“Some years ago we brought a guitar on family holiday and started jamming on the beach, doing covers. Some German tourists heard us playing and suggested we put the covers on YouTube - this was 2008 - so we started going busking on the streets of Dublin, and uploading the tunes. Through all this we built up a nice foundation to start doing it properly and then we moved from covers to our own original material.” - Hudson Taylor

From these modest baby-steps as “Harry & Alfie”, the brothers Hudson Taylor developed their songwriting skills and live performance chops on the streets of Dublin and other European cities. Drawing on inspiration from classic rock idols like The Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel and The Beatles - seeing AC/DC aged eleven was a revelation - to more contemporary influences like Fleet Foxes, Villagers and The Tallest Man On Earth; Hudson Taylor released their debut album, the breezy, acoustic-driven “Singing For Strangers”, in 2015. Produced by by Iain Archer (James Bay, Jake Bugg), the album included three big hits - ‘Chasing Rubies’, ‘Battles’ and ‘Weapons’ - which helped established Hudson Taylor in Ireland and the UK.

The brothers add: "We spent 2015 and ‘16 playing tons of gigs and getting 'Singing for Strangers' out there and promoting it. When that started to naturally slow down we started writing new tunes and recording demos for the next album.”

2018 was a big year for Hudson Taylor. With new management and a new record deal with leading Irish independent label Rubyworks. The brothers released the ‘Feel It Again’ 5-track EP in the spring, which delivered two huge airplay hits in the shape of ‘Feel It Again’ and ‘Run With Me’, and has gone on to enjoy over 14.5 million streams on Spotify. They followed this with an 8-track mini-album called ‘Bear Creek To Dame Street’, which brought together more new tracks produced in Seattle by Ryan Hadlock, best known for his work with The Lumineers and Vance Joy, and some of their best loved older songs, captured live in concert at a sold-out concert at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre.

2018 also saw Hudson Taylor make huge steps forward with their live profile. Two sold-out European tours, plus key European festival appearances including Leeds / Reading (UK), Electric Picnic (IE), Rolling Stone Weekender (Germany) and Benicassim (Spain). In America, they toured with both Gabrielle Aplin and Hozier, and successfully completed their own debut US headline shows. They also made their first US TV appearances on Good Day New York (Fox), WGN-TV (Chicago), Good Morning San Diego and Fox 5 San Diego and wrapped online sessions for Paste, Baeble Music and Balcony TV. The brothers rounded off the year with six consecutive sold out homecoming nights at Whelans’ in Dublin.

Harry and Alfie: “In 2018, we played the most gigs in any year since we started making music together, and had an absolute blast. We released a lot of new tunes and got a fantastic reaction to them from the fans. We are looking forward to releasing more new music and going back out on the road in 2019.”