Every evening under the clock at London’s Waterloo station, amongst the weary commuters and lost tourists, there’s a stream of couples meeting before they head off into the night. Thousands of people have met here over the years. Greeted by a loved one, the fear of being stood up is postponed for another night. This evening, Gigwise is making its way across Waterloo station, trying to avoid a head on collision with a cluster of French tourists. If Gigwise doesn’t get its skates on it risks standing somebody up…
Last autumn, Richard Hawley, erstwhile Longpigs guitarist and one-time Pulp member, released an album, ‘Coles Corner’, which received lavish praise for its invention, timelessness and dexterity. The album spawned a fine collection of singles, and a high place in many end of year polls. The title track, complete with luxurious Scott Walker-esque vocals and Ennio Moricone aping strings, finds the singer in his native Sheffield, standing on the corner where the old Coles department store used to be. He waits for his loved one “with a smile and a flower in her hair,” only to walk home alone and find “loneliness hanging in the air.”
The Coles Corner liner notes describe how every city has a place where people have been meeting for years. This particular evening, Gigwise accepts defeat in meeting Richard Hawley, puts some money into a phone box, and makes its apologies.
With a voice as baritone on the phone as it is on record, Hawley is an eloquent, if sometimes defensive interviewee. Quietly pleased with how Coles Corner has been received, he distances himself from it being interpreted as a confessional record. “I suppose bittersweet does about summarise what my songs are,” he considers, before adding with a touch of resignation, “That’s what the rest of the press say so…I don’t really look to categorise my work.”
Hawley has a string of live dates coming up over the next few months, including a UK tour which starts on the 18th of May, and the V Festival towards the end of August. Given how important Sheffield is to him – mostly as a source of inspiration - his reluctance to spend months on the road when he has a family, is understandable.
“It is difficult to balance your work life with life in Sheffield,” he explains. “It’s about keeping a perspective and learning to take a step back and trying to please yourself.” Switching into rock elder statesman mode, he adds, “A lot of bands don’t look after themselves, and look where they end up? It’s their own lives, if they can’t write music for themselves, then who are they writing for?”
Hawley should know. When the Longpigs split in 1997, after an acrimonious US tour, he found himself with a blinding hangover, and a spiralling drink problem. He described himself to one journalist as being, “a complete gibbering wreck.” The excesses of the road and Hawley’s introspective character nearly made him quit the industry for good. Gentle coercion from his Sheffield mates, particularly Jarvis Cocker, convinced him to persevere.
The UK music scene would be a lot poorer without Hawley. A self titled mini album came out in 2001, followed by the startling Late Night Final, effectively kick-starting the critical juggernaut which now marks his releases. Gigwise challenges you to find a bad Richard Hawley review. “It’s important to know when you’re getting jaded,” Hawley sighs. “You have to be careful not to turn into a complete gump through overwork.” Gigwise isn’t entirely sure what a gump is, but it doesn’t sound like a good thing, so we move on.
He describes the transition from band to solo artist as “surprisingly easy.” Given the gulf in sound between The Longpigs and Hawley’s own work, it makes his rejuvenation all the more surprising. He won’t be drawn on his creative process, despite the feeling that Coles Corner was an epiphany for him.
In his Sheffield drawl he says the title track was written while, “Pushing my son on a swing in the park. It just came to me. It was written halfway through a spell of stuff for the album.” As an insight into his thought processes it’s not much. Maybe there’s a hidden metaphor about momentum in there, Gigwise ponders. Gigwise then tackles the inspiration for its favourite Hawley track, The Nights Are Cold, from Late Night Final.
Hawley isn’t playing ball. “I write these songs for me, I’m not writing them for anyone else,” he says defensively. “The Nights Are Cold was written in half hour, one take.” Gigwise thinks the song, one of Hawley’s most wistful, draws on a Camus-esque existential power: “The fate of man is random so don’t look down, the towns and the cities are all burning down,” it goes. “Let my life and all of its storms begin to blow, take me here or there I don’t care where I go...” he croons. It ends ominously with, “Beauty is a dark cloud when you’re alone.”
Answer or no answer, it beats Richard Ashcroft droning on in his tiresome, pseudo-intellectual way about the blindingly obvious. So Hawley retains his cloak of secrecy, but there are some answers. He is wilful in not betraying his Sheffield roots. “My family have lived in this city for 250 year,” he says. “Why would I want to be anywhere else? I don’t want to move to London, my family are all here. Why do that?”
He’s even more forthright about the current crop of Sheffield bands breaking through. “There probably is too much pressure on the young Sheffield bands. But the thing that pisses me off is that it’s been fucking ten years since the last lot of Sheffield acts broke through, the Longpigs included. The city is producing amazing music but most of it doesn’t get heard. It’s a fucking shame.”
So Hawley’s creativity and determination to do things his way stems from an excess of civic pride. Coles Corner is a love letter for Sheffield. Asked why so many bands draw on the city for inspiration, he says, “They’re writing about their own lives, it’s just honest y’know. Better than writing some shit about somewhere they’ve never been to…” Fake tales of San Francisco indeed.
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