Once more, with feeling: Hudson Taylor and their journey so far

Some last names just work as band monikers. It’s like a kind of charm. The Hanson family discovered this early on in their career, as did the Jacksons – who famously became The Jackson Five. And for Alex, Eddie and Wolfgang – well, Van Halen really was a no-brainer.

As for Harry and Alfie, their double-barrelled last name Hudson-Taylor was a clear and present gift-horse. Smartly, they chose not the look it in the mouth.

There is something of the gift horse too when, moments after wrapping up our chat with the men in question, Alfie tells us: “You know we’ve always had so much respect for Hot Press. Whenever we were busking on Grafton Street, we used to do this cover of ‘Billionaire’ by Travis McCoy. Except instead of singing ‘I wanna be on the cover of Forbes magazine’, we’d sing, ‘I wanna be on the cover of Hot Press magazine’.”

“That’s the intro to the article sorted,” I assure him – after blushing of course!

But it makes sense. What better way, after all, to put into perspective just how far this hugely ambitious duo have come? On the most famous street in Dublin, Hudson Taylor appeared to build up their fanbase, one beguiled bystander by one. Indeed, if you were looking for Brown Thomas, Dubrays or the Disney Store in Dublin in the early part of the decade, chances are you left town with an empty wallet and a new favourite live act.

That was then, this is now. While Hudson Taylor have retained their ability to captivate audiences with their superb live performances (impromptu or not), they’ve also been thoughtfully refining their music. They worked hard to assemble an LP they could be truly proud of (2015’s excellent Singing To Strangers) – and then worked equally hard to move into new creative terrain. Right now, Hudson Taylor are an act in transition – literally, it seems, as much as figuratively – as they stretch towards inevitable international stardom. But first the practicalities!

“I moved back to Ireland about four months ago,” begins Harry, “while Alfie’s still living in London.”

How does that work for making music then?

“We’ve both been working… better?” suggests Alfie, turning to his brother.

“Yeah! We’re probably working better now that we’re apart,” Harry laughs.

Their conversation often ping-pongs amiably along these lines.

Alfie: “Living together was grand at the start, then it began to get a bit intense.”

Harry: “As it would with anybody.”

“But actually making the time to work on things,” Alfie continues, “to be disciplined about the music, I think it makes it easier. You’re travelling to connect, to make something together. We probably see each other more now, than we did when we lived together.”

“We’ve had 20-odd years of our lives together,” notes Harry, before shrugging contentedly. “Some relationships are easy like that.”

Different countries, same page, then. The folk-rock duo’s commitment to their music is immense. American audiences discovered the truth of this recently, when the band went on tour around the States.

“I was thinking about this myself,” says Harry, “that I just want to go and give the 16-year-old me a pat on the back and say, ‘It’s going to be grand man, you’re going to go with your band to America. Do all those things that you’re dreaming of’. I mean it really was a dream.”

The band were in the US to support UK singer-songwriter Gabrielle Alpin – who just happens to be Alfie’s other half. Was it a case of shouting up the stairs, to ask if they could support her? Or was it a more formal process?

“It was a bit of both actually,” laughs Alfie. “We were doing our own thing at the time – our own shows – and we weren’t really thinking about touring the States yet. And then we decided, it’d be nice to go out and help Gabrielle on her tour. I was gonna ask for three weeks off anyway, so l could travel with her. So I was delighted. We let the managers handle all the details.”

FEEL IT AGAIN
Rewind to 2015. Following a whirlwind couple of years, with a jam-packed schedule of gigging and recording, Hudson Taylor finally took proper flight with their acclaimed Singing To Strangers album. But while their gorgeous harmonies and stomp-clap rhythms won over audiences across Ireland and Europe, there was no way they were planning to rest on their laurels.
“Basically, we had been living by Google,” says Harry. “Checking the calendar to see what we were doing every day. It was incredibly busy. And just after releasing our first album and doing the tours, there was about a year where suddenly it was like, ‘Oh… there’s nothing’. That was the first time that had ever happened for us. And so we started re-thinking what we wanted to do with ourselves. After the first album, we released 38 songs to the world online. But it was important now to work on something new.”

It was no coincidence that ‘Run With It’, Hudson Taylor’s first song of 2018, began with the lyrics, “Now we’re gonna set fire to last year/ Say goodbye to the songs and old dreams we held dear.”
“After the album release, everything became so clear in hindsight,” elaborates Alfie. “Like, ‘We won’t do that next time’, or ‘That was really good’. Or, ‘That person we worked with, we had a real connection with them’.”

Did that influence their songwriting?

“There’s loads of different ways in which the songs came about,” says Harry. “It might be that Alfie would write something a third of the way through and present it to me. Or vice-versa. The thing I remember distinctly from the first album was the very specific way that Alfie would get into the moment. He’d take something that would feel like gibberish, and you’d see it becoming this really beautiful, soulful thing. It would happen, and then I’d harmonise with it, and we’d both get a real buzz off it. Goosebumps would start to rise and we’d be like, ‘Whoa…’ – you can feel it in the room. And then before you know it, a chorus idea gets accentuated by the harmony and the rest sort of writes itself.” 

“A lot of the music is drawn from family,” Alfie adds. “Or from the world around us. Or sometimes it’s political, without meaning to be. About two years ago we had quite a lot of political stuff layered into the music in a really beautiful and poetic way. But it can’t be bullshit for me when I write. If you’re going out there every day with the intention of making people sing it back to you, you have to believe it yourself.” 

OUT IN THE WILDERNESS
Appropriately enough for two young men who look like they arrived in Ireland straight from a James Dean movie set, Hudson Taylor recorded the Feel It Again EP in the wilderness of the American north-west. While their first album saw them working with Northern Irish songwriter and producer Iain Archer (Snow Patrol, James Bay), for this project, they teamed up with an old acquaintance.

“Ryan Hadlock,” Harry says, “has worked with The Lumineers, Vance Joy, Foo Fighters. We’d come across him about four years ago, when we were out in LA doing some writing. He expressed an interest in working with us back then, but – just with his schedule and ours and the financial situation – it just didn’t work out at the time.

“But then around this time last year, our manager Caroline (Downey) was in a taxi in Dublin, and ‘Ho Hey’ by The Lumineers came on the radio. She just thought the sound was so similar that she went ahead and got in contact with the guy who’d produced it. And of course, that was Ryan. So he told her he knew us, and that he’d like to work with us. Suddenly we both found ourselves with time off – and before we knew it, we were in the Seattle wilderness surrounded by sequoia trees, working on this EP.”

A nice change of scenery then! Did the music change too?

“I suppose we wanted our new songs to sound… thicker?” says Alfie, looking at Harry for affirmation. “For a start, we really wanted to add some strings into it. Tadhg, the lad who plays with us, kind of perfected this spooky, ethereal sound for our live show, so we wanted a bit of that on the EP, to give it texture. We also had some horns in our music for the first time, and bodhrans. Percussion has added a lot to the EP – not so much in a trad way, but more in terms of backbeats and stuff. Then obviously Gabrielle came in and provided vocals. So it emerged as a more textured, involved sound than before.”
Mirroring the change in musical direction, Hudson Taylor also hooked up with Hozier manager Caroline Downey and signed with the highly respected Irish indie label Rubyworks, which has Hozier, Ryan Sheridan and Wyvern Lingo on its roster.

“After we finished things with our old label in London, we decided to start afresh,” says Alfie. “We decided initially that we wouldn’t actively look for any label or a new manager or anything like that. But once we started demoing tunes, we felt we had to do something a bit more proactive with them. We looked into stuff like self-releasing and all that. But Caroline came on board, and then we just dug a bit deeper with what Rubyworks were doing, and they developed a good relationship with us. They helped us finish our demos and made it possible for our live band to become involved in the recording, which was such an integral part of it. So we really just connected. It felt like the right time with them.”

Over the past twelve months, Harry and Alfie have supported arguably the three biggest pop-rock bands in recent Irish history, Kodaline, Picture This and The Script. Did they get any advice from their compatriots along the way?

“We met The Script in London years ago,” says Harry, “and their guitarist Mark gave us a piece of advice which, at the time, we never listened to. He told us, ‘You shouldn’t be playing two acoustics. You should have an electric guitar in there too’.”

Alfie: “And sure enough…”

“We were stubborn,” says Harry. “In fact, I was particularly stubborn, for whatever reason. It was this kind of purist thing for me, like Bob Dylan going electric. We’ve finally moved away from that.”

“The good thing about it is that there’s a bit more range and contrast in the music now,” says Alfie.

“When we do our show, we’ll have big feckin’ rocky songs and then we’ll also be able to strip it all back, take away the microphones and do completely acoustic songs. We’re still there for the people who fell in love with the songs when we were really doing much rawer stuff.”

Audiences across Europe will experience this first hand as the brothers tour festivals in the summer. And while the Irish Sea may separate them now, and their musical direction has taken them to previously unexplored places, very little has changed in terms of their own personal chemistry, and their capacity for making great music. Hudson Taylor are about to get a whole lot bigger. It is only a matter of time...

The Feel It Again EP is out now. The new single ‘Old Soul’ features Holly Hudson-Taylor and Gabrielle Aplin on backing vocals.