This month in East, we caught up with Sheffield troubadour and ex-Longpigs and Pulp guitarist, Richard Hawley, for a chat about his upcoming show at the De La Warr Pavilion (Friday October 9), his new album (Truelove’s Gutter), starting gangs, his hometown and the troubles with transporting Cristal baschets.
E: Hi Richard. I’m just calling in regard to your gig at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill.
RH: Hello. Yeah, I’m really looking forward to playing there.
E: Have you played in Bexhill before?
RH: No, never. I’m interested in the place, and people in Bexhill are probably sick of this, but because of Spike Milligan. The gig itself – it just looks like a beautiful venue.
E: Is that something you look for before heading out on tour, the quality of the venue?
RH: Yeah, I like to consider the audience, because a lot gigs are just like big sheds. As a concert goer myself it’s always nice when you’ve got a venue you feel comfortable, you know. Hopefully the audience are going to be treated with some respect as I’m only playing theatres on this tour. I’ve had some great gigs in the sheds, so to speak, but I just wanted to make it comfortable for everybody.
E: Does it make a difference now you can pick and choose your venues?
RH: In the early days, years and years ago, we’d just play anywhere. I wanted to make it a nice experience, because the type of music I play is meant to be listened to and people can feel relaxed and comfortable and take it all in.
E: Obviously it’s coming on the back of the release of Truelove’s Gutter: where did you draw the influence for the sound on the album?
RH: Inside my head. With this record I wanted to stretch myself as writer, as a singer, as a lyricist, a guitarist and a producer, and stretch the musicians I work with as well and just push it. I wanted to dispense with the issue of the three minute pop song for a while, although I don’t know what the next record will be. I just wanted to explore music a lot more and let it breathe rather than it just being made for radio. I wanted to make music that was made to be listened to in people’s homes. But sometimes that takes a while. We live in a sound-bite culture now and it is kind of a reaction in part to that.
E: I saw an interview with Calvin Harris the other day and he was saying no one buys albums any more, everyone just buys singles, implying the long-player format was all but dead. Yet people, including myself, still buy albums and like having a body of music they can listen to from start to finish.
RH: I come from that generation. I like the idea of listening to a collection of songs, written by human beings about their reflections. I find it sad that. It’s a grim indication of the way things are going if you can only absorb a sound-bite of two or three minutes of music before you get bored. I find that sad really. I do like the album. I disagree with him completely. I think Elbow proved that he’s wrong.
E: I totally disagree with him too.
RH: Excellent – we can form a gang, me and you.
E: The album gang.
RH: Yeah that’s it. The album kids gang – along with Guy Garvey. But yeah, I’d go with that. I don’t believe the LP is dead at all. I think that’s wrong.
E: From listening to your album it seems a lot of the songs, especially the first two, romanticise every day situations. Do you tend to look for the beauty and sadness in most things?
RH: I’ve always sought poetry in a beer mat. Ordinary things and just the little kindnesses people do to each other – I find those really beautiful things. You know in everyday things. Like the lyric in the song where it says ‘hope hung on every washing line’, you know. I find beauty in those things rather than the great schemes and machinations of politicians and what have you.
E: A lot of the album seems to be about experiences that could be enriching but leave you feeling something is missing. Why was subject so important to you?
RH: I’d been away so much and when I got home there were a lot of people who I’d not spent any physical time with, who weren’t having a great time. Life sometimes isn’t one big party and you set off in one direction when you’re young and you sometimes end up not being the person you’d hope you’d be.
E: You use a variety of musical instruments on the album, like a glass harmonica and a musical saw. Was there a reason behind using a load of eclectic and eccentric instruments?
RH: Just to expand and not be afraid of experimenting with things. To challenge myself and expand the sonic pallet of what I’d done before, and not try and repeat myself.
But what started me off on that journey was the musical saw, because my grandfather used to play one. It was a sound I’d always wanted to use. He was a violinist, as well as a steel worker, and he played the saw at family parties to make us laugh when we were kids about how you could get music out of a tool. I once asked him if he could anything out of a hammer and he said, ‘I don’t think so son’.
But I wanted to use that and when I was looking for people that played the saw, I found a lot of other instruments as well.
The glass harmonica was invented by Benjamin Franklin and it’s an acoustic instrument. The irony of it is he’s the one who discovered electricity. I’d had that in mind, and the megabass waterphone is something I’ve always been interested in – they use it a lot in horror films and science fiction soundtracks. And the Cristal baschet was something that I discovered a while back.
The word serendipity came to play a lot on the record. When I got in touch with David Coulter, who played the musical saw, he’d already worked with Tom Waits and Marianne Faithfull, and the collaborations he’s done in the past are amazing in terms of scope and breadth. Well, Colin Elliot who’s our bass player and my co-producer said, ‘Oh yeah, I used to go to school with someone called David Coulter. Can’t be the same kid though, as I don’t think that David Coulter would have played with Tom Waits’. Anyway Colin went to pick him up from station and they both went ‘Colin?’, ‘David?’ And it was the same guy; they’d not met since they were ten years old when they used to play in the school orchestra together.
It turned out David was a bit of a fan, so he said, ‘Can you play me some of your songs?’ So I played him the opening track, As The Dawn Breaks. And I told him I wanted a prelude to this, like an introduction to the album, and in my head I imagine it being a microphone plunged into a car engine or some kind of rumbling sound. And he said, ‘Here, listen to this’, and played me a couple of tracks that he’d done with Thomas Bloch on the Cristal baschet in Paris, and that was it, that was the sound. So we got in touch with Thomas and he played on the album and it was great.
E: I heard the saw made in Sheffield as well.
RH: Yeah, that again was like coming full circle. David had actually bought in Germany, I think it was from Westfalia, and the words on it were all German. But then, right in small letters at the bass of the saw, it said ‘Made in Sheffield 1860’. It was made all those years ago and it had come back home. It was a great feeling and I took some pictures of it to have some souvenirs for myself. And David’s going to come out and play live with us as well.
E: Has he been teaching you how to play the saw?
RH: Oh god, I’ve tried. Technically it’s an amazing instrument to master. I couldn’t learn nowt out of it. David is the master; he’s one of the world’s experts on it, along with a lot of other things. He plays a lot of interesting instruments. We did the Steve Lamacq radio show recently and it was David’s first performance with us. He played the saw live and it was just an amazing experience.
E: How hard was it to get hold of a glass harmonica? I looked at it today because I wanted to see a picture of it, and I just kind of imagined it as well … a glass harmonica. But it was like something out of an H.G. Wells novel.
RH: I think the harmonica thing is in reference to what it sounds like. The theory of it is like when you put your finger on the edge of a wine glass. They used to call it the devil’s instrument and banned it because people used to lick their fingers, but the rims of the glasses were lined with lead, so they’d absorb the lead and go crackers. Obviously now they don’t have the lead in though.
It runs through a water trough and there’re two pedals you press to turn the axis where all the different sized glasses are surrounding. It’s an amazing thing to watch when they actually play it. Unfortunately I’m really going to struggle to take that and the Cristal baschet out on tour. It’ll be virtually impossible because they’re so rare and they’re very difficult to cart around, as you can imagine. The Cristal baschet is all glass rods. It’s a bonkers instrument, it really is. It was invented in the 20s by the Baschet brothers in France and it’s a purely acoustic instrument as well, there’s no electricity involved. If you’ve heard that opening track you can’t believe that isn’t some kind of synthesiser, but it’s purely generated acoustically. There are these glass rods that you stroke with your hands and these two percussion things that look like sails, so it looks like this completely outrageous space ship. It’s insane.
This is nothing like a glass harmonica
E: It sounds like it might be incredibly difficult to transport.
RH: Oh yeah. I think it’s probably why that well known band line up – two guitars, bass and Cristal baschet – never took off.
E: Unless you’ve got some sort of crazy insurance policy I guess.
RH: Yeah, I talked to Thomas and he’s actually taken it all over the world – to South America and America – but it’s a technical nightmare for him.
E: One word that seems to pop up about your music is ‘timeless’. How do you feel about that tag? I guess it’s better to be associated with being ‘timeless’ rather than ‘disposable’.
RH: Yeah it is. Tags are always a bit odd though. It’s not music meant to exist in any particular time as such. I’m not a particularly fashion orientated person and I’m not obsessed with the latest sound-bite or the latest crop of things that all sound the same. I suppose it’s a compliment really. It’s not the worst thing anybody’s ever said to me.
E: Sheffield seems to be having a great decade musically: has it always been a very musical place?
RH: It’s always been a place that had a huge musical scene and my family were part of it, my father and uncle. They used to back a lot of the blues musicians and country guys who came over from the States like Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, John Lee Hooker. It’s always been there. Dance music was invented in Sheffield, for good or ill. It’s always been a place of a lot of invention.
It tends to throw up mavericks as well. There’ll be a lot of bands that sound quite similar, but then there’ll be those who are quite disparate like Arctic Monkeys, or Pulp, or the Human League, or Reverend and the Makers. It’s got a lot of history musically. It’s a good city. I think it’s got a confidence about it now, since the success of bands like Pulp and Arctic Monkeys, which I hope a lot of the younger musicians will gain confidence from and realise that from little acorns great trees grow.
E: Don’t forget Def Leppard and ABC.
RH: (Laughs) It has a long and varied history.
E: Does the city act as a kind of a muse for you?
RH: Definitely. It’s home. My family have lived in Sheffield for a long time, centuries in fact, and I feel deeply rooted in it and deeply connected to its history – I’m another one in the chain. It has two reactions home: you either want to escape it and get the hell out of there, or you love it, and luckily for me I fall into the latter half.
E: Was the album name inspired by a Sheffield landmark, like your previous releases?
RH: Yeah, Truelove’s Gutter was a place from about 1750. There was a man called Thomas Truelove who ran an inn and he used to charge people to dump waste in the river and they named the street after him. They renamed it after the war, I’m not exactly sure when, but it was some time in the early 20th century. But it just seemed to sum up the record, the juxtaposition of those two words really. They just seemed to sum it up for me.