Stranger Than Fiction: Hot Press meet Hudson Taylor

For a brief moment it crosses my mind this article might not be an interview, but an obituary.

The top of a pillar on Dublin’s Aungier Street is a strange place to find high-profile musicians. Stranger still is the pang of fear when Harry Hudson Taylor, completely unannounced, springs the four feet from one narrow platform to the next. Newspaper headlines flash before my eyes: ‘Magazine causes death of young musician’.
Instead, said strummer deftly lands on one stylishly-clad foot, and pirouettes to face the camera, still nonchalantly plucking his guitar strings. His brother Alfie shrugs: “He’s been doing this for years.”
Taking to the streets of the capital, guitars in hand, is something the pair have indeed been at for yonks; a quick flick through the photos on Harry’s phone shows that trickery on bollards is a long-time staple too. Today, it’s only the amount of people looking for selfies that suggests anything has changed.
“Actually,” Alfie points out, “busking was always a great way of meeting people. We’ve met people in the States who saw us busking on Grafton Street. The first time we went out busking was with a keyboard powered with AA batteries. I was 15-years-old. We loved it then, and we still love it now. The title of our album tells the whole story; we just love performing for people.”
There’s an infectious enthusiasm about the pair, just days after the release of Singing For Strangers, their first full-length effort. Alfie is a classically handsome bundle of energy. Harry, the elder by a year, is normally the quieter and more studious of the two; he wears glasses and dark perma-stubble, and speaks in wry, considered tones. Except, it seems, for today.
“As soon as the album came out, all that natural tension was gone,” Harry explains. “All of our interviews are just us talking really fast!”
Speed, it should be noted, is something of a rarity for the duo. Having inked a record deal three years ago – thanks in no small part to a considerable YouTube fanbase – one could reasonably have expected an album to have arrived sooner. It’s clear that the duo might have thought similarly.
“Being signed is a blessing, of course,” says Harry. “The first year, though, was a bit of a stall. We had our own little buzz which was going nicely. However, our growth plateaued; arguably, it went down for a bit. We had a time where we were doing songwriting sessions with different people. You’d have a guy who says, ‘My favourite songwriter is Paul Simon,’ and you’d think ‘Well, that’s a good start’. And they’d be so, completely, utterly different! Like, some weird Euro-trance going on or something. We’d be happy with what we’d done in the studio. The next day we’d get a demo of a Hudson Taylor dance remix.”
“For a long time, what’s been dominating the charts and the radio is one type of music,” Alfie continues. “We don’t want to degrade dance music or anything else out there – everything has its place – but in the UK, where there’s so much competition, there’s really only one avenue that the music industry likes to go by, and that’s BBC Radio 1. We were recording songs that weren’t getting used, and we weren’t happy with others because it didn’t sound like what we do.”
In fairness, it’s not at all surprising that they would be pawed and clawed at by the grubby hands of the industry. A pair of handsome, intelligent and talented young Dubliners, eager to up sticks and make a music career in Britain? It’s the stuff of Louis Walsh’s wet dreams.
Harry shrugs. “We thought all that stuff was a bit of a myth, at first. We only realised after that year had passed that we’d actually experienced it. Not quite the classic horror stories of A&R, but still, it’s all about playing ball, obviously. You have to draw a line. We let certain things go – mistakes and that. We definitely didn’t do everything right ourselves. Then there were certain things where we knew what we wanted, and we would say it.”
He continues: “There were five versions of ‘Chasing Rubies’, for example. Eventually, we settled on the one that came out as the lead single. It’s another instance where we were played around a bit. Nobody was listening to us for a while.”
It’s encouraging to hear the pair backing themselves and fighting their corner; it’s even more heartwarming to hear it bear fruit on the record. The album – which contains no less than six bonus tracks – contains everything from relatively new cuts to the first song Alfie ever wrote, ‘The Place I Called Home’.
Many of the tracks were penned on the conservatory of their mother’s house in Stillorgan. It moves from delicate balladry and intricate love songs in the Simon and Garfunkel mould to the foot-stomping stylings that would fit nicely alongside Mumford and Sons.
“As far as the sound goes, we wanted it to be sort of raw,” Harry reasons. “We like how it feels that little more ‘live’.”
To that end, they assumed full responsibility for the album’s bonus tracks, recorded and produced without outside influence.
Harry says: “Having worked with so many people – and seen things go wrong so many times – we wanted to give it a go ourselves. For our next record, we’d like to do it in collaboration with someone. We didn’t have that much of a say with this album, so we’d like to have control rather than hand someone else the reins.”
It says a lot about their ambition and belief that they’d line up such a move.
“Sometimes,” Alfie admits, “you don’t always know if you’re in the right or not. At those moments you have to just trust it. We’ve never released something we’ve hated. Some things we weren’t 100% happy with, but never something we hated. We never want to end up in that situation, either. Someday we’re going to be 40 or 50 years old, and the album is still going to exist in some form.”
There’s plenty of time between now and then, and plenty more opportunity to fulfil dreams. Some, of course, have been ticked off; a Late Late Show appearance brought the sort of excitement you’d expect from lads raised watching Gay, Pat and Tubridy do their thing. Another dream, funnily, will be up to us to help fulfil.
Harry grins" “You know that song ‘Billionaire’, and the line about Forbes magazine? Well, we used to play that while busking on Grafton Street, singing ‘I wanna be on the cover of Hot Press magazine, smiling next to Florence and the Machine.’ That’s another one on the to-do list…”
If they keep going on their current path, you feel they’ll be happily looking out from newsstands very soon indeed.