Richard Hawley
3Olympia, Dublin
★★★★★
“He’s a hopeless romantic,” my friend Stevie whispers after the first of a superb set of forlorn love songs from Richard Hawley. I’d agree, if he weren’t so damn good at it. He’s a peerless romantic.
With so much love in the air, it could make for a night as schmaltzy and saccharine as a Poundland Valentine’s card, full of sentiment and scent as cheap as patchouli, but Hawley is from Sheffield, in the Republic of South Yorkshire, “a city where they call you love”, a far-from-stainless northern English metropolis built on steel but tempered by self-deprecation, without the swagger of Liverpool or Manchester, whose “ways are not the smooth ways of the south, but hard, and used to keener weather”, in the words of the Yorkshire Irish poet Seán Jennett.
“I love Sheffield,” Hawley says of his muse, “but it’s a postindustrial shithole. When Storm Amy blew through it, it caused millions of pounds of improvements.”
He loves Dublin, too, flying in a day early to spend a night in the Lord Edward pub up the road. He’s heading back there after the gig, he says, to buy a pint and 2,000 straws. “Ireland is the only country apart from Sheffield that, when I leave, a tear falls,” he says. But he has our measure too. “Have you no second homes to go to?” he asks towards the end of an epic, two-hour set.
READ MORE
Hawley’s lyrics are wry, his wit dry, his voice a melodic if melancholy baritone and his band one of the tightest you’ll find, supplemented this evening by a classical quartet. These are love songs, with strings attached, lush with a louche delivery.
Hawley has long celebrated his native city in song, and at the 3Olympia on Wednesday night he plays his Mercury nominated fourth album, Coles Corner, in its entirety to mark its 20th anniversary, before cutting loose to showcase his band’s range.
Coles Corner is to Sheffield what the Clerys clock is to Dublin, a famous meeting place for first dates, similarly immortalised by Philip Chevron and his band The Radiators from Space in Under Clery’s Clock.
It’s a fair bet that this gig is not a first encounter for most of the audience but another night to remember in a long and beautiful relationship. I’ve seen Hawley at Vicar Street and in the Iveagh Gardens, but the faded grandeur of the Olympia theatre is the perfect fit for an artist drawn to nostalgia and chipped glamour.
The singer introduces Just Like the Rain as the first song he wrote, on his 16th birthday, “living proof that I was, am and always will be a miserable f***er”. Far from it. He is great crack, and actually it’s an up-tempo number with jangling guitars.
Water is a recurring image – as in his country-music homage (Wading Through) The Waters of My Time – but, Sheffield being landlocked, most falls from the sky: “My tears hit the ground just like the rain.” It climaxes in The Ocean, the album’s first single, which builds into a tsunami of sound, the string section, guitars, drums and double bass swelling and sweeping all before them. It’s reminiscent of Scott Walker, who rated Hawley’s voice as “up there with the all-time greats”.
“We used to play that at the end of the set for f***ing good reason,” Hawley says as he gets his breath back. He is full of yarns. Paul Weller gave him the 1963 Rickenbacker guitar he is playing but advised him to “stop playing all that ’50s shit. No, Paul, I won’t.” He is unashamedly retro.
Hawley grew up in a home full of music. His father played guitar and worked as a gas fitter alongside the Sheffield singer-songwriter Joe Cocker, who became Richard’s godfather and used to sing him the traditional song Who’s Going to Shoe Your Pretty Feet as a lullaby. “Now I sing it to my children,” says Hawley. Thinking the album was done and about to go on tour, he recorded it for his wife to play to them in his absence, but when the band heard it they insisted it be added to Coles Corner.
The second part of the set kicks off in high gear with the stirring, soaring anthem Tonight the Streets Are Ours. “You can dance to this next one,” Hawley says about I’m Looking for Someone to Find Me, adding, after a beat, “if you’re a knob”.
After the slower, melancholy Don’t Stare at the Sun the band shows its mastery of a heavier rock sound on Standing at the Sky’s Edge, then a more psychedelic style on Deep Space, and the more melodic Prism in Jeans and the simply beautiful Open Up Your Door, a crowd favourite.
“It just says Richard Hawley on the ticket, but that’s misleading,” the singer says. “Lots of other talents are involved.” He adds, after another beat, “Sadly, they can’t be here.”
The encore is a love song he wrote for his wife of 37 years, a psychiatric nurse, the exquisite For Your Lover Give Some Time. He then straps on a guitar given to him by Lisa Marie Presley, American musical royalty even though he is not normally a fan of royalty. (Cue cheers.) He once played it on stage with Shirley Bassey, who made an unrepeatable joke, NSFW unless you’re a singing legend. The show ends with Heart of Oak – a showstopper, aptly enough.
This is a night not of stainless steel but of sterling silver. And Hawley and his band are master cutlers.
