My career in the entertainment industry has enabled me to work with a diverse range of talent. Through my years of experience, I've recognized two essential aspects, industry professionals, whether famous stars or behind the scenes staff have fascinating stories to tell. Secondly, audiences are eager to listen to these stories, which offer a glimpse into their lives and the evolution of their life stories. This podcast aims to share these narratives, providing information on how they evolved into their chosen career. We will delve into their journey to stardom, discuss their struggles and successes, and hear from people who help them achieve their goals. Get ready for intriguing behind the scenes stories and insights into the fascinating world of entertainment. Keena's brother Greg formed Hue and Cry, which emerged in the late 1980s with a sound that blended pop, jazz, and sophisticated songwriting. They first captured international attention with their debut album, Seduced and Abandoned, which produced the unforgettable hit, Labor of Love. Their music has always stood apart, thoughtful, melodic, and emotionally rich. He has a great story, so before we dive into our episode, we'll be back with an uninterrupted show right after a word from our sponsors. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me. Oh, it's my pleasure. I understand you're about to release a new single. Can you give our listeners a little update on the single and a little inside information on what they can expect? Well, we're promoting our new Hue and Cry single Stronger, and there's an album out on March 29th. I'm having a great time chatting with people about it. It's a bit of a departure for us, so people are picking up on that, moving into kind of, or not really moving into Electronica, but recovering an electric phase of our past, which we started out with, and which we're kind of picking up again. I think it's great you're staying true to your past. With that said, how have you seen yourself evolve from your humble beginnings to where you are today with the new album? Well, it's interesting. I don't think we've evolved that much at the core because we describe ourselves as post-punks. So, punk is three chords in the truth. Post-punk is all the chords and all the truths, and post-post-punk is how do we make a hit record out of all that authenticity and possibility? So that's the kind of principle that's kept us going for the last 40 odd years, and so we came back to doing this new record called Everybody, and we thought, how do we, not so much how do we revive our sound, but how do we recover a certain optimistic, futuristic vision, which turns out to be exactly what people need in these slightly grim and contestive times. So we have happened to have made an optimistic electronic record, which we're very pleased about. It's always good when you're happy with your completed project. So tell us, who were some of your early influences? Well, it was interesting because of the post-punk thing. It was a lot of, you know, quite experimental synthesizer bands that then became pop bands. Preeminent of that was, you know, Human League. So that's been a big inspiration in the new record. But we also come from a very jazzy background. Our father was a great lover of big bands and Bill Cantow singers. So we mixed that in with an appreciation for classic soul Stevie Wonder temptations, Sly Stone. But even something that Sly Stone, if you listen to, it's a family affair or you listen to there's a riot going on, is using drum machines at the very core. Stevie Wonder famously using mobs and synthesizers and Kurzweil keyboards to kind of make his great records. So there's been this kind of debate between the organic and the mechanical for a long time and pop music and how do you get passion through technology. And so we're just picking up on that and taking it forward with this new record. Yeah, I think that's awesome. When you released your first album and it turned out that it was a huge breakout album for you, did you sense that this album was going to connect so widely and expand all over the world? And then did that ultimate success take you by surprise? I think when you try to make the quirkiest, most idiosyncratic record you can and that pleases you rather than necessarily pleases anyone else, then when other people come to appreciate it, it's a delight. I mean, I'm famous within You and Cry because our big hit, big top 10 hit, Labor of Love. I didn't want it to be out because I thought the bass drum was all the place no one could dance to. It was far too radical, a lyric, far too political. And of course, you've got to number six and sold hundreds of thousands of records. So I've never been allowed anywhere near the decision making process to choose a single or a track ever again because clearly I'll get it wrong. But we have always, we've just been inspired by idiosyncrats, you know, people who just have a unique vision and we've always tried to follow that. But we'll also have to believe that it could be popular music as well, that you need to follow your nose deeply enough is to connect with something universal and to connect with people's tastes. If you're absolutely individualistic in your taste, you might get to somewhere that appeals to other people's tastes in a universal way. So yeah. Now, you just brought up your song, Labor of Love, which was a huge hit for you. What do you think made that song so timeless? I think it's got a big metaphor at the heart of it. And I think it took it on a journey. So the idea of a labor of love is a great concept. Yeah. You know, the idea that love is itself a labor is quite challenging. But I decided to stick the old political language onto it, which so the full the full chorus has withdrawn my labor of love. And of course, it's occupying two different worlds, the world of romance and the world of politics. And it's trying to kind of talk about the power of battles within each one of them. And I think also the production is incredible. We worked with guys, there was a guy, Harvey Goldberg, who had worked with the Rolling Stones and the Stevie Wonder as an engineer. And he really made it kick through, it punches through the radio whenever it plays. Whether it's 1987 or 2027, it will still punch through to people. Yeah. Yeah, that makes total sense. Now, as brothers, how has that relationship affected your creative process? Has it made it easier or sometimes more intense? Certainly, intensity is the default. And then when it's easier when we're telepathic with each other and near telepathic, and it means that when you're in the writing situation or in the performing situation, you very quickly agree on something that's good. And you very quickly agree on something that's bad. So there's an awful lot of intuition there. And it's, but it's best with writing. I mean, it means that when something's really working, we instantly know it and then we focus on that. And that we keep chasing that feeling of intuition between us. It's helped us be writing songs for four. The process is obviously good because it's been helping us writing songs for 40 years. That's a great test of time for sure. Now, as younger artists always do, they have a creative process to learn. Looking back, what lessons did you learn while you were writing? What did you learn while you was evolving with your career? Oh, bruised and battered lessons. One of which would be choose your moment to be arrogant and choose your moment not to be arrogant. There's an awful lot of people who are in the music business for troubled reasons, but nevertheless music, the music business runs on a kind of a relationships and empathy. So as the years have gone past, I've tried to stand in someone else's shoes a bit more because I think the thing about rock and roll is that it's kind of an institution for the broken and the battered. And they often come into rock and roll because no one else will have them. So I've tried to remember that more and more as the years go by. When someone's evidently having a hard time or giving you a hard time, they're in rock and roll for being healed by the music. Might be my number one lesson, forget and forgive. Yeah, those are great words to live by for sure. When you reflect back, was there a moment when it really hit you that you and cry had become part of the industry and people were starting to take notice? Yeah, there was a funny moment. We started to get phone calls sometime in the mid-80s, sorry, the mid-20s. And I thought, why am I getting all these calls about Labour or Love? And our track had appeared on the radio station of Grand Theft Auto, the video game at that time. It was like the biggest selling video game in the world. I think it still is. And people started to say, I've just been listening to you as I'm driving around chasing gangsters in Grand Theft Auto. And I thought, OK, that's us at the heart of popular culture. We also did a show in mid 2000s called a TV show, Saturday Night TV show called Hit Me Baby One More Time, which was a kind of a show. It was about acts coming back onto the scene after having been away for a while. And we decided to do it just for a laugh, but it really restarted our career. And it was nice. It's nice to be. It's nice to bring your quirky numbers to the heart of the mainstream. So that was another great experience. Now, because you're brothers, this isn't just a musical collaboration. It's family. When you listen to some of your songs, those songs can be when you very first started or the ones you just recorded. Do you listen to them and feel like they're chapters of your lives together? Yeah, very much so. And it's interesting what's what's delightful about me and my brother is that we began in a very polarized way. I mean, we were we were those broken souls that come into the music business and try and find a way to express themselves. But it's painful and we were painful with each other. And over the years, we have sort of gravitated into this beautiful space where we both kind of generally agree with each other and take joy in that. So I would have said that one of the big early hits was a song called Violently. And that was very much about the kind of fractious relationships in my life, including with my brother. But we now are both on the same page, say when it comes to approach to peace over war and public affairs. And we turn the same song violently into a peace anthem. And we're both completely on the same page when we're doing that. So it's nice for a brother to have been, you know, an enemy at one point in your life and a comrade at the other. And to do that by coalescing around these songs and uniting around these songs that we have both written. And certainly the songs in the early days are triumphs over our tensions. And the triumph just gets better as the years go by. I can tell you. That's just great to hear. There's a lot of artists out there that over the years they do everything they can do to stay relevant. Sometimes you will see that they are just merely following the path of what others are doing, trying to stay competitive. It seems like over the years, you haven't done that. You have simply followed your own instincts. So when you look at that, did you find that staying true to what your sound was? Did you feel that was risky or just merely a path you had to take? It's because we're from the punk era. The idea that you have a right to authenticity and you have a right to experiment was just the basis of how we came into the music business. And that sort of persisted all the way through to the present. We owe a lot to my dad and his eclecticism as a musical shaper and former of our taste. And I owe a lot to magazines like the NME, which I don't know if you know about the NME, but it was a famous music magazine. It wasn't just a music magazine, it was a curator of musical possibilities. They used to have cassettes on the front of the NME, which would be the most extraordinary collections of music. And they totally shaped the way I wanted to, where I valued pop and rock and soul and jazz. Virtuosity and chops, musical chops has always been a big thing for us. So that's been what the jazz legacy has kept us alive to when someone's playing with soul and virtuosity and whatever genre you want to be close to that source. So that's kept us interested and interesting, but we're willfully eclectics, willfully eclectics. Yeah, I think that's great. So if someone is discovering your music today, what one song would you want to start them out with and why? That's a great question. I would, I'm tempted to say the latest song that we've got called Stronger and I know that would start seems like an obvious promotional thing to say. But it's actually a great distillation of the spirit of human crying. It's a very confessional lyric. The lyric is about resilience and personal strength in the face of public crises. So the whole tension between why do I feel too tired to save the world? Save the world has been a big human cry theme for many years and it sounds like it's turned up again on this record. So there's a very sensitive soul at the heart of this record, but the record is very powerful. It's driving, it's rhythmic, it's ambitious, it's reaches for the sky. So that's to me, you work your way back from the current single stronger because that's very much the essence of what human cry is about. And there's a crucial line in it which says, let the softest kind of power make me stronger. And that's very much a statement about philosophy. Yeah, that's a great statement. You just mentioned you have a great infusion of soul, pop, jazz. Was there ever a moment in your recording career that a label head, A&R producer, they just said to you, you have to be more commercial. Did you fight that battle at all? Yeah, there's a, and we won the battle. We did fight that battle and we won that battle. There was a famous moment when we were recording our hit record second album, Remote. There was a song called Sweet Invisibility, which was a kind of funk Latin song. And we had found a guy called Angel Hernandez who did Latin horns for Broken Heads and David Byrne. And we brought him in to do a chart, to lay down a chart and lay down this horn. So we hadn't heard it until the day and it was the most ornate, beautiful, burrow, exploratory, experimental Latin horn track you've ever heard. Our producers immediately moved in to say, okay, we'll take that tiny bit and we'll take that tiny bit and we'll just repeat it. We went over our dead bodies. This is what we're here to make music for. And we literally threw ourselves across the mixing desk and said, leave this piece of music alone. And we kept winning those fights. But the thing is Ray Charles put it best. You know, you use jazz musicians and you depart from jazz because jazz musicians have the chops for everything. They have the chops for folk. They have the chops for blues. They have the chops for soul, for pop or whatever. They always have the capacity for it. So we always used to make that case to people that when we have a jazz element in what we're doing, it's keeping things flexible and open and keeping things new and fresh in a kind of deep sense. Yeah. Now, if you could step outside yourself and look at you and cry as a fan, what do you think is the thread over the years that has kept your music connecting with everyone, especially those that have followed your career? I think we're trying to connect with them in a powerful, popular, but complex way. You know, the lyrics are always operating on several different levels and people sometimes say it took me 25 years to figure out what you were singing about and what you were trying to say. To me, that's a result because it means that people are pondering over what you're doing. We always shop for the moon. I mean, our idea of a pop gig is all the guys in Steely Dan standing with their backs to the audience blown away. So that's our idea of what a pop gig is. But my brother's a consummate arranger and a consummate producer, and he was always, don't bore us, get to the chorus. But on the way to the chorus, be as complex and as rich as you could possibly be, but also try to be humbable, popular, memorable and striking. So that's what I would say is the consistency of you cry is complex pop. Nice. Now, your fans, they've followed you for years. When you have someone that will come up to you and tell you that your songs help them through difficult times, how does that make you feel, especially since you are the one that wrote the song? It feels fantastic. I mean, I love the fact that songs have journeys into people's lives that you can't control and you can't predict. That happens a lot when we're out playing small venues and people come up and just say, you got me through this or you helped me to achieve this, which is even just as nice when people say that the songs helped them aspire to a but higher and better state of affairs to try to study for a degree or to try to go for a project or an entrepreneurial opportunity. Very, very pleased to hear that because and we even wrote a song about it called Ordinary Angel, which is a big track from the second album remote. And that's all about the way that pop music can inspire you, give you wings. And I mean, I don't think there's any there's any greater functionality for pop music than that. It's to inspire people to stretch for a goal and get there. It's fantastic. Yeah, it is. Now, sometimes you're sitting down, you're writing a song, you have an idea and a perception behind it. Then as time passes, sometimes things will change. Is there a song that has a little bit different interpretation now than it did when you first wrote it? Yeah. Yeah, that's a good that's a good question. The obvious one I just talked about was violently, which is which was about personal tensions that became a kind of a kind of a piece song. I'm struggling to think of one that's obvious at the moment, to be quite honest. That's not a problem. Like you said, your music has always been sincere, it's been emotionally honest. Do you feel that audiences now are looking for more authentic songs than they ever have? I think so. There's something about AI that's driving people to the human and the authentic and the live performance. I think people are more into flaws and honesty and a certain crackness faced with the kind of the perfections of artificial intelligence and so the coming perfections of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence can't tell a heart-rending story where you might actually believe it. Whereas if I'm standing in front of you and you can see every reaction of me, I often say when I'm playing live, this is therapy I'm getting paid for, you know, rather than having to pay for it. So I think we're going to have a lust for live to riff off the old Iggy Poxon. I think we're going to have a lust for the live and the authentic and it's only going to increase. And I think it's good news for people like us who have defined ourselves by live performance all throughout our career. So yeah, I think there's a time, the more the smarter the machines get and the smarter the people think that they are who control the machines, they're ultimately not smart because they're not going to defeat the human. Yeah, I am so glad you brought that up. I've been here in Nashville for over 30 years producing people, helping them get started in the industry. I'm always bringing up if you go back to the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, and if you listen to those songs, there's a lot of things they all have in common. They had a distinct passion for their music and they did not try to have a perfect recording. If you go back and listen sometimes to guitars out of tune, the pianos out of tune, there was always an imperfect recording, but that is what made the recording perfect. Now in today's world, they're trying to get that perfect recording and they forget we're human. We're not perfect. Sometimes it is that imperfection that makes it really resonate with the listener. I'm sure you have seen that change right along with the rest of us. The beauty of what you are doing is that you are staying true to your sound. Have you seen that create any issues for you with everything that's changed over the years while you've been recording your same way? Well, I would say there's obviously things like auto-tune and there's ways in which things can be manipulated, the waveforms of things can be manipulated and I've seen them done. I resist it myself, but I wonder whether there's going to be a bit of a division opening up in rock and roll between people who want to lay on the line as a physical being, a sweaty mammal in the world, trying to articulate things that only songs can articulate and one branch. And then another branch will be people who maybe like a machine aesthetic and want to see things become a bit like athletes who take steroids competing in their own form of games. We have a very odd relationship to both of those extremes with this new record because my brother, as he's been saying over the last couple of weeks, he was given advice to switch off his computers, but switch on the arpeggiators and switch on the synths and have them have a conversation among themselves as physical machines, not digital possibilities. And so we would wake up in the morning, go to get into the studio and the arpeggiator or the MOOC would suggest something that we should play. I mean, that sounds a wee bit mystical and a wee bit weird, but it was hot, it was cold, it was malfunctioning, it was ready to go, it wasn't ready to go. And we wrote songs to these machines calling out to us, but they're not. It wasn't AI, it was almost like, and we have this whole thing we're saying at the moment where if you go to the NASA Sound Library and you listen to how they've rendered the waveforms of the transmissions of objects in deep space, whether it be quasar or black holes or the background radiation of the universe, the universe sounds like Giorgio Morode. You know, the universe sounds like a synth or a pulsar or an arpeggiator. So we think what we've made is almost the ultimate folk record because it's all waveforms and it's all tapping into kind of a deep emanations, deep power forms, power waves. So, but trust a musician, if you're worried about technology and you're worried about technology taking over humanity, give it to the musicians and they'll sort it out. They'll figure out a creative relationship, they'll test its limitations, they'll glory in its limitations, they'll humanize the problem of technology. We're either embracing it heedlessly or we're resisting it in a ludic fashion. I think musicians can show a third way. Yeah, and musicians, I have seen them sometimes getting in the studio, they're immersing themselves into the project and then all of a sudden one of them makes a mistake. Yet the whole band follows the mistake and everybody goes, oh, we have to get rid of that, we have to get rid of that. And ultimately is the greatest sound and you can't touch that flaw. Yeah, again, this record, we would switch on the machines and they would do something we had not predicted or they would resonate in ways that we couldn't predict. And the biggest fight I had with my brother, who is a bit of a perfectionist, is to say, Gregory, that's what happened in that moment. That's what the machines wanted to do, let's go with it. And so if you listen to the record, you'll hear strange noises and strange backgrounds and strange foregrounds and we fought to keep them in. And also because we are running our own label and we're funding fewer ourselves, we have that power and that autonomy to make those kinds of decisions. That's also important as well. Yeah, exactly. Now, if someone's listening and they're following their creative dream but wondering, man, should I do this? What would you tell them? I would tell them that, well, I would tell them as an atheist that they only have a limited amount of time to do beautiful, brilliant things. And every moment is precious. And because it's precious, don't waste it on formula or cliche or the obvious or the inauthentic or the courierist. No time left. There's never any time left not to do the thing that you must do, the purest thing that you can do, whether you're sitting with a harmonica and an empty bottle, empty glass bottle, or whether you're sitting with a wall full of arpeggiator synthesizers and simulators. Do the thing that you think is inimitable, cannot be copied. However old you are, you don't have time left to do anything less. Absolutely. Keep chasing that dream for sure. Now, over your career, you've performed in large stadiums, you've performed in intimate shows. What's your favorite to do? The large stadiums or break it down and do that intimate acoustic show where it's just unplugged, so to speak. Any preferences? I love both. I love both. The intimate stuff is amazing, but it can be overwhelming in terms of the audience. The passage of their souls right across their faces, right in front of you, but that can be the most intense gig. But then when we're doing a tour in the UK in October with a full band, full eight piece, nine piece band, and when everybody's on the dime, the Hammond organ is playing, the horns are playing, the black invocers are kicking in. There often can be no better experience. So I'm lucky that we have a career in both tracks going on both routines. Yes, it's always nice to look back and reflect and be happy with everything you've done. Now in closing, where can people find you so they can follow your music and follow where you are? The best thing to do is to go to the web and find us in www.QQi.co.uk. Everything is there. All routes lead from there. Roots and routes lead from there. And we're very big on Facebook, so try and find us on Facebook as well. And we encourage you if you come and see us. We have very, very strict rules about using smartphones during our performances. If you don't use your smartphone to record your favourite songs, and if you don't put it up on social media, we throw you out of the building. That's very, very strictly enforced. So come and see us there and we would love to see you. And thanks for the interview. Tony, this has been great. Yes, this has been great conversation, great information. I really appreciate you joining us today. All right, man. Thanks a lot. Thanks so much. Thanks for joining us today. We hope you enjoyed the show. This has been a Tony Mantua production. For more information, contact media at PlateauMusic.com.
