HUE And Cry’s 13th studio album, due for release in September, is called Pocketful Of Stones and, this being Greg and Pat Kane's record, there’s a story attached to it. Specifically, to the limited-edition, collectors-box version.

Each of these individually-numbered boxes contains three CDs, a DVD, and, as per the title, a stone personally collected from a beach by the brothers and presented in a drawstring cotton bag.

"We were on the beach, picking up those stones," recalls Greg. "I’d taken my shoes off and put my wellies on, and you’re pre-occupied with looking at these nice stones. The promo girl who was with us suddenly said, ‘Greg! Your shoes!’ They’d floated out to sea. I was like, ‘I guess the tide’s coming in’, and it reminded me of these stories in the news, about people getting washed out to sea. When you hear them, you think, ‘How on earth did you not notice the tide coming in?’ It can happen to you.”

As for the stones themselves … “As Pat says, there’s hundreds of millions of years of evolution in the palm of your hand. Stones are mesmerising. Pat and I didn’t know each other’s love of stones. I mean, when would you even bring that up in conversation?” It’s a good point.

In addition to the new album (more of which later) Pat and Greg are on the road again. Two gigs at Glasgow’s 02 ABC, three weekends ago, were both sold out; and on Saturday, June 3, they headline Oban Live, a festival that stems from trad-fusion band Skerryvore’s 10th anniversary celebration in the town’s shinty ground, Mossfield Stadium, in 2015. It’s a good line-up this year, too: Toploader, Skerryvore, Admiral Fallow, Roddy Hart & The Lonesome Fire. None of the acts, however, has quite the history of the Kane boys from Coatbridge.

Thirty years ago this November their debut CD, Seduced And Abandoned, was released, having been preceded by a top-10 single, Labour Of Love, a song subsequently Pat subsequently described as a “coded anti-Thatcherite anthem which was the soundtrack to the general election campaign in Britain that year”. The second album, Remote, in 1988, sold more than 300,000 copies in the UK and gave rise to several other classics: Looking For Linda, Violently (Your Words Hit Me) and Sweet Invisibility.

Looking for Linda has long been one of the band’s more arresting songs, given its subject matter – one which, incidentally, is not one that any other bands would have strayed even close to. “I remember when Pat came to me with that lyric”, says Greg, “and he told me how it had come about. It’s a song about domestic violence. ‘When you get behind closed doors’ – that’s what Looking For Linda is referencing.

“It was a conscious decision by Pat and I to cloak it in,” and he taps the table to mimic the song’s familiar beat “We were big fans of The Beautiful South, big fans of what Paul Heaton was doing. Give it this, ‘we’ll all dance about’ approach, and you listen to the f***ing song: it’s a woman running away from an abusive partner”.

The song was a reminder that, even back then, Hue And Cry were something different.

That first year, 1987, was a vivid one for the Kanes. Madonna was on the UK leg of her Who’s That Girl? tour at the time and Hue And Cry supported her on four stadium gigs, three of them at Wembley Stadium. They also supported U2 at Glasgow's SECC. “My mum still remembers that gig at the SECC,” says Greg. “'That Bono’s a lovely boy’, she’d say. He just grabbed onto my mum.

“We were on the front cover of the NME, and I remember Bono and The Edge hanging out, looking at it. I felt very proud, obviously. I was only 21, Pat was 23. U2 were writing The Joshua Tree [their 1987 album] on that tour. I had my new piano, and The Edge came up and said, ‘What’s this?’, and I told him our record company had just bought me it.

“Bono was so kind to us. He watched our set from the side of the stage, because bands that support U2 don’t really go down that well. He waited for the first two or three tunes and he waved and said, ‘That’s fine, off you go’. Pat and I had a great time."

On the train home to Coatbridge, he recalls "looking at everybody, and thinking, ‘Am I the only person on this f***ing train who’s been on stage with U2 and hanging out with f***ing Bono all day?’

“I remember getting home and going to the pub and people saying, ‘Are you not supposed to be on stage with U2? Why are you here?’ I said I’d much rather hang out with my pals. When U2 come off stage after two-and-a-half hours’ work they’re not going to want to hang out with me. They’re going to want to go back to their hotel rooms, or just chill out.”

Hue And Cry delivered a succession of well-received studio, live and compilation albums until 1999, at which point they went into semi-retirement. Pat had had an increasingly busy media career for more than a decade and in 1999 he became one of the founding editors of this very newspaper. Greg had trained as an audio engineer in the late 1980s and during the band’s lengthy hiatus he focused his energies on audio engineering and producing – activities he still does today, alongside those of videographer and digital content creator. He has done front-of-house work at countless gigs all over the country, something he adores.

The lay-off ended with Open Soul, in September 2008, followed by a Christmas album in 2009, by the funk-encrusted album, Hot Wire, in 2012 and, two years ago, by September Songs, their affectionate tribute to singer Frank Sinatra, whose voice had been a constant aural feature at home when the brothers were growing up. Now comes the new album, Pocketful Of Stones. It’s good to have the brothers back.

“The writing period for the new album was essentially the start of 2014,” says Pat in a separate interview, “and then we were thinking about it and writing all the way through the referendum, and writing during the months afterwards. So there’s a lot of emotional undercurrent on it, as you can imagine.

“We’re calling it a ballads-and-anthems album. We tossed a coin a few years ago. Gregory wanted to do a funk album, I wanted to do a ballads album. He won, so Hot Wire was a funk record. This new album was about calming things down, making slightly different musical landscapes.

“We had a theory, post the Sinatra record: if he [Sinatra] was a young man, or a working artist in his prime between 2014 and 2016, what kind of album would he make? We thought it would partly be the classical element, with the string section, but it would also have an electronic or digital dimension. It’s an interesting-sounding record.”

One particular song – It Happened Here – has already become a favourite with fans. “It’s a direct story-song about experiences during the 2014 referendum. We were singing it all the way up to, and during, Brexit, and we’ve been doing it in big-band format and acoustic format.

“It’s a song about the power of local communities coming together and drawing on their own resources. People have been coming up to us for months, saying, ‘What is that song about’? It’s interesting: it seems to have jumped out of its box, as it were. It communicates to people how they are thinking about how they, quote-unquote, take back control in their lives. That has a resonance in Scotland, in Brexit, in the relationship between the big cities and the left-behind areas outside the cities. It’s interesting how certain songs can take on a life of their own.”

Asked about the prospects of a second independence referendum, Pat, a prominent figure in the Yes movement, says: "I think it's incredibly complicated out there. We have a window that's open that Scots could jump through to be at the heart of Europe. Whether or not we're going to do that, I don't know. I hope we do.

"Long-term, one has to hope that the kind of country that Scotland has become over the last 10 years – confident, capable, ambitious, with a fabulous woman running the show – would we want that Scotland to persist under any constitutional circumstance?

"I think everybody's slightly recoiling from the idea of another binary, life-or-death, existential decision," he adds. "I was wrecked to pieces by it the last time. I don't want that to happen again in my life, as in, I don't want to be wrecked to pieces again. So I'm up for whatever happens in terms of another referendum but I certainly want to conduct it in a much less adversarial way. We have to have a discussion with our fellow Scots about the good society that we want, and presume that they want a good society as well."

Pat's line about communities is reflected in the success of boutique festivals such as Oban Live. “We play these festivals all over the country,” says Greg, “and it’s just local communities getting together to have fun for three days. They’re starting to spring up and to be honest they’re a lifeline for bands like us working in the modern-day music industry.

“My band are mostly educators [working as teachers or lecturers], so Monday-to-Thursday is a no-no. Our last record was made after seven at night, until midnight, because nobody can do ten-‘til-six during the day: they’re all doing other stuff. That’s the life of the modern musician. But at festivals you meet kindred spirits from the same sort of bands, from the same sort of era, and we’re all in the same boat”.

As brothers who have worked closely together in the studio and on the stage for so long, there has been the odd moment of tension between them. As Pat once acknowledged, back in the 1980s “they did a lot of our growing up in public”. The title track of their second album, Remote, had a line which summed up the brothers’ relationship – “the tension is all that we’ll ever have, we might as well use it”.

In a Sunday Herald interview in 2004, Pat said of the relationship: “It was terrible. It was appalling. It was violent”, and he pointed to a scar under his right eye, the result of a fight with Greg in a German dressing-room that involved fluorescent lights being shattered. For all that, the Kanes never quite went the combustible, enmity-sodden way of Liam and Noel Gallagher, of Oasis, or even of Ray and Dave Davies, of The Kinks. Pat and Greg, at least, are still talking, still creating together. Both are now in their early 50s and both are parents. even if Greg came to parenthood relatively late, and is father to a four-year-old daughter, Eva Rose.

Pat now recalls “a lot of stupid brotherly rivalries involved” when he and Greg began making music together, when Pat was 15 or 16. “Both of us equally played our part. Inescapable, I would say. The tensions were real, but they are way behind us now. I love and admire my brother – indeed both my brothers – intensely”. [The third brother, Garry John, plays bass guitar with The Proclaimers, who, like Hue And Cry, were formed in the early 1980s.]

The dynamic between Pat and Greg surfaces when you ask Greg if the Oban gig will be just them, or with a full band (the answer, incidentally, is "with the band"). Do the songs breathe more when it’s just the two of them?

“It’s quite interesting. I like it when it’s just Pat and me [on stage]. I don’t know if you’ve got any siblings, or what your relationship with them is [but] my friends have very fraught relationships with their siblings; they meet at Christmas and on birthdays, twice a year. I get to hang out with my brother all year, so I’ve got a different view of how families work.

“Our family over-functions. So when it’s just the two of us on stage, that’s my favourite thing, because lots of family memories come flooding back. There’s a lot of emotion, and because you’re so exposed … I quite enjoy putting myself under that duress.” He talks about trying to find his pain threshold when sitting in the dentist’s chair. “It’s the same sort of thing as playing with Pat: you don’t know where your level is unless you strip yourself back and just do it. He’s Liza Minnelli: he loves f***ing strings and horns and lights and thousands of people and adoration.” Greg, on the other hand, tends not to like pyrotechnics in concerts. As Pat observes: “He has a taste for unkempt men, staring at the floor, strumming guitars furiously, which I don’t quite understand. But I forgive it”.

The 1980s were, then, when the world first became familiar with Hue And Cry, but the brothers don’t seem to miss that decade. “I truly don’t,” says Pat. “And one of the things that infuriates me about the times we’re in is that it sometimes feels as if we’re going back to the 1980s.

“Politically, yet again we’re facing an implacable force. In terms of the music business, it’s better than it was in the 1980s, because it’s much more artist-centric. In the 1980s you were very much the meat in the sausage-machine, and you were ground out the other end, whereas the business now is about a lot of artist-entrepreneurs who are playing live and are building up their own communities of interest. That’s what drives the whole process, rather than going up, cap in hand, to a major music company and saying, ‘Please, please give us money to make music. A lot of people now are a lot more resourceful than that.”

The 1980s, he adds, was a harsh, extreme time “in all ways. I appreciate the opportunities that it gave. I mean, there was a lot of money flowing around the music business then, so we syphoned a bit of it off. We went off to record in New York. I’ll never forget these experiences, you know? But do I want things to be kinder and gentler than they were in the 1980s? Yes, I totally do. Of course you do.”

Oban Live runs from June 2-3. The Sunday Herald is the festival's musical partner. For more information and tickets, visit obanlive.com

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