#1406: Minor Detail

80s Snapshot:

• Number of songs on Hot 100: 1
• Highest peak position: 92
• Cumulative weeks on Hot 100: 2

Staying on the Emerald Isle for a second straight entry, today we’ll be examining a pair of brothers whose musical styles underwent a number of changes over the decades.

Irish brothers John and Willie Hughes (no relation to the 80s film writer/director of the same name) began their musical careers as teenagers in the late 60s with a Dublin rock band called Ned Spoone. Initially specializing in covers of contemporary hits, the band gradually progressed in a heavier direction. The Hughes brothers left Ned Spoone in 1971, shortly before the band put out its first official recordings.

John and Willie’s musical inspiration turned to a more psychedelic direction. Founding a folk duo called Highway, the Hughes brothers’ was largely experimental, combining traditional acoustic instrumentation with more exotics sounds like lutes, tin whistles and Indian drums. By the time the group was formed in the early 70s, the hippie movement was already on the wane in the public eye and this project was not commercially successful. The two brothers briefly quit the music business entirely, returning to school and the family business.

As the decade crossed over into the 80s though, the Hugheses got back together and sought yet another rebrand, this time falling more in the synthpop mold that was making a big name out of groups like Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. Now named Minor Detail, the duo were signed to Polydor Records, one of the earliest Irish groups to sign to an American record label. Their self-titled album began to dent the charts in the fall of 1983, sneaking onto the Billboard 200 at a #187 peak and hitting #45 on the Rock Albums chart.

The album’s first track “Canvas Of Life”, an upbeat (both melodically and lyrically) synth-led track emblematic of the sound Billboard Magazine called “danceable beat, sophisticated synthesizers and a philsophical storyline” was released as the group’s first single. The song’s music video entered light rotation on MTV and the track debuted at #95 on the Hot 100 on the 9/24/1983 chart. A week later, “Canvas of Life” peaked at #92 in its second and final frame on the chart. In their native Ireland, the song peaked at a very respectable #25.

Two other tracks from the album, “Hold On” and “Take It Again” were issued as promotional singles only, but “Canvas of Life” would be the only physically-released single in the United States for Minor Detail. In fact, outside of two standalone singles in 1986 that saw Ireland-only release, Minor Detail’s self-titled album was their only major output. That said, John Hughes would continue to impact Irish music in the coming decades. He served as a musical coordinator for the 1991 film The Commitments, a cult hit about a working-class soul band in Dublin; the fictional band’s cover of “Try A Little Tenderness” made #67 on the Hot 100. He also discovered and has served as the manager for the Irish family band The Corrs, who had two singles make the Hot 100: “Runaway” hit #68 in 1995 and global smash hit “Breathless” reached #34 in 2001.

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