On the eve of the 15th anniversary tour of Hurts' debut album "Happiness", which will be introduced by sold-out concerts in London (May 22) and Berlin (May 24), the group's soloist Theo Hutchcraft, answering the questions of NME journalist Andrew Trendel, recalls the crystallization of the musical handwriting, the creation of a collective image and the rapid arrival at the zenith of fame.

The album "Happiness" released in 2010 by the Manchester synthpop duo became the fastest selling debut record of that year in the United Kingdom. With the singles Better Than Love, Wonderful Life and Stay, the album reached number one in the charts of Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Finland and a number of other European countries. The record has sold over 2 million copies worldwide and has been certified 16x Platinum in total.

At the 2011 NME Awards, Hurts were honored as Best New Band ahead of Two Door Cinema Club, Everything Everything and Beady Eye. Addressing the audience, the other half of the duo at the time, Adam Anderson, took a dig at critics, stressing: "Not bad for two pretentious bums who sound like Westlife..."

"Our rise was determined by controversy. That was the goal - to create something that one part of people would really like, while the other would hate it. And contradictory reviews would be exactly the same, only one with no stars, while others with five."

We tried to create alternative music that would be pop music at the same time, with unlimited ambitions," explains Theo.

"The xx started around the same time and sonically they were very much going against the grain. A couple of years later Lana Del Rey came along with her very different vision of pop music. It was a transitional period where we felt weird. We went to perform at festivals or the NME Awards where everyone ignored us. We were the black sheep," recalls Theo.

When asked about the exterior aesthetic, how Hurts' elegant overall image came about, Theo says: "We were heavily influenced by Italian cinema, music, bands like Joy Division, Tears For Fears, The Smiths - all the things we liked. We didn't have a lot of equipment or resources. When we went to meet record label people, we wore suits because otherwise we'd be considered homeless. We dressed up. the way we wanted to present ourselves.

We didn't have expensive video cameras and the rehearsal room was in an abandoned building. It just had to be done and it looks like we did. It's strange that something born out of necessity becomes so iconic. Like some of these videos. The first clip of "Wonderful Life" was actually made in our studio, we were wearing what we were wearing at the time, and it featured the people who came first to dance. Sometime now, I watched it again and wondered to myself: "How could it have happened [getting millions of views]?!" I think because it was so clean and honest.

We just did what we wanted to do because we were young and we had a fire burning in our chests not to be like others.”

Theo, what can we expect from the concerts of this tour?

"We played the whole album on the NME Radar Tour in 2010 because we just didn't have any more songs. Now it's going to be better than ever because we'll be performing with the same band, but on a completely different level. The songs now have a life that they didn't have at the beginning, and people have experienced so much with these songs.

The goal is to really celebrate where it's taken us. The process of emergence was very unusual. Now, 15 years later, it's still a record that people talk about as a classic debut, or even that it changed their whole life."

We would like to remind you that on August 14, as part of the mentioned tour, Hurts will perform on the Sigulda ruins stage. This will be the only concert of the association in the Baltics.

Tickets are still available in the www.bilesuserviss.lv network.