THEY’VE BEEN ploughing a particularly idiosyncratic furrow for quite some time now. Being one of the best kept secrets this side of MI5 is beginning to lose its appeal though and this once media-shy quartet is bent on shouldering their way up to the front windows, if that’s what it takes to hijack an audience full of elusive eardrums.

Hada To Hada, skin to skin. Even the handle betrays a smidgen of what they’re about. Eroticism and evangelical zeal seldom make cosy sleeping partners but in Kieran Duddy’s cavernous cerebrum they jostle and jibe at one another with consummate ease.

On the eve of the release of their debut, My German Lover, Hada To Hada are in buoyant form, far from what we’ve come to expect from listening to setfuls of their bluer than blue meditations on love lost and found – and somehow inevitably lost again. Kieran Duddy and Belinda Morris court rumour and sigh at the realisation that the album is at long last a reality.

It was Stark Studios that helped make it so. “Yeah,” Kieran Duddy smiles, “without the munificence and magnanimity of Stark My German Lover wouldn’t have happened. It was their willingness to put in their time and expertise that gave the album the final go-ahead.

Leaving fairy studio-mothers aside though, we need to sort a few things out here. Like, how they regrouped after the (amicable, though regrettable) departure of ace double bassist and five-string banjo player, Bill Whelan and what sounded like five-limbed percussionist, Paul McDonnell; and how they manage to write some of the most gut-wrenching lyrics on love without frankly leaping lemming-like from the nearest cliff at speed; and how Belinda manages to play soprano and alto sax as though she were a woman possessed of a fine fever that raises the tone of the instruments past anything they’ve ever produced before. Few musicians manage to move a listener as she does. Van Morrison at his self-absorbed best, almost always; Richie Buckley in inspired form, often; Candy Dulfer in Barbie-doll pose, never. Morris simply opens the sax’s mouth and lets it speak for itself.

The title track of the new album My German Lover seems an apt starting point, with its lyrical content hiding more than its title might suggest. Duddy is wary of “explaining away” his songs before people have had a chance to hear them for themselves, yet he acknowledges that in the Hada To Hada scheme of things lyrics hold level sway with melody and deserve a fair hearing.

“I have views and opinions on the North,” he says, by way of explanation, “and the song evolved more as a cry from the womb, a very basic instinctive reaction, as opposed to a political statement. And in that sense it goes right across the board because it affects all people everywhere. Most times when I hear of people being shot or beaten up, the first person I cry for, and probably the last, is their mother. That’s the essence of the song.

“I felt it summed up the whole feeling of the album. Relationships is a strong theme; relationships working, not working, falling apart. But other than that, relationships go beyond just the usual male/female situation. There are all sorts of relationships in life and the song seemed to suit the mood of the entire album.”

Duddy seems to have come through more than his fair share of stormy passions. Has the experience left him a haggard wizened old man before his time? Or have the trials of that resilient little cardiac muscle renewed his faith in the implacable spirit of the soul?

“There’s a line I came across recently,” he offers, “which went: ‘Show me a human being and I’ll show you a sense of loss’. Songs just get presented to me. In the context of the situations I’ve lived through, the situations work themselves out and present themselves as songs and so in a way it’s just externalising something that’s very basic to most people. It’s a working out process, maybe . . .”

Is Hada To Hada’s writing instinctive then, or does Duddy sit down with a full agenda and legal pad at the same time every day? With another song on the album entitled ‘Primo Levi’ it’s tempting to suspect that he’s intent on teaching us a few things he feels are worth knowing.

Duddy scoffs at the very notion. Preaching is not part of the game plan, whatever the congregation.

“No,” he shakes his head in exasperation, horrified at the thought of lecturing to anyone, anywhere. “I was very taken with his (Levi’s) life, having read some of his books – and it tied in with another situation in my life and the two of them seemed to marry well because they reflected on the same thing: people making choices. Irrespective of what you do, you can’t judge anyone at the end of the day really, because you’re never quite privy to exactly what it is that they’ve been through. Everyone is an individual. So when it came to writing the song, I took him as the theme and the song took off from there. What little I knew of his life story at the time struck a chord somewhere. Angst-ridden. God, there’s that word again! We’d be big in Scandinavia, that’s for sure! Those people’d love us on dark winter nights!”

Whatever about angst and alienation, Duddy’s managed to corral a formidable percussive duo into the Hada To Hada paddock since the original line-up came to an end. With Nollaig Bridgeman on drums of every creed and colour and Brummie-born Paul O’Driscoll on double bass he’s found himself surrounded by class talents eager to get on with it with the minimum of fuss. Both Bridgeman and O’Driscoll are top session players, with Paul’s distinctive presence being very visibly eh, present in Deiseal’s line-up too. Men of many parts, they’ve soldered what was already a highly compatible alloy between Duddy and Belinda Morris. Duddy sums up their arrival with ease.

“It was a series of nice coincidences – or maybe it was synchronicity. I don’t know which, because I’m not that angst-ridden yet that I’ve got down to reading Carl Jung!”

A painter in a parallel incarnation, Duddy’s word arrange-ments speak recurringly of eyes and sight and the visual impact of events on his psyche. Surely the painter’s eye impinges on the writer’s pen?

“Yeah, I’ve thought about this one,” he laughs. “I find it very hard to talk about painting. I have a lot of ideas of what I think it’s about but I find it hard to put into words. When I’m painting sometimes I can go for days, working on stuff, and when I go out it can be quite nauseating; you’re too open, you’ve stripped a layer of nerves off somewhere and everything you look at seems twice as vibrant, twice as alive, and it can be quite sickening actually. It’s the same with writing, it can totally consume you – which is great, because it’s a natural high and it is very invigorating and very stimulating. Those endorphins are flying which is great!

“But it’s a very singular thing too insofar as it’s one person working alone, not talking, not communicating. So I suppose that that’s the question: how do you relate what you see? It can be quite disturbing and I can understand why some people who paint go off their heads because the process is so intense. You become so aware and your senses are so heightened by taking in colours. I don’t know what level it works at but it does!”

All this talk of natural highs and endorphin flows have me turning a particularly nauseous shade of green. Can it be that I’ve been throwing good money after bad into Samuel Snort’s coffers when I could’ve been generating my very own supply direct to the cortex free gratis?

Duddy sighs at the dual-edged sword that is the creative impulse.

“You can have it – you’ve welcome to it,” he laughs. “I tell you, Missus, give me a real job any day! Therein lies the rub. As one of my lines goes: “Are words enough to give love meaning?” Love is about communication with people. Music is very solitary and it demands time on your own, but what value can the music have if you don’t have a one to one with people?”

Would they like to see Hada To Hada’s music transferred to film, given its strong visual imagery?

Belinda’s thought this one through – and yes, she would. “I have it all worked out,” she smiles. “I can see this train . . .”

Duddy isn’t discounting the idea either. “Videos are part and parcel of the rock industry and they’re certainly good calling cards to have, but I don’t see them as a priority. There is a film company interested at the moment but we have to work out what it is exactly they and we want. Is it a video, a film script, a film score, a vignette or what? But the convention of video is something I haven’t given any thought to, really.”

The alto and soprano saxophone is an integral part of Hada To Hada’s sound. I wonder whether Belinda has tried to emulate any of her heroes in her playing, because the sound is purely her own, untraceable and unrooted in anyone else’s musical identity.

“I started playing the sax five years ago. I was beaten into submission by Kieran,” she smiles wryly. “I bought a soprano sax just before I was laid off from my job and I just started practising a lot when I was unemployed. I used to play oboe in school so there’s a slight classical history. But my ‘style’ is just a very naïve style. I don’t really listen to sax players, just some acid jazz, but I don’t play like that so it obviously doesn’t have any effect on my playing.

“I keep a safe distance. Manu Dbangu is a Senegalese player who I love, but it’s his voice as much as his playing that I love to listen to”

Finally, does Kieran believe that Hada To Hada’s music, personal and all as it can be, holds any universal truths that the populace might identify with?

“I would like to think so, yeah,” he nods. “God, if I thought that I was the only one who thought like this! I’ve never written with the intention that this will really shake a few people up. You can never be that dogmatic, but certainly there are universal truths there. There are elements of us all there, longing for something. It’s not formulaic though. I don’t know other people. But if you feel this music has touched you, God help you Siobhán! Here’s a number you can ring right now!”

And what if he wakes up in the morning intensely happy and at one with the world – will all the writing stop then? Will the ink run dry?

“I’m always intensely happy,” Kieran lies blithely. “There are two sides to every coin, I suppose. I don’t feel particularly angst-ridden. I’m generally fairly happy and the music adds to that. It’s a release. I’ve never written songs with the conscious thought that I must write songs to ‘cure’ myself. These are not a cure for cancer. They’re only songs at the end of the day.”

As for their dance cards, they’re looking pretty booked up for the new year, with Europe and Canada bagging the largest spaces on the itinerary.

“There’s a huge, huge world of music out there, beyond the charts, beyond the mainstream,” Kieran insists. “There are loads of festival dates all over Canada and in Europe and having the CD together without having a major record company coming near us is great as well. The technology is now there for people to do it, to sidestep the major industries. It’s not all about fame and fortune. It’s about generating work.”