Richard Hawley: 'Music kept me on the straight and narrow'

“It’s basically 25 years since I’ve been a solo artist – a quarter of a century; it’s 25 years since I got married; 25 years since I gave up the drugs, and it just seemed like a good time to put a collection together,” the 56-year-old explains. “When I went through the songs I thought it’s actually not a bad idea, so I’ve got to give credit to them.

“Colin compiled it and I was basically a lazy git, I suggested a few alterations but I’m terrible at listening back to things. I don’t ever look back and I rarely listen to anything that I’ve done. My mind is always on moving forward all the time, so it definitely had to be other people compiling it.

“But I’m glad it exists,” he says. “I listened to it when I got the vinyl test pressings – I’ve not heard the CD because I hate sound of them, I’ve never, ever bought a CD in my life – but it’s a good listen. I try not to get too sentimental about it.”

By the point at which Hawley released his first, eponymous mini album on Setanta in 2001, he had already been playing guitar in the bands Treebound Story, Longpigs and Pulp. All the time, he’d been setting aside material that didn’t fit any of those groups. “I’ve been writings songs since I was a little boy and it was kind of parallel to everything else I was doing,” he says. “Occasionally it would be a necessary thing to contribute towards somebody else’s song – I co-wrote quite a few things with Jarvis (Cocker), in Treebound Story we all wrote together – but the kind of songs that I was coming up with they weren’t something that was hip.

“I was never a fully fledged indie kid and I was never really a pop writer; I couldn’t define what it was that I came up with, so I just didn’t mention it,” he says, laughing. “I just kept it very, very quiet. There were some people who knew that I wrote, like Jarvis and Steve Mackey, bless him, and dad and my family, and they used to nag me to do this because it’s good, but I wasn’t really keen.”

Eventually, he says, a frank conversation with his father, Dave, himself a well-known guitarist on the Sheffield music scene, persuaded him to reveal his songs to the world. “He just said, ‘Son, don’t get to 60 and look back and you haven’t done it because you’ll just regret it’. So, in a non-arrogant way, I’m really glad that I have. It’s weird but it’s the one thing I kept completely quiet and to myself, but that is the thing that’s kind of saved me.”

The warm and gentle tone of Hawley’s early records “undoubtedly” reflected the influence of country, blues and rockabilly that had been handed down by his father, he acknowledges. However, he says: “I’ve always been very keen not to just make pastiches because there’s no point to doing that. There’s always been another element to the songs, I think, that is difficult to put your finger on as to why they work. I don’t think they sound old. That was the funny thing about listening to the songs that were 25 years old, they didn’t feel like that, and if I listen to something in the charts from the same period of time, it’s dated.”

The song that Hawley wrote about his father, My Little Treasures, from his 2019 album Further, is included in the best of. He says Dave, his grandfather, Albert, who played the violin, and his uncle Frank White, “a fabulous guitarist”, inspired him to follow a musical path. “They all influenced me,” he says. “It wasn’t something I wanted to do for a career; it was something that all the family do, get together and sing and play. They were all in bands back in the day, and Frank continued until his death, he’d play three or four times a week.

“I was very lucky to have that because where I was brought up wasn’t a nice place. It was pretty heavy in those areas, music kept me out of a lot of s***, it kept me on the straight-and-narrow. I used to practice my guitar religiously, and in the end that guitar ended up being my shovel that dug me out of that particular hole.”

If Hawley’s third record, Lowedges, proved a “turning point album” in the development of more of a band sound (“It helps you not disappear up your own a***,” he says), by Coles Corner, he was hitting his stride. The first to two of his albums to be nominated for the Mercury Prize, it was a sizable commercial success.

The title song, named after a Sheffield landmark where courting couples once met, is one of numerous examples from his catalogue that mention his home city. While he decries what the council has done to the city centre – “They’ve ruined it,” he says, “we lost John Lewis, which was a terrible crime, all the department stores have gone, and a lot of the vibe of the independence of Sheffield has changed, the huge corporations are allowed to proliferate, and we’ve got a serious problem with drugs and street drinkers” – he still sees the wider place as inherently romantic.

“The beauty of Sheffield is its people and the parks, we have 420-plus municipal spaces, woodlands and walks, we’re right next door to the Peak District which is why there’s a lot of climbers, hang gliders and walkers that maybe came here to go to university and stayed. It’s a really rich culture, Sheffield. If you come here, it gets under your skin and a lot of people stay. I’m never going to leave until they carry me out in a box, I love it.”

Hawley might have become a bigger name by this point, but he has always remained defiantly unstarry. “I always hated the pop star stuff; people being treated differently, I loathed that,” he says. “When we play concerts I’m aware of the riggers and the people that make the food, the hat-check girl, the people on the door, doormen, bouncers, security. Every part of a concert goes towards it working, and without those people it doesn’t work. I’m just the numpty on stage playing guitar.

“That somehow fame entitles you to treat people badly? I loathe that. If I ever see it, I will call it out – and I have done. It’s got me in a lot of s***, to be honest, but I will call it out. I don’t like it, none of us do.”

By Lady’s Bridge, Hawley and his band were selling more than 100,000 copies in the UK, but in hindsight he sees it as the end of a chapter. Its successor, Truelove’s Gutter, was noticeably more stripped-back and sombre in tone. “It definitely felt like I’d gone as far as I could go with that multi-layering thing that I did at that point,” he says. “I wanted to get quite serious and open it out a lot.

“I guess by that point, the confidence not just in myself as a writer and a player, the confidence in us as a band, I felt we could achieve a lot more. I didn’t expect everything that happened with Coles Corner to happen, it just rocketed and it was like holding on to the back end of a jet fighter at the time, ‘woah, where the hell’s this come from?’ I definitely didn’t expect that level of success at all, then Lady’s Bridge cemented that.

“That was a hard record to make because that was when Dad was dying, he passed away halfway through making that and it wasn’t an easy record to make, but I tried to be as positive as I could be. Also, when I said to Dad, ‘Look, I’m just going to pack it in; I’ll sit with you and help you out’ and he said, ‘If you stop, I will haunt you forever’. I didn’t really have a lot of choice,” he laughs.

With his contract at Mute Records up, Hawley moved to Parlophone for his seventh album, Standing At The Sky’s Edge. Released in 2012, it’s arguably his angriest record, reflecting his fury that the Conservatives were back in government, promising years of austerity. “It was dark,” he says. “When Thatcher took over I was 11 years old, it was just before I went to comprehensive school, and I could see it happening again and I really felt for the kids. If you’re young, you’ve got a lot of hope – a lot of it is probably from naivety – but for young people to be devastated by austerity and not being invested in is horrible.

“I’d lived through it. If you were a northern girl or boy when the Tories took over in ’79, you were definitely not part of their plans. We’ve seen the contempt that they show us with HS2 decision, that is what they think of us, and anyone in the North of England that votes for them is really misguided because they don’t care at all.

“In Scotland, they’re starting to wake up. They’re starting to realise that the SNP only has one idea, which is independence, beyond that they’ve got nothing to offer the Scottish people.

“We need to get these (Tories) out, they are horrendous people. The big clue for all of us should have been how they behaved during lockdown. A terrifying global pandemic, where thousands and thousands of people lost their lives, and they didn’t see it as that, they saw it as an opportunity to make money and that’s despicable. They’re unforgivable people; I’m surprised that they’ve managed to hang on to power as long as they have. They haven’t got a moral bone in their bodies...they just see everything in terms of pounds, shillings and pence, and I really feel for the young people now, they’re thrown on a scrap heap before they’ve even started, it’s awful.”

In 2014, Hawley wrote his first film soundtrack, to accompany the documentary Love Is All, which incorporated clips from the Yorkshire Film Archive. He says: “Any kind of film work is a completely different process to making an album, but to be honest, I’ve got away with murder, really. All I do is give people permission to plunder my back catalogue...I did contribute certain things, but it’s often people who like what I do. The Love Is All thing, that was Kim Longinotto, she was lovely to work with. She had this idea to trace the history of the screen kiss, which I thought was a really lovely idea, and some of the footage was from the 1800s and even before that, almost as far back as the American Civil War. I just liked the idea of that, and she’s come up with some imagery and I’d just suggest one of my songs. I wrote a couple of songs for that, but it was generally speaking older material.”

Hawley might have written his next studio album Hollow Meadows while he was suffering a broken leg and slipped disc, but he says once he’d got going, it wasn’t an arduous record to make. “If you want to join those two things together, they were just things that happened, I recovered from them and made an album. I don’t think they’re connected with it.”

Its 2019 follow-up, Further, was a more becalmed affair, befitting where he found himself in his early fifties. He says: “I definitely feel I have to write what you feel when you feel it, and it would be false of me to try and write from the perspective of a 22-year-old guy; I’m not, I’m 56, and I actually like that. The new stuff I’ve been writing is even older. I don’t expect younger people to get it, I’m not writing for them, I’m writing for myself, I guess, ultimately, but you have to be yourself.

“That’s the great art of life, the goal, to learn to be comfortable in your own skin and to learn to be yourself, and hopefully that isn’t something abominable. I don’t want to turn out like Pol Pot or something. I think Gandhi was attributed the quote ‘Be the person you want the universe to be’. Well, that works, unless you’re Adolf Hitler. I’m very wary of hippies or any kind of stuff like that, but to be comfortable in your own skin is something worth pursuing. To find inner peace and to be confident without being arrogant, and to just be happy sitting still.”

In recent years, Hawley’s music has been used in a number of films and TV programmes, including Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse’s popular BBC Two show Gone Fishing. In 2019, Sheffield Theatres first staged the musical Standing At The Sky’s Edge, based on his songs. It was revived last year and transferred to the Olivier Theatre in London, where it went on to win several top awards. It’s due to transfer to the West End in February 2024.

Despite initial reservations – “I hate musicals,” he says, “all that wafting about, the jazz hands nonsense” – he came around to the idea when his wife Helen pointed out that actually he liked Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Oliver! and Fiddler on the Roof.

“The more I thought about, it was an area that I was deeply uncomfortable about, and I felt well, that’s actually the place you should be,” he says. “You should put yourself in positions where it’s going to be a challenge, it was not going to be easy to do, and it was the right decision – like going solo in the first place. I felt like a cat with its fur rubbed the wrong way. It felt like the wrong thing to do, so I knew instinctively it was the right thing to do.”

However, he adds: “I don’t want to take any credit where I don’t deserve it (for the show’s success). Tom Deering was the arranger, what he did with the songs was phenomenal. Like I said, I’m just the numpty that stands there playing the guitar, I get way too much credit; the other folks who’ve made that possible deserve the credit, really. It ended up winning two Olivier Awards. I felt very much a degree of imposter syndrome, I didn’t deserve to be there, but they did.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Hawley says he has never watched Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, despite his songs being featured in all six series. He is, however, pleased to be associated with the show. “My brother-in-law Lee Radforth is a keen fisherman and he watches it religiously and he says, ‘You’d really enjoy it, Rich’. I don’t want to indulge myself, but it’s quite a nice thing that they use the tunes,” he says.

“Those two, I’ve got a huge respect for. As comedians and artists, I think they’re phenomenal. So it’s a nice feeling that somebody involved in that – I don’t know whether it’s Bob or Paul or whether it’s their producer or somebody else who likes my stuff, but it’s a nice honour.”

Now Then: The Very Best of Richard Hawley is out now. He plays at Scarborough Spa on June 20, 2024. https://richardhawley.co.uk/