodle sandwich when you wrote ‘Wonderful Life’. What’s in a noodle sandwich?
Adam: [Laughs] It’s a very simple recipe. We used to buy these cup noodles for 30p and one day like most men there was this instinctive moment when I went ‘What would this be like in a sandwich?’ and that was it really. [Laughs] We were either eating beans or eating noodles and writing music. There’s a lot you can do with baked beans as well . A can of baked beans is a canvas.
Theo: We’ve made every meal possible with baked beans.

What’s your writing process like?
Adam: First thing we do is get into a room and turn all the lights off but leave one light on. Sit opposite from each other, facing each other, and just wait. Just hope. Most days nothing happens and we’d go ‘Should we just go home’? Literally six days out of seven.

What are some of your biggest musical influences?
Adam: People like Depeche Mode are obviously very important, Prince, Oasis and Phil Spector was very important too. When we were making the album we didn’t listen to any music, at the time we had like a ban on music in the studio because we didn’t want our minds to get confused in a whole different direction, we wanted to sound unique.
Theo: Listening to your idols when you make music is the worse thing in the world because you realise that it’s never going to be as good as that song.

You sport a very distinct style. Tell us more about it.
Adam: We started dressing like this when we were unemployed as a way of trying to get some pride. It’s quite demoralising not having enough money all the time so first of all it was a way to feel better about ourselves.
Theo: It’s very cheap because all we wear is black and white shirts and trousers. We wear a white shirt every day of the week and when you do you’re appropriate for every single situation, except going to the gym and the beach of course.

Where do you buy your white shirts from?
Theo: [Laughs] Everywhere. We don’t really own that many clothes that’s why it’s so easy to travel because at home, we’ve only got the same. You can go in your room in the dark and pick two things, and one of them is bound to be a white shirt and the other is bound to be a jacket.
Adam: Some say that we’re some kind of fashion pioneers or something. It makes me laugh because really all we do is dress like bankers and we did this three years ago. It kind of tickles me a bit.