UK duo Hurts

From the matchstick men of LS Lowry to the industrial electronic chug of New Order and the beer-sodden suburban indie of Oasis, Manchester has always been a Mecca for the direct and unsentimental. Its music and art is a working-class reflection of the city itself, where a penchant for exotic glamour and needless excess are likely to earn you a restraining order.

Hurts, however, haven't been studying their city's rulebook. The outfit - helmed by vocalist Theo Hutchcraft and keyboardist Adam Anderson - make music that takes its cues from the dreamy, new romantic synth-pop of the early '80s. Evoking bands like Depeche Mode, Heaven 17 and Tears for Fears, the pair clearly prefer synths and samples to guitars.

"Mine is an outsider's view," Hutchcraft says of the city. "To me, Manchester isn't a lairy place or a macho place, particularly. It's quite gentrified. It's hopeful and bleak."

With their matching angular haircuts and sharp cheekbones, it's easy to imagine Hutchcraft and Anderson as having been inseparable since birth or, at the very least, best friends from high school. But it wasn't until they met by chance outside a nightclub five years ago that they struck up a lasting friendship based on a shared passion for synth-pop and sharp dressing.

Of course you can't be music obsessive in the United Kingdom's musical capital and not be in a band, and within weeks the pair had formed the first incarnation of what was to become Hurts.

Since the pair lives on different sides of Manchester, much of their initial communication happened over the Internet, with Hutchcraft recording his vocals over Anderson's backing tracks.

"It was like we couldn't meet in public," Anderson says. "We made music together before we knew each other."

Originally going by the name Daggers, the pair crafted an intriguing musical hybrid that paired the intelligence of electro with the frivolity of pop. Audiences, however, were left baffled.

"We studied songs constantly," Hutchcraft says. "We wanted to construct the greatest pop band on the planet, but we couldn't quite do it."

"It was a car crash," Anderson says. "You could see A&R men edging backward out of rooms."

"It went wrong," Hutchcraft adds.

After taking time out and going on a record-collecting mission to Berlin and Verona, the duo returned to Manchester and decided their musical tastes had changed and so should the direction of the band.

"We were done [with Daggers]," Hutchcraft says. "[The transition] was pretty effortless. We just started writing these songs."

Inspired by the dreamy sounds and syncopated textures of Italo disco, Hurts was born. Their recorded debut came in the form of last year's million-selling Happiness. The album is something of a master class in oblique electronica, with its icy, melancholic refrains and buoyant passion for pure pop, as evidenced on the boy-band aping "Stay," with its vast, deliberately over the top choir of backing vocals, the gloriously somber "Wonderful Life" and "Devotion," a floor-filling duet with the queen of pop herself, Kylie Minogue.

Having lived on government benefits until last year, however, Anderson and Hutchcraft's newfound fame and riches are presumably still something of an oddity to them.

"I told the government I wanted to be a talk-show host, and they gave me 44 pounds a week," Anderson says. "It was OK."

"It was fine," Hutchcraft says. "We had nothing."

Both worked, too: Hutchcraft as a motorbike mechanic and Anderson as a cameraman at a Manchester dog track, something he was still doing when the band began to gather momentum.

"It was odd," he says. "One minute you're watching a man inject steroids into the hind leg of a dog, the next you're on the phone to Rick Rubin and he's saying how much he loves your video."

It seems Manchester may just have to get used to the addition of sax solos and sharp suits to their musical lineage.

Andrew Fenwick can be reached at
afenwick@praguepost.com