“You read the news now and it’s so depressing, so grim,” says Richard Hawley. “My mum was saying it feels like it did during the Cuban Missile Crisis, driven to the edge of an abyss by idiotic world leaders, you know?”
He takes a second to stir some sugar into his coffee before looking up and continuing: “But if you live in this city and wander its streets, you’ll hear this word over and over again – love. It’s not used in a sickly, sort of chocolate box sense. It’s often quite sincere, and sometimes it can be disarming and charming at the same time. It could be two blokes my age referring to each other as ‘love’, and I just think there’s something beautiful about that.”
On a drizzly Monday afternoon, we’re seated in the upstairs room of Marmadukes Café on Norfolk Row and the 57-year-old Pitsmoor-born songwriter is discussing the naming of his latest album, In This City They Call You Love, the ninth record in a solo career spanning 25 years.
Its title also provides part of the chorus for the album’s fifth track, ‘People’, an ode to the hardy individuals who have shaped and continue to embody the city’s resilient character. It is vintage Richard Hawley: poignant, nostalgic and almost custom-made to stir a South Yorkshire soul, taking the listener on a melancholic tour of meandering rivers, shivering hills and roaring furnaces.
I venture that the song’s first live outing in front of a local audience, circa 10,000 at Don Valley Bowl in August, will be a special one. “Every single one of them will understand what it means, I know that much,” is the reply. “It didn’t take me long to write – the best ones never do – and on the day I wrote it, it was my Uncle Eric’s birthday; he was a steelworker who worked with my dad. He’s still with us, the last of a generation that I knew, and that was just flitting through my mind. It’s an almost immediate process for me at times – a bit like capturing lightning or trying to hold on to water in your hands, and you’ve just got to get it written down while it’s still there.”
The album opener, ‘Two For His Heels’, sees a continuation of the brooding, stomping blues-rock that dominated previous album Further, but seasoned Hawley listeners will notice a conscious stripping back of the weightier production, moving away from the distortion pedals and placing the artist’s sonorous vocals front and centre. It’s a change of tack that becomes more pronounced as you move through the album’s 12 tracks: a sense of space is omnipresent, allowing for a more thorough exploration of voice and melody.
“It was just to see if I could do it,” he explains simply. “I suppose as an older guy writing these vignettes, you cram in as much information as possible in a short space of time, which is really the art of writing a rock or a pop song. You only have so much time to capture people’s attention, especially nowadays. I don’t worry about that too much, though.” There’s a pause and an amused chuckle. “The record label made me laugh the other day. They said to me, ‘Could we talk to you about your TikTok account?’, and I just replied, ‘No.’”
I have to stifle a laugh myself, momentarily caught up in a vision of Richard Hawley performing some sort of contrived dance on TikTok to promote a release. It would never happen, obviously, not least because he’s wary about the impact of social media on society. “If social media was a place, you’d never visit. You’d never go, ‘Come on, kids, get in the car, we’re going to Social Media. It’d just be this barren land filled with unpleasant people.”
With four decades of a successful music career behind him and shows that seem to only get bigger each year, Hawley has certainly earned the right to set his own terms with labels and focus on the craft. As he succinctly puts it: “I know what I’m doing. I’m 57 years old now, so who’s going to tell me otherwise? That’s not me being difficult or grouchy, but I think there’s an understanding that there’s no need to meddle with the recipe. I do that enough myself.”
But if you live in this city and wander its streets, you’ll hear this word over and over again – love.
But was there a slight trepidation in laying the instrumentation so bare compared to previous records? “When making a record, if you feel like you’re walking out to sea and can’t quite feel the bottom, you’re probably in the right sort of space. It wasn’t a commercial decision. I always go with questions like, does it sound good? Does it feel right? I don’t know about you, but when I try on new clothes, I don’t look in the mirror first. I see how it feels. It’s the same with music.”
In This City They Call You Love is Hawley’s eighth solo album to make a direct reference to his hometown. Embodying the Yorkshireman paradox of a straight-talking, no-nonsense personality matched with a friendly, convivial nature, he’s a natural orator and gives thoughtful responses on most topics (although it’s often clear when it’s time to move on). However, it’s when discussing the Steel City that you’ll find the artist at his most eloquent. When I ask why he thinks Sheffield has proven such fertile ground for his songwriting, the answer is instantaneous. “It’s people. I’m a big history reader, especially local stuff, and whatever has been thrown at us, the indomitable spirit of Sheffield people is something I’ve always been in awe of. We survived the horrors of Thatcher and what came after that, and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to get involved with Standing at the Sky’s Edge, because I can see it happening again. There’s a spirit of independence and resilience here that’s always inspired me. When I leave, I miss the spirit of the people here. Sometimes it takes travelling the world to realise how special a place is, or it did for me anyway.”
With inspiration on tap from his surroundings, it’s perhaps no surprise that Hawley’s such a voracious songwriter, telling me that the next album has already been named and the songs written. Many of the ideas, he says, come to him while walking his dogs through one of the city’s local parks. “As long as I can move, I’ll always have a dog. We’ve got 420-plus municipal parks and public spaces and woodlands, so there are many places to escape to if you live here. Not bad for a post-industrial shithole, eh? But there’s always somewhere to disappear to, to take refuge, and I’ll take the dogs and go down into the woods. There I’m surrounded by the curves and ellipses and arches of nature; it has a subtle but immediate effect on the mind. Humans aren’t meant to live in square boxes, surrounded by straight lines.”
Not one for self-congratulatory pats on the back, it comes as no surprise that Hawley took some persuading to bring out Now Then: The Best of Richard Hawley last year (“I couldn’t do a greatest hits because I haven’t fucking got any!”). While waxing lyrical about former glories isn’t his style, I am able to coax out a bit of reflection through asking about formative experiences en-route to becoming one of Sheffield’s foremost songsmiths. He speaks of Sunday afternoons in St Cuthberts Social Club with his dad and a much older crowd of friends, listening intently to tales steeped in wisdom and dry wit. Barry Hines would come into another local watering hole, Firth Park Working Men’s Club, to swap stories with the little mesters and craftsmen unwinding after a long day’s work. It instilled a deep love for storytelling which, when combined with a strong family music pedigree, remains as the driving force behind his prodigious output.
“I’d play with our Frankie at the Pheasant on Lane Top for years,” he adds, referencing his uncle, the musician Frank White, a hugely influential singer and blues guitarist in his own right. “Looking back, that was nuts. I’d finish school on a Friday and walk up the hill to the Pheasant and play rock ‘n’ roll with him before carrying on with the weekend and going back to school. They sold Magnet Ale at that pub, so the place could quickly turn into a fucking zoo. It was a good learning curve at that age, do you know what I mean?”
While there are some big arena shows and festival slots on the upcoming album tour, you get the impression that those types of shows in busy backstreet boozers will always reserve a special place in his heart. As if to confirm this, Hawley recently played an intimate live show in the backroom of a small Irish pub, The Grapes on Trippet Lane, to promote his compilation album, and he readily admits that he feels more at home in those spaces than a 10,000-plus arena. “It might seem a perverse thing, but you want to see the white of people’s eyes. That intimacy goes hand in hand with the music, I think. I’ve always felt very much like an outsider in modern music, like a salmon swimming upstream. But people are still turning up to see us in these big venues, which I think is amazing, so I’ve never stopped. It’s been hard work but a lot of fun.”
I wonder aloud if that in itself is a key reason behind his longevity as an artist – a refreshing sense of authenticity in a modern music scene increasingly dominated by commercialism and fleeting trends? There’s a brief moment of consideration before the response arrives. “Well, if you’ve been around a long time, you’ve got to stick to the plan. I’m much more relaxed in my own skin than I ever was. I don’t want to make too much out of the age thing because, as my grandma used to say, ‘health is wealth’. If you’re well and healthy, you can continue doing what the fuck you want. But fundamentally, I think people just want to hear you sing your blues. So, that’s what I’m going to carry on doing.”
I reckon that’s a fitting note to leave it on. We make our way down the stairs and after thanking him for his time, I remind him of the obligation mentioned when we first met at the door – to bring his wife back a fresh loaf from the in-house bakery.
“Oh aye, good point! Thanks for that, Joe. Ta-ra, love.”
In This City They Call You Love is out on 31 May via BMG Records. Richard Hawley’s UK tour finishes with a headline slot at Don Valley’s Rock N Roll Circus on 29 August.
Words: Joseph Food