Richard Hawley review: Sheffield star shines at Olympia in Dublin
A file picture of Richard Hawley who played the Olympia in Dublin on Friday, May 24. (Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images)
★★★★☆
Here’s a welcome rarity. The usual reaction at any kind of concert where an artist decides to preview material that hasn’t been released yet is a polite but noticeably exit towards the bar and/or the facilities.
Steel City Serenader Richard Hawley has a marvellous new album out this week, In This City They Call You Love, although as he quips, “They call you other things in Sheffield as well”, which most to the sardine-tight crowd in the Olympia have yet to hear. That doesn’t stop him playing several songs from it, but nobody moves, because they’re great and Hawley is a mesmeric performer.
Resplendent in a pink-flecked western shirt, dark glasses and perfectly quiffed hair – like a young Elvis on a night out – Hawley is canny enough to surround himself with a crack band who are on fire on this first night of the tour, apart from a warm-up in Wales. With a guitarist either side of him, including long time cohort Shez Sheridan, and his own making three, it’s a sumptuous orchestra more than a mere ‘rock band’, with more pedals on the floor than the aftermath of an explosion at the Raleigh factory.
Orchestral is also the word for his remarkable canon of material. Opener ‘She Brings The Sunlight’ sports psychedelic lightshow and a paint-striping solo. ‘Open Up Your Door’ earns a roar for its first chord alone and proceeds to fill out to a sound so widescreen it could be directed by Cecil B DeMille.
Hawley could have played anything from that enviable back catalogue and everyone would have been smiling but to hear him do the Morrissey-ish ‘Tonight The Streets Are Ours” was a special treat, as was ‘Don’t Stare At The Sun’ with its swirling guitar solo that shares some common ground with U2’s ‘Love Is Blindness’.
As he’s said many times before, Hawley loves being in Ireland and enjoyed himself interacting with the faithful whether it was mishearing one woman’s age as 15 (“That’s the end of that!”) or questioning someone’s request for ‘God Save The King’ (“Where are you from?!?”).
He dedicates a lovely ‘Heavy Rain’, another instant classic from the new album, to his departed pal Steve Mackey and then, impossibly, gets even better for the encore. A pin dropping would have sounded like a fire alarm during a hushed ‘People’ and then he unleashed the full croon, which wraps the listener in velvet, for a mighty ‘The Ocean’.
“Dublin, you never let us down,” he tells us, but really it’s Hawley who never disappoints.
