It’s been twenty years since singer-songwriter Richard Hawley birthed Coles Corner, his most celebrated album, into the world. Released in 2005 and nominated for the following years’ Mercury Prize, it’s a record so beautifully lovelorn, romantic and orchestrally lush, that an admiring Alex Turner humbly joked “Someone call 999, Richard Hawley’s been robbed” when he and his Arctic Monkeys took to the stage to collect top prize. Certainly, Hawley’s endorsement from fellow Sheffieldites of such cultural cache in the mid-2000s has played something of a part in the album’s enduring appeal, and here we get Coles Corner in its entirety.
Well, except for the album’s final track ‘Last Orders’ which, as a ponderous, uber-atmospheric piano instrumental, is best utilised as a brief introductory passage before Hawley and his band arrive on stage. The setting is an unusual one; the pier has been removed of all its arcades and amusements, making way for a 2000 capacity Great Hall. Hawley performs while some of these contraptions lie dormant above him: a glitterball, a House of Mirrors and ‘Connect 4’ basketball hoop machines. It feels part social club, part abandoned warehouse.
Tonight’s renditions of Hawley’s songs include a four-piece string section (two violins, cello and viola), which provides the orchestral embellishments atop Hawley’s standard line up of drums, bass, keyboard and three guitarists. This mini-orchestra brings opener ‘Coles Corner’ – a typically lovely example of the nagging loneliness pervading much of Hawley’s best work – fully to life. Hawley’s tendency to chat away between tunes is evidenced early doors as he humorously engages in some W-S-M bashing in joking that recent Storm Amy “caused thousands of pounds worth of improvement.”
‘Just Like The Rain’ is introduced as the first song Hawley ever wrote when he was sixteen (fans will already be familiar with his go to quip that this proves that he was “always a miserable fucker”), and it’s a skipping, acoustic folk ditty flavoured by guitarist Shez Sheridan’s rapid pre-chorus licks. Though The Great Hall is not the most conducive for Hawley’s characteristic, pitch perfect sonics to flourish, they are so redoubtable as to be barely tarnished; ‘Hotel Room’ eeks out some tantalising, reverbed vibrato from his Gibson 335 before stretching out into the gorgeous melody of the middle-eight.
The ubiquitous cultural trend for album anniversary shows brings with it the joy that fans get to hear favourites largely not catered for on previous setlists. ‘Born Under A Bad Sign’, for this reviewer at least, is a case in point; it propels forward amidst its hypnotic, chiming riff with plucked violin strings building tension before Hawley showcases his aptitude for guitar tones with a fractured solo full of crunchy reverb.
With the Coles Corner section of the show coming to a close, Hawley is mid-anecdote (involving a comically morbid background living next to a graveyard, a butchers and a taxidermist, a family home full of music and Joe Cocker trying to move in on his mum) when a stirring in the crowd indicates that someone is having a health emergency. Hawley is a little unsure as to how to proceed but calls for a five-minute intermission as concerned calls for a medic, to the venue’s shame, go completely unrealised.
All remains well, it turns out, and the second half of tonight’s set features a collection of tunes from various eras of Hawley’s discography. Standout song ‘Tonight The Streets Are Ours’ is, especially with the live strings, a joyful sugar rush of melody and tender lyricism. The appealingly titled ‘I’m Looking For Someone To Find Me’ is fine slice of skiffle-meets-rockabilly, and more evidence of Hawley’s ability to shape loneliness into something lovely. ‘Don’t Stare at the Sun’ and ‘Standing at the Sky’s Edge’ – the latter a murder-ballad come swampy psychedelic rocker – momentarily takes the evening into more rock-infused territory.
‘Prism in Jeans’, the solitary tune to be taken from Hawley’s most recent album, 2024’s In This City They Call You Love. With echoes of ‘Pretty Green’ in its melody and a redolence of the shuffling arrangement of ‘Something Stupid’, it’s both derivative and characteristically pretty.
Hawley, ever-ready with an anecdote and a dryly humoured-quip, is a loquacious master of ceremonies. He reminisces about his last visit to Weston when he was personally asked by Banksy to perform at his satirical “bemusement park” Dismaland in 2015. Hawley also wields a black Rickenbacker given to him by friend Paul Weller who tried to encourage him to “stop playing all that Ted shit.”
However, despite the exterior of his perpetually sardonic norther-ness, within Hawley – as is obvious to anyone fond of his music – beats a sentimental heart. “I love these people on stage, genuinely love them”, he says in addressing his longtime bandmates. “You shouldn’t be ashamed, if you love them, tell them. Time is running out.”
And with time running out in a more immediate, localised sense, one has to forgo Hawley’s two song encore and make egress toward the train station. If Hawley was indeed robbed of a Mercury Prize in 2006, Coles Corner has endured as a gift that keeps giving.
Scott Hammond