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Just when you had Richard Hawley nailed as one of the more dependably dependable artists around, he orchestrates something of a U-turn.
Not that the new direction is that radically altered from what the croonsome Sheffield-based songwriter has been up to until now – there’s no electro touches or visiting MCs on stage tonight. But for an artist whose previous five albums have mined a narrow if remarkably enduring formula – basically Roy Orbison’s romantic yearning transported to rain-lashed Sheffield with bags of slapback echo and twang, the timeworn interior of the Picturedrome providing a particularly apt surroundings for the resulting time-warp – the darker shades and more expansive musical palette of new album ‘Truelove’s Gutter’ seem like a genuine reinvention.
Tonight’s set comprises largely of new stuff, and deservedly so. The musical saw drone and stop-start guitar strums of opener ‘As The Dawn Breaks’ hang heavy in to air like gloomy (if stunningly pretty) rainclouds, whilst the epic, pulsating ‘Remorse Code’ is peppered with stinging solos that sound like Neil Young playing on Hank Marvin’s kit in King Tubby’s echo chamber. Best of all is ‘For Your Lover Give Some Time’, which Hawley introduces as a slightly sarcastic look at a how a relationship changes over the years. It could just as easily be read as a weary description of a love on its last legs, the protagonist’s half-arsed wows of imminent change – no more smoking, a little less boozing – highlighting just how inescapable the rut’s become. Either way, it’s a breathtaking, totally timeless song that already sounds like a future standard, and welcome as such by the never less than enthusiastic capacity crowd.
Add Hawley’s trademark deadpan humour and the proceedings often resemble the outcome of two starkly contrasting acts – one an achy-hearted musician, the other a foul-mouthed, self-deprecating club comic dedicated to ripping the piss out of the sincerity of the former – colliding into one another, with brilliantly unpredictable results. There are other surprises, too – at one point, when technical glitches delay the start of the truly grand ‘Open Up The Door’, Hawley, having taken in a cacophonous choir of requests from hecklers, bursts into a note-perfect rendition of Elvis classic ‘I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone’. Elsewhere, he conducts a singalong of ‘Happy Birthday’ for an audience member.
“Thank you for listening to all the new stuff”, Hawley quips before ripping into an extended take of the evening last number, the majestic ‘Ocean’ off 2005’s Mercury-nominated ‘Coles Corner’. He shouldn’t worry. Tonight’s rapturously received set proves Hawley’s managed to both breath fresh air into a sound that was at risk of becoming an inflexible straitjacket and taken this audience with him on his new musical adventures.
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