Richard Hawley Interview

After 30 years helping to landscape Sheffield’s music scene Richard Hawley’s seventh studio album has achieved his highest album chart yet. A musician whose career has always held high critical acclaim, he was instrumental in Brit Pop with the band Longpigs then went on to join Pulp for a short time. Alongside his solo career he has a tapestry of session work including Elbow, All Saints, Hank Marvin and Arctic Monkeys. For a man who is held in such high esteem by others and optimises rock star cool, when we speak to him he is faultlessly courteous and completely entrancing.

How was it performing at Latitude after breaking your leg?

Yeah I was on crutches, there was a load of old mates and stuff around, it was lovely to see them anyway but they were all quite shocked to see me with a pot on my leg and in a wheelchair. Guy Garvey (Elbow) wheeled me on, he was dressed in one of these high visibility shirts, we looked like that couple off Little Britain.

I was just glad throughout the whole thing I didn’t pull any gigs. I didn’t want to spoil it for everybody in the band and crew but also the audience who have given their money, love and time to come and see us. A lot of people these days, they cry off a tour or whatever and end up in A&E because they have broken a nail, you know what I mean.

You said of your latest record that you deliberately limited yourself with regards to instrumentation, how did it change the way you wrote and arranged?

I think that the fundamental thing, I still wrote the songs in my head, but then a lot of the songs were based from jam sessions. I would just play a song with the guys and we would come up with a bit that would work for certain sections. It was definitely a hands on record, for the most of it anyway you could see the whites of each other’s eyes in the room. It wasn’t like I would lay some guitar down then leave it for a month because that’s the bit where we put the 90-piece orchestra, it wasn’t like that. It was just old fashioned really but I really liked it. A lot of it is recorded live, just us together in a room and I loved that, it was the way I used to make records a long long time ago.

You have just produced Duane Eddy’s new album Road Trip, how has that turned out?  
I love it. I think it’s a great record. I know he is happy with it. He’s not recorded in a studio for 25 years before that and the previous record that he had done was with pop star fans of his like Paul McCartney and George Harrison and all that, it was awful. I’m being honest about it, it was a truly tragic record.

It’s one of those records that I was so glad to have made, to repay a massive debt that I owe Duane. We have become very good friends, I speak to him on the phone, as my wife reminds me when she shows me the phone bill. He is a great artist and he is someone who I think has been criminally neglected and criminally ripped off by the music industry. It was good to pay respect, but not just do it out of that because it’s got some musical merit. I think we have pushed things forward for him without introducing dance music or electronica. Its very sort of much a representation of what he does as an artist but very slightly updated that’s all.