Just as there’s no such thing as a typical Richard Hawley gig – I’ve watched him break a thousand hearts with a full orchestra in the former Templeborough steelworks, rock out a cave in Derbyshire and a Florentine piazza in Halifax, bring his own brand of Country and Northern to a ballroom in Austin, Texas and hold a football stadium in the palm of his hand with a crooned ballad – so there is no such thing as a typical Richard Hawley album. Each makes its own world. From the aching tenderness of Coles Corner to the Guinness-black strangeness of Trueloves Gutter to Standing At The Sky’s Edge’s dizzy swirl of spectral psychedelia, throbbing with his teenage love of Jimi Hendrix. And most, if not all of his albums, tip their hat in some way to his beloved home city of Sheffield.
“I’ve made three albums where I had the title before I'd even begun to record, where I had an agenda. One was Truelove’s Gutter. Another was Standing At The Sky's Edge when I wanted to turn everything up and make the music a lot more aggressive, and then this one. I wanted it to be multi coloured in a way… focusing on the voice and what voices can do together… I deliberately only played a handful of guitar solos to keep it focused on voices, the song and space…”
The result is one of Hawley’s most intimate but powerful sets yet. By turn sparse and lonesome, sweet and soulful, plangent and delicate, raunchy and saturnine. The album begins in that latter mood with first single Two For His Heels, a low blues rumble that reflects his love of the moody twangy guitar and exponents like Duane Eddy and Link Wray. The phrase two for his heels is a term in Cribbage. “I just overheard that phrase in the working man’s club next to my house,” says Richard. “Two guys playing cards: it's a card game phrase. I immediately had this the scenario in my head about escaping this murderous king or father or something, running off with his daughter. What sounds like a baritone guitar playing that looping riff is a Mexican instrument called a Baja Sexto.”
Have Love is a low-slung R&B shuffle around a splintered electric riff. “I like that recurring lick. It's really primitive music; a two-chord jam really, like Billy Boy Arnold or Texan mountain range music. Songs like this you really need to get the feel and the groove right and I think we did.”
One of Hawley’s great loves and well springs of inspiration is the ghostly, remembered sound of transatlantic rock and roll before The Beatles ushered in the rock era, the sound of the Everlys or the Larry Parnes stables cuter moments. It’s a sound evoked on the gorgeous Prism In Jeans. “My wife Helen thinks it sounds like Jackie’s White Horses. I love the music of that pre-Beatle era. The Tornadoes Telstar and The Shadows. That kind of far-off netherworld. I’ve always loved that time whether it’s cool to or not. Who cares? I’m not one of those musicians who develop a skin condition if they get a bad review or get compared to another band. That chiming little guitar break is a 12 string with all the high strings taken off, the trick the Everly Brothers’ dad taught them. As a song, it’s about someone who is like a rainbow in a very confined space. A Prism in Jeans.”
Hawley has always been a superb poet of loss. His darkest album Truelove’s Gutter has a thread of mourning running through it, and here that jet black seam is mined thoughtfully in Heavy Rain. Amongst other things, it’s a country-tinged lament for absent friends. “A lot of this comes straight from the demo I did in my little shed in the garden I call Disgracelands. If you listen hard, you can hear birdsong and dogs barking and kids shouting over each other.”
Nearly all of Hawley’s albums have been named for areas of Sheffield, the city that made him. Lady's Bridge is the oldest bridge across the River Don in the city, for instance, whilst Truelove’s Gutter is the old name for Castle Street. Sky Edge, a residential area high above the city, gives its name to his most psychedelic album and what has been called “the most exciting British musical in years,” Standing At The Sky’s Edge, currently in the West End after runs at the National Theatre London and Sheffield’s Crucible. The city is never far from his thoughts and music and here it is celebrated in the track People, a deep, darkly unsentimental tribute to a city built on steel and love.
“This song and the album title is a thought and a phrase that just popped into my head complete. This is a city where hairy tattooed builders and burly bus drivers will call you love. We have our own ancient language. It’s Shakespearean, Chaucerian. And I’ve tried recording elsewhere, but I always end up coming back to Yellow Arch in Sheffield. The joke is that it was used to be a tool works and now it’s a place where us tools work!”
Richard recently completed a series of triumphant shows with John Grant performing the songs of Patsy Cline, originally a commission for Manchester International Festival. You can hear echoes of Cline, Jim Reeves and other sweetly sad country giants of yesteryear in Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow. “Country is a genre of music that I love and sometimes try and mould or adapt into my thing. This is, I hope, just well-played, straight to the heart music which is what the best of country is.”
Two tracks on the album ‘go deep’. Firstly, there’s Deep Space, a thunderous attempt to reach escape velocity away from the wreckage of a ruined country and world. “It’s the most rocking thing on the record. It came from a feeling that I couldn’t ignore. This insane position where Elon Musk and Richard Branson are charging people £1,000,000 to go up into space when we’re bombing kids and stuff. But it’s also about understanding that need to escape from the madness…into space or into yourself. The face-melting guitar sound is played on a fuzz/wah pedal from Eastern Europe called a Poltava. Built by the Ukrainians and the Russians jointly.”
Then comes its companion piece, Deep Waters; this time though, comes the soul deep calm of an Elvis Gospel tune with a halo of Jordannaires harmonies. “Coming next to Deep Space, there is a ‘compare and contrast’ going on. It’s a pretty deep song about the comfort of gospel, a sound I’ve been listening to all my life, and seeking forgiveness and salvation and but without completely giving in and giving yourself to God. I’m not going to start going to church just yet.”
That secular spirituality suffuses I’ll Never Get Over You, a ballad full of heartbreak and devotion that showcases the unassuming talents of his longtime bandmates Collin Elliot, Shez Sheridan and Dean Beresford. “I wanted a space in the music and space for Colin and Shez to harmonise. Over this last quarter century, we've learned to sing together really good you know, and Deano just does exactly what is needed on the drums, lots of room to breathe. Again, it was a song that arrived fully formed, a gentle ballad that’s maybe the nearest I’ve come to a kind of Velvets feel.”
He describes Do I Really Need To Know, the perennial jealous lover’s anguished question, put to a lovelorn bossa and sweet Philly Soul, as “probably the bravest one on the album. I wanted to make a song like the Delfonics. But you do that and you could end up making some terrible white boy funk. I think we pulled it off. The guitar solo on this is my second favourite solo of mine ever after Open Up Your Door…” Nearly all the solos on the album, we should note are played either on a guitar loaned to him by the late Scott Walker’s family, or his dad’s old Gretsch or the Telecaster than belonged to his friend Duane Eddy. “The album most definitely is a family affair.”
When The Lights Go Out is a sad, sweet song from the Borderlands, in this case both El Paso and Hebden Bridge. “This definitely has that Mexican feel. That South of the border three-chord trick that all the greats used, early Buddy Holly… La Bamba. There comes a time when you just must turn the lights off and trust in the dark and trust in yourself and your character.”
The album closes with a thing of absolute beauty. ‘Tis Night is plangent and otherworldly, the perfect nocturnal valediction to an album of spare beauty, romantic longing, joy and melancholy, and simply one of the most lovely things he has ever recorded. “Again, it just arrived fully formed walking the dogs. It’s played on a very lovely old Epiphone Emperor Regal guitar made in 1948 that's got this distinctive beautiful sound like nothing else…like a glockenspiel or a celeste. It’s a quiet, reflective song, an end of the evening song when it's just you and whoever else is there…”
He remains the only pop star who, like his city, calls you love.
Stuart Maconie
For more information contact Stefan.Hayes@v2benelux.com
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten