HE’S a patient man in an impatient world. He turns on his television and sees a procession of unhappy people who require instant results — those who want to look ten years younger, those who need their life decluttering, those who want a panel of judges to send them through to the next round. Richard Hawley talks about them as if they’ve lost the plot — symptoms of a world where consumerism has raised expectations to impossible levels. Then he straightens his quiff, places his Guinness on the table and apologises: “Sorry, I’m turning into a moaning old woman.”
If there’s one thing that Hawley, 38-year-old father of three, knows about, it’s biding his time. He spent much of the Eighties in the Sheffield indie stragglers Treebound Story, seemingly content to toil away on rhythm guitar. After they dissolved, he attempted to hold down his only “proper” job. But after nine weeks in HMV — which saw him reprimanded for playing an unsanctioned hip-hop record — he walked. What terrified him the most, he says, is that he didn’t feel like playing his guitar during that whole time.
It was a spell in the Britpop also-rans Longpigs that got him off the dole after ten years. Should you have happened to caught the band live, Hawley was just to the right of the singer Crispin Hunt, dutifully stitching together chords to frame Hunt’s forgettable hysterics.
He also passed through the ranks of Pulp in the band’s debauched final years. Two decades after first writing his own songs, he summoned the nerve to put some on a tape and hand them to the bassist Steve Mackey. The songs Mackey heard were something approaching the finished article — Hawley’s dark, lovelorn balladry recalled the early Sun recordings of Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash. No less of a revelation was Hawley’s voice: a tarry baritone for which the songs seemed made.
Mackey, whose friendship with Hawley stretches back to primary school, recalls: “It was as if the person I’d always known had finally found a way to put himself into song.”
The new album Coles Corner merely underscores the immensity of Hawley’s gift. Ask him to delve into some of its songs and you’ll get a look of bemusement. He doesn’t write, he says. The music just appears in moments of distraction. The orchestral to and fro of the title track came to him one morning when he took his two young boys to the playground. The alternating pushes of the swings prompted the song to write itself in his head.
Not that you’d know it from the romantic sweep of Hawley’s performance, but the current single The Ocean came to him while 20 yards out at sea on a small dinghy in Cornwall. It seems astonishing that these songs, like so much of his output, didn’t already exist in our subconscious — such is the immediacy of their impact. So why did it take so long for their creator to go public?
Bullied at primary school for the hair lip and cleft palate that distinguished him from his peers, he says he never saw himself as frontman material. “At the same time,” he adds, “the music was always there. Always.” This is an understatement. At 6 he knew his way around a guitar. By days a steelworker, Hawley’s father also played: “There was never any question of him telling me, ‘You’ve got to study,’ because as far as he was concerned, I was already studying.”
In his final year at primary school Hawley was tormented for crying when Elvis Presley died. One classmate asked him if he was a mod or a rocker. Quoting John Lennon when asked that question, he said he was a “mocker” — and got a punch in the face. Hawley Sr’s concern for young Richard’s wellbeing meant that before his son started secondary school the two paid a visit to a family friend. Some years before Brendan Ingle’s discovery of Naseem Hamed, the boxing mentor showed the Elvis fan a few self-defence moves. Just in to the new term, Hawley landed a three-week suspension.
“I think there had been a lot of pent-up aggression. This one kid started on me, and the red mist came over me. But no one laid a finger on me again.” Hawley was already writing songs by the time his father booked a busman’s holiday, playing in a band across the beer halls of Germany. He remembers how flattered he felt when at 14 he was deemed good enough to join the tour.
“When I came back, my careers advisor said, ‘What are you going to be?’ and I said, ‘Well, I already am it’. Not in an arrogant way, but I was doing what made me happiest.”
Long reconciled to the fact that “it’s easier to make a living as the f****** ugly one at the back”, Hawley says he harboured no resentment towards the lead singers whose material paled beside his own songs.Of singers he likes, he singles out Robert Plant for attention. In 2003 Plant called to ask Hawley if he might like to play on Plant’s next record. With his own career taking off Hawley declined, but the two got to share a drink when they appeared on Later , two years ago: “He’s a proper role model. No airs and graces. Still goes to see Wolves every Saturday, knows how to have a proper sit-down and a chat.”
Plant’s interest was by no means a fluke. Robbie Williams called a couple of years ago to ask about collaborating on his next album, only to meet the same response. Williams had been obsessed with I’m on Nights, Hawley’s heartrending paean to his father’s exhausting shifts at the steelworks. In the opinion of Scott Walker, too, “his voice is up there with the all-time greats”.
Hawley even managed briefly to briefly lure the Shadows’ Hank Marvin out of retirement, upon completion of an instrumental, I’m Absolutely Hank Marvin. “I sent him the song, with an accompanying letter saying, ‘Rather than me doing my imitation of you, is there any chance you can play on it?’ ” A while later a package came back from Australia, where Marvin lives. “It’s probably the last recorded song Hank Marvin will ever play on. I want to put it out in a way which does it justice, but I’m not sure how. If you’ve any ideas, let me know.”
But it’s Nancy Sinatra for whom Hawley reserves his warmest adjectives. After he and Jarvis Cocker contributed two songs for last year’s comeback album, Sinatra asked Hawley to support her on the accompanying shows. Noticing that, as he puts it, “the stuffing was coming out of teddy”, Sinatra asked about his sleeping arrangements. Hawley said his band’s budget meant he had to sleep on the tour bus. Using her own money, she booked him into hotels for the rest of the tour.
“She’s like the big sister I never had. At Christmas, we got a huge package through the post. It looked like a load of hat boxes — which, when you assembled them, turned into a snowman. This was something Nancy and her daughter had made from scratch, and filled with sweets for our kids.”
For Hawley, it all comes back to patience. If Nancy Sinatra can find time to make Christmas presents for his children, that’s something we can all learn from. “Mind you,” he says, “I’ve got a half a mind to send her the dentist bills.”
- Coles Corner (Mute) is out on Monday
