At first glance, Hurts don't appear to have a lot in common with Oasis. The moody pop duo - singer Theo Hutchcraft and keyboardist-guitarist-producer Adam Anderson - are a well-mannered, fashion-conscious pair not prone to making grandiose statements about their own Christ-like qualities. Oasis, on the other hand, are none of those things (even if Liam Gallagher will try to sell you one of his parkas). But there is the Manchester connection - and that, as it turns out, is rather important.
'The thing is, in Manchester it's a very second-best city,' Anderson says on the phone from that city, where he's spending his first day at home in six months after a world tour that took him and Hutchcraft to about 50 countries (according to Anderson's possibly inflated count).
'Musicians in Manchester are always very ambitious. Even if you look at a band like Oasis - who we on the face of it don't really have much in common with - they made music that was so much bigger than Manchester and it was so far reaching, and that's what we wanted to do ... We just thought, 'Let's try to make this international and make it grand'.'
Hurts, who bring their huge live show to Hong Kong on May 11, for a while didn't look like they'd be anything grand. For years, they laboured as struggling musicians with humble part-time jobs before anyone noticed them. They had previously gone through two other (unsuccessful) configurations, one under the name Daggers, the other as Bureau.
'It's funny we made that decision at a time when our actual lives were very small and the boundaries were very close around us,' Anderson says. 'Maybe it was a reaction to a small comfort zone in our lives and we contrasted that by making these huge songs.'
Anderson, who's now 27, was working as a cameraman at a greyhound racetrack the day he and Hutchcraft, 24, wrote the song that would elevate them to pop stardom. Wonderful Life, an epic 1980s-esque synthpop 'future classic', as a critic at The Guardian described it, got to No 21 on the British charts and made the top 10 in eight European countries. Its striking music video - a po-faced melodramatic affair with underwater dancers and a haunting refrain in which Hutchcraft intones, ambiguously, 'Don't let go/Never give up/It's a wonderful life' - has been on heavy rotation on music TV in Britain and Europe for months.