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Review: Richard Hawley, Bristol Beacon – ‘Absolutely flawless’
All the best pubs have brilliant jukeboxes. Punch in a number for a huge, indie heart-pumper. Punch another for a scratchy rockabilly 45 with its tail on fire. Punch another for a slow-dance croon.
Richard Hawley, and his band, are like a six-headed wurlitzer, a many-armed rock-ola. You feel you could drop in a quarter, choose the numbers and the finest tunes you’d ever heard would just spill out.
In front of a packed and excitable Beacon audience, Hawley allowed the arm to drop on a whole load of parallel-universe smash hits.
is needed now More than ever
The heart-pumpers start early. She Brings the Sunlight surfs in on Oasis buzzsaw guitars with some backwards Beatles sprinkled in for good measure.
Hawley shakes the stage dust from his voice and then peals off impressive guitar licks, every inch the denim-clad gang leader. The new single Two for His Heels, taken from the latest album In This City They Call You Love, has an echoey razorblade slink, full of simmering threat and neon splashed pavements.
That big, northern heart continues pumping throughout the set as Hawley carefully creates the world around him. As Tonight the Streets Are Ours starts, his anti-Tory invective is expletive-filled and heartfelt.
“They don’t belong in our world”, he says as the hall is filled with a joyous, defiant, wholly northern sensibility. Unthinking political evil is mown down with a guitar that is set to stun, with lyrics that celebrate rather than divide, with a heart as big as Sheffield.
Hawley’s musical past might lie in the indie pop of The Longpigs but, clearly, his heart lies with 50s-flecked pop. Prism in Jeans has a delicious, sunshiney Bossa groove while Just Like The Rain is note-perfect skiffle beat pop.
McCartney could have wooed Lennon with this one: it could be an undiscovered gem from the Pye vaults, it could have been a long-lost hidden cut from The La’s debut. It’s perfect. I’m Waiting for Someone to Find Me is another skiffle tune guzzling down rocket fuel. Hawley’s guitar shimmers across the decades.
For all of the guitar histrionics, the huge singalong choruses, the scrupulous backward-looking brilliance, it is when Hawley unleashes his mirror-ball croon that the Beacon melts.
Open Up Your Door is all moonlight longing and tremolo driven yearning. It is impossibly romantic, a world washed in the deepest blue. Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow could be a Johnny Cash brushed-drums weepy, and that, surely, is its point.
It is, however, on Coles Corner where the very essence of Richard Hawley is wonderfully distilled. The heartbroken hero of a black and white film, he is swept about on an ocean of keys, his voice a scrap of velvet of the deepest black.
His band are the friends that you need after love has destroyed you. They are impeccable, steering a course on the right side of sentimental, allowing Hawley to seduce us all.
The support act for this evening was the brilliant singer-songwriter John Smith. As he was leaving the stage, after a set of gorgeous songs, he said that Hawley and his band were “currently the best show on the road”.
He wasn’t wrong. An absolutely flawless set, delivered with undying love and utter conviction.
If you found yourself in a pub with just Richard Hawley on the jukebox, you’d be happy for hours.
Photos: Gavin McNamara
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