LIVE REVIEW: Richard Hawley, Northumbria University, Newcastle, Monday 14 October 2019
It’s long been acknowledged – if not by the music establishment – that Sheffield singer-songwriter Richard Hawley is a national treasure.
This unspoken truism has been the case since the mid-noughties, even before Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys, collecting the Mercury Prize for their debut album in 2006, exclaimed: Someone call 999, Richard Hawley’s been robbed!”
Hawley was on the fringes of Britpop, as guitarist with Longpigs, and late-era Pulp, but it’s as a solo artist that he’s made his name, releasing his first album in 2001. After that Mercury nomination for Coles Corner in 2006 there was a second nomination for 2012’s Standing At the Sky’s Edge, a much darker, heavier album than anything he’d done before. Needless to say, he didn’t win. He didn’t win the Brit Award for Best British Male Solo Artist which he was nominated for either in 2013, but the lack of recognition doesn’t seem to bother him.
Hawley, whose inspiration comes from the city where he was born and his love of ‘50s and ‘60s rockabilly, continues to plough his own furrow, with results that never fail to impress. At the end of May he released Further, his eighth solo record. Much more upbeat than his last couple of offerings, it reached No 3 in the UK charts. Were the masses catching on at last to this wonderful talent?
As part of the tour to promote the record (reviewed here), tonight’s setlist leans heavily on Further, with nine of the 18 songs played tonight drawn from it. The only disappointment was that two of my favourites, My Little Treasures and Not Lonely, were the ones that didn’t make the cut.
The show began with Further’s grungy opening track, and it was clear that Hawley and his regular band – including Shez Sheridan on guitar and Colin Elliott on bass – were on top form, with Hawley’s baritone croon in splendid nick. The frontman was relaxed, sharing banter with the audience, and asking his bandmates to ‘pass that phrasebook’ when there were shout-outs he didn’t quite catch.
Alone and the title track of the new album followed, and then there was a change of pace for a brooding, magnificent Standing At the Sky’s Edge. The skiffle beat of I’m Looking For Someone To Find Me, from the Lady’s Bridge album, was next, followed by Further’s wistful ballad Emilina Says.
Tonight The Streets Are Ours is a song which is steeped in nostalgia, yet absolutely timeless; it could have been written at any point in the past 60 years, and still sound utterly beguiling, and it was up there as one of the high points of this show. Dipping into his rich back catalogue, he gave us another classic in Coles Corner, before returning to new material with the lovely, lilting Midnight Train and Galley Girl, which was much heavier than on the record.
Another Further track, Time Is, featured a fantastic harmonica solo from Clive Mellor, while the penultimate song of the main set, an extended psychedelic version of Down In The Woods, was another contender for highlight of the night, proving – if ever there was any doubt – that this band can rock out, as well as tiptoeing down the path marked deep and soulful.
A two-song encore followed, of There’s A Storm Comin’ from the excellent False Lights From The Land EP and Heart Of Oak, the only song from his previous album Hollow Meadows. Well-earned bows duly taken, Hawley promised he’d see us again “some time”. However long that takes, it can’t be too soon.
