Without Chew

There's an excellent article by the consistently good Alexis Petridis in The Guardian today, discussing the new album by Hurts. After reading that they like to sing 'Without chew ....' along with these words

'Their videos resemble a Guinness World Records attempt to cram as many Thatcher-era visual cliches into three minutes of film as possible: you watch the trenchcoat-clad figures trudging through snowy Mitteleuropean cities and women in black cocktail dresses and fascinators throwing meaningful shapes by swimming pools, and you are gripped by the certainty that Max Headroom is about to appear and start walking like an Egyptian'

I was intrigued and wanted to find out more. Why would anybody in their right mind want to replicate the sound of Climie Fisher, Go West or Johnny Hates Jazz? Their website opens with a photo so styled, so consciously self-aware, that the more I looked at it the more I was convinced that only seconds later they would both burst into guffaws and say something like 'Oh I'm bostin for a piss, me'. It does, in fact, look like a pisstake, or perhaps a perfume advert parody from a sketch show. Either that or the Marks & Spencer advert for suits worn by England players during the World Cup in South Africa.

England Substitutes

Hurts

Could they be any more 'synth-pop duo'?