Hue and Cry

Coatbridge, and a hit that was never a love song

Hue and Cry are two brothers from Coatbridge in Lanarkshire: Pat Kane singing and writing the words, Greg Kane on keyboards and the arrangements. Wikipedia dates the duo to 1983; the promotional copy on their current tour pages, and the band themselves in interviews this year, say 1984. Either way the working relationship is now past forty years old, and the division of labour has not changed much — Greg described it to The Boar in May 2026 as Pat the dreamer who handles lyrics and himself the doer who handles instrumentation, adding that "because we're brothers, we can read each other's body language really well".

The break came with the debut album 'Seduced and Abandoned' in 1987 and the single pulled from it, 'Labour of Love' — a brass-driven pop record whose lyric is about political compromise rather than romance, which is part of why it has outlasted most of what it shared the charts with. The follow-up, 'Remote' (1988), produced 'Looking for Linda' and 'Violently (Your Words Hit Me)'. Those three songs are still the spine of the set: setlist.fm has logged 'Labour of Love' at 81 performances and 'Looking for Linda' at 71 across the 766 setlists it holds for the band.

The long detour through jazz, Linn and a television comeback

What happened after 1991's 'Stars Crash Down' is the reason Hue and Cry are hard to file. 'Bitter Suite' (1989) had already stripped the band down to piano and voice; 'JazzNotJazz' in 1996 brought in Michael and Randy Brecker. Later records took in drum and bass, R&B, folk and Latin writing. The labels moved with them — Stampede, then Virgin's Circa imprint, then their own Fidelity, then the audiophile Scottish label Linn, and now Blairhill.

The brothers went to solo work in the late 1990s and reconvened in 2005, winning their heat of ITV's 'Hit Me Baby One More Time' — the sort of thing that usually ends a career's serious phase and in their case restarted it. 'Open Soul' followed in 2008, 'Hot Wire' in 2012, 'September Songs' in 2015 and 'Pocketful of Stones' in 2017. A fortieth-anniversary release, 'Hue And Cry 40', came out in 2024. Then nine years passed with no new songs.

'Everybody': finished in February 2020, shelved, released in 2026

The sixteenth album arrived on 29 May 2026 through Blairhill Records. Ten tracks, no horn section, almost no live band — Pat Kane told Super Deluxe Edition he wanted "an electronic record, referencing Bowie's Low along with Simple Minds, Japan and The Human League". Greg spent two years working through a wall of roughly twenty analogue and digital machines, DeepMind arpeggiators, hydrasynths and wavetables among them, and came out with a view of the medium he put plainly to The Boar: "Electric music is all about either making mistakes, recovering from it, or making mistakes and celebrating it."

The delay was not creative. The brothers wrote fifteen to twenty songs over about a year and finished the record in February 2020, weeks before lockdown. Greg wanted to keep tinkering; Pat said it was done. Releasing a dance-leaning album into a closed-down country made no sense to either of them — "nobody was dancing because nobody could go and dance", as Greg put it. It sat until this year, by which point a fortieth-anniversary tour and family difficulties had intervened.

Yoad Nevo, whose mixing credits include Pet Shop Boys and Duran Duran, handled the mix. Three singles came out ahead of the album — 'Stronger', 'Make My Day' and 'Everybody Deserves to be Loved' — and the writing takes in resilience, love, justice and what technology is doing to people. Pat Kane's own framing in the Classic Pop announcement: "From a wall of arpeggiators and synths, humming and pulsing away, we've wrested out 10 songs that have as much of our mind, body and soul in them as any of our previous music."

How it has landed

The reception has been warm with a reservation attached. Louder Than War gave 'Everybody' four stars out of five and called it one of the year's best synth-pop albums, writing that the style "fits them like a glittering glove". MusicOMH's John Murphy went to three and a half, noting that evolving the sound this dramatically at this stage of a career is admirable in itself. At The Barrier, reviewing on 8 June 2026, called it "a grower not a shower" and picked out 'Stronger', the ambient 'Dissolve and Disappear', the bass-heavy 'In Our Ruins' and the closing 'Force Majeure' — while asking, fairly, whether a record built on synthesisers keeps the thing that made Hue and Cry worth watching in the first place, which was always the interplay between players on a stage.

That question is what the October tour exists to answer. The album's limited collector's box hedges in the same direction: alongside the signed CD, marble-effect vinyl, a Dolby Atmos Blu-ray and a 7" of two unreleased tracks, it includes a fifteen-track 'Live At Kelvingrove' CD recorded in Glasgow in 2025 — the band, not the machines.

The run: October 2026, then a thin 2027

Through the first half of 2026 the brothers were out as an electro-acoustic duo — a 13-song set at the Lowther Pavilion in Lytham St Annes on 30 March 2026 ran I Refuse, Looking for Linda, Mother Glasgow, Everybody Deserves to Be Loved, Black and Gold, Labour of Love, The Man With the Child in His Eyes, Truth, Sweet Invisibility, And Then You Bloom, Headin' for a Fall and a Violently / Give Peace a Chance pairing. They played Blackpool's Winter Gardens on 26 September 2026.

The full-band run is split in two. Five English dates are co-headlined with Roachford, each act playing a full set with its own band: Manchester Bridgewater Hall on 9 October, indigo at The O2 in London on 10 October, Cambridge Corn Exchange on 11 October, Birmingham Symphony Hall on 16 October and the Glasshouse in Gateshead on 17 October. Tickets for those went on artist pre-sale on 22 October and general sale on 24 October via Ticketmaster. A Scottish leg follows at Eden Court in Inverness on 22 October, Aberdeen Music Hall on 23 October, Edinburgh's Usher Hall on 24 October, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on 30 October and Perth Concert Hall on 31 October. Beyond that the diary is sparse — The Robin in Bilston on 30 April 2027 and Alexander's Live in Chester on 17 June 2027.

Pat Kane's explanation for going back to the full line-up rather than touring the album as a duo: "It's always the most exciting thing to be playing live with the full Hue And Cry band – we can give all the hits the full widescreen treatment." Roachford's contribution to the same announcement was four words: "This is gonna be epic!"