Richard Hawley: I'll never forget the Irish venues that backed me early on
Richard Hawley, photographed in Sheffield by Dean Chalkley.
“It’s just something you kind of take for granted. All of us get pretty depressed reading the news, especially of late, and it just occurred to me that the people in the city where I was born and raised just say ‘love’ to each other. It’s a very northern English thing. ‘Alright, love?’ Sheffield is a very friendly place.”
Richard Hawley, the Steel City Sinatra, a man who can knock out a heart-swelling ballad that wouldn’t shame Roy Orbison before breakfast, is talking about the title of his latest record, the sumptuous In This City They Call You Love.
It’s not the first time he’s named an album for his locale (“Let me tell you, it won’t be the last either!”) as the blessed who are familiar with masterpieces such as 2005’s Coles Corner or 2009’s Truelove’s Gutter can attest.
Even if Taylor Swift was to release an album of his songs tomorrow and untold riches were to rain down on his bequiffed head, he'd still stay where his heart is. “I’d make her come here,” Hawley reckons.
He didn’t have to travel far for the title of lead single ‘Two For His Heels’ either.
“There’s a 100-plus-year old social club next door and it’s basically just full of funny old blokes pissing and moaning. They play cribbage and say to each other, ‘One for the jacks and two for his heels.’ That to me just sounded like surrealist poetry. I took that as a starting point and imagined, almost like a fairy tale, a couple eloping from this horrible old drunk man.”
We’ve already mentioned Orbison, and another touchstone in Hawley’s sound is the peerless work of Scott Walker, the producer and songwriter who died in 2019. Richard has a story about that too.
“I worked with Scott on Pulp’s last album, We Love Life [Hawley played guitar and lap steel on the 2001 record]. That’s where I first met him but we had a really bad start. I knew he was a stickler for time, I’d been told ‘Don’t be late’ because he was old school.
“I was supposed to turn up at about 11am but there was a record shop next door to the studio. They were having a closing down sale with all these amazing EPs by Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent and Little Walter, stuff that I didn’t have, selling for buttons. I got completely absorbed and then looked at my watch.”
“I arrived in the studio out of breath with a big pile of old records. Scott was at the mixing desk with his baseball cap pulled down. ‘Richard, you’re late.’ ‘I know, but I’ve got a really good reason.’ He had a look and went, ‘Hey, I played on this record!’ It was an Eddie Cochran single, ‘Little Angel’, that he’d played bass on when he was 15 or 16 and his mood changed. He said, ‘Shake my hand because I shook Eddie’s hand’.
“His manager Kathy got in touch as we were starting this record. Scott’s will had been sorted out and he’d asked his daughter Lee to give me a guitar. It was the mark of a very good friendship. This 65 Olympic white Telecaster turned up a few days later and I used it loads on the album. I’ve got my Dad’s guitar, which I have near me all the time, and Duane Eddy gave me a guitar. These were gifts that were given with such love. It was meaningful for me to have those things.”
There’s been a lot going on for Hawley lately. The musical based on his songs, Standing At The Sky’s Edge, is currently running in the West End, he put out one of the best ‘Best ofs’ that money can buy last year in the form of Now Then, and there’s also a fantastic compilation of some of his favourite wax, 28 Little Bangers From Richard Hawley’s Jukebox, on Ace Records.
“That’s a tiny selection of 5000-plus seven-inch singles I’ve got. Weird, off-the-beaten-track stuff I’m obsessed with collecting. Creating music on a seven-inch single is a specific art. Compressing so much information into such a short space fascinates me. There was some kind of alchemy going on, trying to create something commercial and ending up creating something else instead. Chasing lightning.” There’s also the not inconsiderable matter of the tour.
“I’m 57 now, Pat, and I made a big decision quite recently actually. I thought about it a lot during lockdown. Do I really need, want, whatever, to keep playing? Maybe I should just sit and watch the river go by and be with the missus. So I sat by the river with the missus for a bit… and then I got in the van again pretty quick!” Hawley’s howls of laughter continue as he questions management’s odd decision with regard to the itinerary. “My manager needs his head looking at because the first two dates on the tour are in Dublin! Me and the boys are just overjoyed. I’ll drink Guinness any day of the week, the trouble is we might not get on the flight to Glasgow!”
Good King Richard has nothing but fond memories of playing in Ireland. “I’ll never ever forget the people that backed me early on, places like Whelan’s and Róisín Dubh in Galway. There are hundreds of stories that you couldn’t publish but I remember we played the cathedral in Kilkenny on the last acoustic tour and we’d already clocked this pub at the bottom of the hill [Ó Riada’s, possibly]. I’d had a test pint during the day and the Guinness was off the map.
“We finished about 10:20 and this priest told us we had to be in the pub before twenty to eleven because they close the door to keep all the eejits out, so we belted it down the hill on those small steps. This priest with all his cassocks flying was running much faster than us and then he veered off to the right and I thought we were going to beat him. We got there and of course the priest was at the bar, cool as a cucumber, with three pints!”
He had the Lord on his side, I offer to Hawley, who’s still laughing about at least one story that “doesn’t involve lawyers or the Garda” as we say our farewells.
- Richard Hawley plays the Olympia in Dublin on Friday, May 24, and Saturday, May 25
