Richard Hawley
Lowedges
On the back of the album cover there is an old British motorcycle gleaming under a blinding sun in a blue sky. The kind they don’t make anymore, unless it’s in shoddy kit form, but those who know them cherish them and keep them running out of love or maybe a desire to retain something of happier times.

It’s appropriate then as Hawley’s new album sees him as part curator, part creator, dusting down sounds that have been parked up for a while, cleaning them up and restoring them back to shelf condition. It’s a steam train of a record and none the worse for it.

Following on from his self-titled debut and last year’s ‘Late Night Final’ it is, in essence, more of the same only bigger. At the same time it’s not an album that batters listener into submission, it’s effect is that of a good, long soak in the bath when your limbs are weary and your love life sucks.

Lowedges kicks off with ‘Run For Me’ which has the full kitchen sink production of something by Scott Walker and manages to hit the peaks Richard Ashcroft is currently missing by the simple expedient of not hollering when a whispered word will do. While Hawley’s voice is not as manipulable as the guitars on which he made his name it’s a lovely dark baritone which puts us in mind of Lou Reed if he’d had a bile filter and a penchant for the sort of crooning which stayed well away from Vegas. People who know better than us point out Jim Reeves as a source and after nipping down to Forever Changes we can see it although, thankfully, Hawley is never as saccharine. Another forgotten source are Johnny and Santos, a Hawaiian guitar duo, whose sound echos through a couple of tracks, most notably ‘Darlin’.

From what we can gather the album was pretty much written in the studio which gives the whole thing a consistency of pace and sound and the playing is great, tight and loose as it should be. It’s truly a Sheffield album - recorded at Yellow Arch and G2 and with a full cast of local musicians including Colin, Andy and Shez from Dizzy Club, Si Stafford (Joe Strummer’s Mescaleros / Hiem) and Liz Hanks (Justin Lewis / Sally Doherty / Summerisle).

Hawley was the first interview we ever did for Sandman and he said ‘I just write songs about the cheerful things, specifically love and death. It’s romantic music.’ Here he richly fulfils his own specifications with the added themes of escape and loss. The simpler he keeps the lyrics the more touching they become. The train metaphors of the last album are replaced with those of two-wheeled transport. ‘The Motorcycle Song’ with it’s refrain ‘There’s a hole in my motorbike’ is absolutely heartbreaking - capturing perfectly the desolation of distance and the fear of not being able to get home. It’s rare thing at the present time that something can have such a strong emotional core without resorting to the adolescent or the overly literate.

This is a lovely album and one that will inevitably surprise those who only connect Hawley with the bands that featured his guitar. The fact that it’s coming out in 2003 is completely and gloriously irrelevant, it could have been made any time in the last 50 years and is technicolour proof that they still do make ‘em like that.

While sandman is full of strong silent types, Lowedges is the kind of album that you could conceivably weep along to and feel better for it.
Jack Tractor