Yearns to have up-to-date craft (8)
I believe the answer is:
longship
'craft' is the definition.
Both the definition and answer are singular nouns.
Perhaps you can see an association between them that I don't see?
'yearns to have up-to-date' is the wordplay.
'yearns' becomes 'long s' ('long' can be a synonym of 'yearn').
'to have' is a charade indicator (letters next to each other).
'up-to-date' becomes 'hip' (I can't justify this - if you can you should give a lot more credence to this answer).
'longs'+'hip'='LONGSHIP'
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for longship that I've seen before include "Viking boat" , "Viking vessel" , "Viking craft" .)