Born in Glasgow, the journalist and political activist Pat Kane is one half of the pop duo Hue and Cry (with his brother Greg). They’re best known for their 1987 hit Labour of Love.
What’s your earliest memory?
Bawling my eyes out inconsolably, surrounded by a towering ring of perplexed older children, and deeply loving the attention. I even remember imagining I was looking down at myself and this scene from directly above, dispassionately. I was clearly predestined to be a lead singer or a media chancer.
What has been your most memorable Scottish gig?
Playing piano-vocal in front of 300,000 Glaswegians on the Big Day evening show in 1990. You wonder, in retrospect, where my brother Greg and I got the bravery to do such a thing. There was much left-wing political haranguing between songs, for which I apologise.
What was your best meal in Scotland?
Hogmanay in Leith’s the Little Chartroom was extremely competitive — sumptuous Scottish produce, veg and flesh, just melting in my mouth. But a hot lasagne slice from Little Italy in Glasgow’s Byres Road, chomped down while watching the West End pirouette past its window, has rarely been beaten for wellbeing.
What was your first family holiday in Scotland?
Girvan. It’s where I (and many other mind-blown youth) first encountered Keith Albarn’s psychedelic wonderland the Fifth Dimension. Next to a row of chippies and the slow, filthy motorboats in their Venetian Pond. The rain, of course, was daily, orthogonal.
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What’s your favourite place in Scotland?
Fingal’s Cave, on Staffa. My memory is of going there on a sea-heaving day with my eight-year-old daughter Grace, both of us slithering dangerously across the hexagonal, till we were at the mouth of it. Then screaming back at the noise of it, like mad things.
What’s been your most embarrassing moment?
Directing the words “roll in the fat thespian” at the presenter’s seat of a BBC Radio Scotland show, not realising my voice was feeding into the green room where said character (the late, and frankly portly, Kenny Ireland) was sitting. He gave one-word answers, on live radio, for 30 minutes. Which I deserved.
What’s the most outrageously untrue thing that’s ever been said about you?
Someone once asked, with absolute certainty, how my second home in Paris was going. Very happy now in our new primary (and only) home, in the Soot-Caked Sensuous Republic of Leith.
What three words sum you up?
Cybernetic. Copacetic. Celtic.
Who would you say sorry to and why?
The poor, Scottish or otherwise. For being a lifelong ineffective campaigning socialist.
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Who was your first celebrity crush?
Jesus Christ my Lord and Saviour. And then, the usual stirrings…
What’s your favourite TV show or film (and why)?
Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend. I saw it as a young film studies student and was thrilled that someone could create something so radical, disruptive but cinematographically beautiful. Still nothing to compare to it.
Who was your childhood hero?
I never really did heroes, but my heart always leapt with excitement whenever I saw a TV show with Gerry Anderson in the credits. I knew it would be a well-designed future, strafed with the creepiest possible aliens. Those illuminated circles cast on Captain Scarlet when the Mysterons were watching him! Jesus FC.
Is there a moment that changed your life?
Yes. I started reading continental philosophy at Glasgow University in 1981, and it described exactly how I’d always felt (as if I were several people in the same head) and how I thought the world worked (human spontaneity and creativity versus the Machine). It’s all a bit complicated now with AI, but I still deeply run on that programme. (And of course, the birth of my daughters, and of course, falling in love with Indra, my partner.)
Tell us one lesson life has taught you
How mammalian humans are. How triggerable that part of us is. How our biggest achievement will be making it through the 21st century, if we can transcend all that.
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What song would you like played at your funeral?
Tom Waits’s Take It With Me, partly for the chickens squawking in the background, but mostly for these lines: “Children are playing at the end of the day/ Strangers are singing on our lawn/ There’s got to be more than flesh and bone/ All that you’ve loved is all that you own”. Then off to the fires with me!
Tell us a secret
I could easily just cook for my beloveds, every day, for ever. And that would be enough.
What’s your favourite journey?
I did “Norway in a Nutshell” a few years ago and floated on the fjords beneath sci-fi mountains. It properly reset me as a creature on this earth.
Hue and Cry are marking four decades together by releasing EPs, and episodes of their Labours of Love documentary on YouTube every month. Their 40th anniversary tour begins on Oct 10. hueandcry.co.uk
