It’s that time of night when the dark is creeping up to morning. Most people are fast asleep, but Emma and Ant Hewitt – the brother-sister musical duo Missing Hours – are caught up in their work and lost in their music. After all, these hours stolen away, missing, are the pair’s inspiration for both their musical name and the music itself.

‘It’s that time that just disappears when you are really focused and engulfed with what you are doing,’ says Emma. ‘I love the strange night hours where all the magic seems to happen.’

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All the late nights spent as a slave to their craft have paid off, giving Missing Hours not only their name, but also their break – the duo are being tipped as an Australian Evanescence and one of the hottest acts for the summer season.

The duo’s broad appeal as a grunge rock-meets-pop act come from the dynamic between Ant and Emma. As siblings their musical journeys have run parallel from a young age. Both grew up listening to their dad’s albums – ‘Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, a lot of that just great 70s music that inspired me and Ant to both start writing music and singing ourselves,’ says Emma. As teenagers, they both developed a taste for 90s rock – Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and Placebo – bands which are now primary influences for Missing Hours.

With their shared taste has come a shared compulsion to write and perform songs. According to Emma, the path to musical success is laced with frustration and both she and her brother have tried to start other careers but the music has always called them back.

‘We both tried to do other things,’ says Emma. ‘Over the last ten years, we have both had so many knockbacks and disappointments that it would have been easier to quit and do something else and we tried at times… but we’d always come back to it and write songs and once you write songs you want to play them to people. So, we’d go back to that and try to get the music out there again… I don’t think music is the most fantastic career choice, but if you just want to play music, you can’t really do anything else and be satisfied.’

Ironically, it was one of Missing Hour’s most stinging knockbacks that kick-started their debut album, ‘Whatever You Want’. Ant and Emma had, at the urging and invitation of a London music producer, moved to the UK hoping to break into the music industry.

‘Ant and I sold everything we owned and went over to work with this producer about six or seven years ago. After six months of being there, we realized that all the promises he made weren’t really going to happen… He tried instead to push us down a really cheesy pop route which we weren’t happy with.’

Out of that disappointment, the budding musicians, wrote a song called ‘Not For You’ about the breakdown of the working relationship with their producer. The song ended up inspiring the producer to offer Emma and Ant a better deal. But, says Emma, it was too little too late and the pair moved on, eventually being signed to Sony BMG.

Not For You became the first song written for the debut album and with it Emma and Ant found their groove, so to speak, developing a writing process that hinged on their strong, almost telepathic, musical bond.

‘Ant will usually start playing a few chords and I’ll start singing some melodies over the top. We’ve got this strange telepathy thing being brother and sister. I know what he is going to go to – or maybe we are just predictable,’ Emma laughs. ‘Sometimes we’ll sit down and an almost complete song will come out in three or four minutes and we’ll record it on the dictaphone. I’ll be singing nonsense lyrics and he just starts playing some chords and we’ll both know we are about to go to a chorus and we’ll start singing a chorus melody and the song ends up almost writing itself in that way. The lyrics are usually the hard part, but when I’m singing the nonsense words, a few lyrics will come out and that will be the spirit of the song…. You’ll get given bits and pieces from a universal consciousness or something. Then you just build on it from there.’

That Emma and Ant always know where the other is going in songwriting comes as no surprise. After all, from their dad’s classic rock record collection to their London disappointments, knowing where they will end up is simply a matter of knowing where they came from and having faith that all those missing hours will eventually be found.

Hoping to find Missing Hours? Go online – www.missinghours.com.

Megan Smith